Australia and Its Stimulation of Teen Creativity
April 22, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold. Did you know that the freedom loving cyclist at BearBlog thinks my essays are generated by AI. Censorship is okay, right?
One could be critical and say, “Australia’s social ban is not working.” Then one could say, “Australian teens have found workarounds, thus demonstrating one way to spark innovation.”
According to The Guardian in “Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is A Flop. But There’s No Joy In ‘I Told You So,’” seven in ten teens still remain on social media platforms. I think that is of 100 young people, only 30 have just given up on the addictive platforms.
The eSafety report also noted that there hasn’t been any major changes to cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children. The ban was supposed to keep kids safe from the potential harms that come with social media: the aforementioned bullying, exploitation by pedophiles and other abusers, and impaired brain development.
Some experts predicted the ban wasn’t going to work. Australia’s eSafety commissioner had doubts and the Australian government knew there was lack of evidence that a ban would deliver the results the government wanted. Requisite legislation was passed. The write up said:
“The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.”
The Australian government seems to be probing the BAIT outfits (big AI tech and social media firms) to verify that these estimable organizations are following the rules of the Information Highway.
The ban ignored the bigger problem of a commercialized ecosystem, where everything and anything is monetized to generate revenue. The algorithmic reward systems are addictive, exploitative, and designed to function like quicksand: Easy to step into and tough to get out of.
Perhaps the Chinese and Russian approaches will deliver what Australia wants?
Whitney Grace, April 22, 2026
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