When the federal government tries to pass a law like banning social media for teens, it needs to release an analysis explaining why it’s a good idea.

The Office of Impact Analysis does what it says on the tin: publishes documents prepared by officials who review what the evidence says about the proposed policy. Politicians initiate this process, but it’s civil servants who are pitched an idea and asked to look for evidence on how it’s going to happen.

Knowing this, it comes as no surprise to a reader of the bill banning social media for teens. impact analysis equivalent complementary analysis can detect a palpable sense of effort in the document, as if it were written by a student trying to squeeze out a few hundred more words for an argument he doesn’t really believe in (or by a professional civil servant striving to justify a proposal that many experts consider not supported by convincing evidence).

The analysis begins by acknowledging, as critics of the bill do, that there is a lack of “correlative evidence of the harms of social media on young people.” Nonetheless, it covers a handful of other surveys and studies that illustrate the harms young Australians can experience on social media, while also reporting its potential benefits.

The analysis includes sweeping assertions that are, to say the least, contested. For example: “the introduction of a minimum age for accessing social media is likely to have a positive impact on all young people under the minimum age, but particularly on girls and transgender young people”.

The document then evaluates three policies: the status quo, banning children under 14 and then allowing them to go online with their parents’ consent, or banning them up to 16. This presents the debate as a dichotomy: ban or no ban. (These limitations are not the author’s fault, because it is not really possible to vampirize in the analysis of parliamentary impact policies). But in the real world, one might ask: ban? No ban? No ban with legal duty of care? Or with just parental consent? The options are endless and the surface is barely scratched here.

When it comes to evidence supporting the idea of ​​banning children under 16, the reporting becomes particularly thin. He mentions children’s fears of “FOMO” and the feeling that parents “are not supported to make evidence-based choices about when their children should be on social media.” (Perhaps policymakers’ anxiety about evidence-based decision making should also be included?)

The research cited under this option includes two documents:

• A study of which the co-author said Crikey that its findings do not support the arguments for a ban on social media for teenagers.
• A section of the U.S. Surgeon General’s opinion on social media and youth mental health, based on the study above.

In short, the government has provided what amounts to a single study supporting the benefits of a social media ban for teens. And it’s not very good either.

There’s also much more to the report, such as a “multi-criteria analysis” matrix that scores policy on a numerical basis. The report rates the social media ban on teenagers as having a net benefit of 0, calculated by balancing the +2 score of young people and parents with a score of -2 for all Australians and social media companies. In contrast, the status quo received a score of -5. (How it was decided that the status quo for young Australians was rated -3, the worst possible score, despite recognizing its various benefits, is a question only the author and God can answer.)

There is also an estimate of the cost of implementing the policy. The government estimates it will take just 80 hours on each of 100 different social media services, costing the entire economy about $54 million. The assumption that after the first year – presumably once the policy comes into force – “22,500 Australians, including people under the age of 16, will attempt to create four social media accounts each year”, is particularly bizarre. a typo or a serious underestimate of the number of Australians using the damn computer these days.

But despite all these details, the analysis is doomed to failure because banning social media for teenagers is a policy based on values ​​and not values. Despite all the reservations and concerns, many parents are simply worried about their children and don’t really like seeing them on their phones, lack of solid evidence be damned. It is seriously hamstrung by the fact that much of the enforcement of the ban will be left to the Minister of Communications and the Electronic Security Commissioner, leaving no room for meaningful analysis of how its implementation implemented will work in practice.

This is a good basis for policy if you are a politician accountable to voters. But it certainly makes life difficult for the civil servant who has to justify why.

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