Meta’s heads are in the clouds regarding social media
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The push is on to increase the age children can legally use social media to 16, and currently it's 13. And I think this is needed because kids are being harmed by social media. Well, not according to Meta. Now, Meta, they're the owners of Facebook and Instagram. They changed their name a year or so ago. Today, they've given evidence to a Senate committee, and this Senate committee's looking into the effects of social media.

How about this from Meta's Vice President of Global Safety, Anagon Davis. She says, I don't think that social media has done harm to our children. Hello? She says, I think that social media, this is evidence she has given in Parliament. They have to take an oath for that. She says, I think the social media has tremendous benefits. I think that the issues of teen mental health are complicated.

I think it is our responsibility as a company to ensure that teens can take advantage of the benefits of social media in a safe environment.

There was then a Liberal MP who replied, are you serious? You can't be serious. But she was. Now, social media is certainly not to blame for all mental health issues with teenagers, but it is contributing. And there are plenty of other issues beyond mental health with the use of social media. We know children have taken their own lives because of bullying on social media.

We moved our son out of his high school after year seven because of bullying. It got that bad. The school did a wonderful job to prevent it, but we thought in the end we had to take him out of the school. Some of that was via Snapchat, social media. There are kids who are riding on the top of buses and filming themselves. They're doing the same thing on trains. Why do you think they do that?

Well, firstly, they've got no brains, but secondly, they like to generate likes on social media when they publish the film. One of them will be decapitated sooner or later, but no, social media is not causing any harm. Why is it in regional towns, say Moree, which has had a lot of attention this year, why is it when there's a break and enter in Moree and some teenagers steal a car, why do they take a video of themselves driving away from the scene at 150 k's an hour and then posting it on Facebook or Instagram?

They're doing it to attract likes, attention, and of course, nothing to do with social media. Meta is seriously telling us social media does not do any harm to children. They are cracking jokes. But they can get away with it. They're a big international organisation. And like most in the digital world, they have very little respect for our way of doing things because they get away with it. We are talking about changing the rules of social media. And we were actually having a chat around the dinner table about this this week. My 13-year-old twins, they are at a legal age to use social media.

And they tell me that almost every one of their friends was using it before they were 13 because it's not hard to get around the rules. So I think the age should increase to 16. But we are kidding ourselves if we think when that happens, and I think it will happen eventually, we're kidding ourselves to think kids won't still access it and to think that Meta thinks, no, social media is not causing any harm.