On board the Australian social media ‘ban wagon’: regulatory theatre, the public child, and the hyper-enthusiastic state

This chapter examines the ‘social media age restrictions’ for under-16s passed into legislation in Australia in 2024. Read as an example par excellence of how the figure of the “public child” (Gilligan, Éire-Ireland 44(1): 265–290, 2009) becomes a site of peak concern and a locus of state intervention, it argues that the age restrictions signal the emergence of a hyper-enthusiastic state overly eager to arbitrate the private domain of child-parent relations. Drawing on Wendy Brown’s concept of “walling” (2010), the chapter interprets the government’s attempt to age-gate social media as a performative assertion of sovereign power that signals the tensions between the sovereign power of the nation-state and transnational corporate actors. Mobilizing archetypal characters, sensationalist claims, and reference to a superficial if not spurious evidence base, the age restrictions further advance a protectionist approach that has long dominated the regulation of children’s digital engagement. Instead, this chapter calls for systemic, carefully formulated regulation that holds platforms and governments accountable to living, breathing children rather than the constructed ‘public child’—a figment of the adult technophobic imagination.