Navigating the digital world: social media and the wellbeing of Australia’s youth

Navigating the Digital World: Social Media and the Wellbeing of Australia’s Youth

Young people’s lives are increasingly shaped by digital environments, influencing how they learn, socialise, and form their identities through education platforms, social media, gaming, and creative expression. Online platforms are a near-universal part of life for young people. A 2025 survey found that 96% of children aged 10–15 had used social media, with YouTube (76%), TikTok (56%), Instagram (47%), Snapchat (46%), and Facebook (42%) among the most popular platforms.¹

While these environments create significant opportunities for inclusion and engagement, they also present real risks, including cyberbullying, mis- and dis-information, harmful content, privacy breaches, and manipulative design. These risks have been experienced by more than half of children aged 10–15.²

The public debate does not contest whether these risks exist but focuses on whether current policies and programs equip young people with the skills and support they need to navigate digital life safely and recover when harm occurs. Restrictive approaches, such as limiting screen time or blocking access, may offer short-term protection but risk undermining resilience and critical competencies for our increasingly digital world.

Preparing young people to thrive online is essential to balancing benefits and risk. This can be done by building skills to evaluate content, manage their digital presence, seek help, and support peers, while ensuring that supportive relationships, education, and responsive systems are in place. Digital resilience is not an individual trait but the outcome of coordinated efforts across personal, relational, and institutional levels.

Previous work undertaken by ACIL Allen highlighted that improving resilience amongst young people can be best supported by strengthening critical thinking, digital intelligence, and social and emotional capabilities in school and community contexts, rather than relying solely on protective measures.³

A precautionary approach to social media

In 2024, Australia legislated a world-first ban on social media for children under 16 through the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024. This policy applied the precautionary principle, prioritising harm prevention despite uncertainty in the evidence base.⁴ While the ban reflects genuine concerns of cyberbullying, negative social comparisons, and links to poor sleep, self-esteem, and mental health, there are questions of enforceability that may compromise its effectiveness. Recent reporting on the final rules contained within the Bill highlights that platforms will not be required to age-verify all users and that compliance will be judged on whether ‘reasonable steps’ are taken.⁵

Approaches to online safety can overemphasise restriction and are marked by fragmentation across families, government institutions (like schools), and platforms. The eSafety Commissioner’s Digital Use and Risk survey shows that harms remain widespread: over half of children aged 10–15 have been cyberbullied, with 38% experiencing this in the past year, despite parental rules and school bans intended to limit exposure.⁶ Whilst these findings are not in relation to the new legislated mandate, they do potentially indicate that restriction and monitoring alone cannot prevent online harms. 

Blocking access can also reduce opportunities for children to develop digital resilience, which research shows is best cultivated through managed exposure, guided learning, and opportunities for recovery across home, school, community, and societal levels. Fragmented efforts at different levels⁷ of the socio-ecological system leave gaps in support and increase inequity, with vulnerable groups such as trans and gender-diverse children facing significantly higher risks of cyberbullying. 

At the same time, social media platform design continues to prioritise engagement over wellbeing. Features such as infinite scrolling, algorithmically amplified content, and manipulative notifications create compulsive use cycles that are poorly addressed by cosmetic safety tools.⁸ Measures like ‘teen accounts’ represent “a bandaid on the symptom without addressing the disease”⁹, as they shift responsibility onto parents and users without addressing the underlying addictive design of platforms. This critique aligns with broader calls for systemic action: strengthening cross-sector coordination, embedding digital literacy and resilience-building in education, and mandating platform accountability for wellbeing outcomes, rather than relying primarily on restrictive bans. 

Research highlights that bans are easily circumvented and may disproportionately affect young people for whom digital spaces are vital sources of connection, particularly geographically isolated or marginalised youth.¹⁰

The importance of resilience

Given the challenges described above, bans must be only one part of a broader strategy. Guidelines, safeguards, and platform accountability are needed alongside investment in digital literacy and resilience-building supports. Operational frameworks have already been established to guide a broader strategy such as ‘PROTECT’¹¹ which enables clear problem recognition guidance for adults, trusted pathways for reaching out, coordinated school–family supports, and access to experts when harms escalate.¹² Building resilience in online contexts requires more than avoidance. Research demonstrates that “exposure to risk is an antecedent of digital resilience,” meaning that resilience develops when young people learn to recognise, manage, and recover from online challenges.¹³ Research conducted by ACIL Allen in 2022 confirmed that young people themselves identify the need for better skills in addressing mis- and dis- information, safe spaces for dialogue, and stronger connections between traditional learning and contemporary digital environments, highlighting that resilience is learned through active engagement, not avoidance.¹⁴ Our work also showed that education systems need to embed global citizenship, digital literacy, and critical thinking into curricula to ensure young people are equipped with the skills to thrive in contemporary environments, rather than depending solely on restrictions.¹⁵

Building digital resilience across systems

A socio-ecological framework shows that digital resilience is ‘a collective endeavour’ that operates across individual, home, community, and societal levels¹⁶: 

• Individual level: Emotional regulation, self-efficacy, and agency are protective factors. Young people benefit from developing the skills to critically evaluate online content and manage their digital habits. 
• Family level: Enabling trust-based communication is more effective than restrictive controls. Adolescents are more likely to disclose concerns when caregivers foster open dialogue rather than surveillance. 
• Community level: Schools and youth organisations play a central role by embedding digital literacy, teaching critical thinking, and offering safe spaces for discussion. Evidence suggests that lateral reading interventions, which help students evaluate credibility online, are more effective than surface-level checks. 
• Societal level: Governments and platforms must establish safeguards and accountability. Research calls for platform design reform to curb addictive engagement features and harmful algorithms, replacing them with mechanisms that promote wellbeing.

Towards an integrated response

The challenge is not to shield young people entirely from digital spaces but to better prepare them to navigate these spaces with confidence. This requires coordinated action across homes, schools, communities, and governments. Families need resources to model healthy digital behaviours; schools must embed critical digital literacy in curricula; and governments must enforce accountability measures on platforms while ensuring that policies do not marginalise vulnerable youth. Building resilience demands a whole-of-ecosystem approach, where the four key domains of resilience are deliberately cultivated.

•  Learning involves ensuring that young people are exposed to realistic digital challenges and supported to reflect on them constructively. Evidence shows that resilience is strengthened when children have opportunities to practise navigating online risks in a safe, scaffolded way, rather than being overprotected.¹⁷ Schools play a critical role by embedding digital literacy into curricula, not just teaching technical skills but also fostering critical thinking, lateral reading, and the ability to evaluate misinformation. ACIL Allen research similarly identified digital intelligence as an emerging gap in the curriculum and recommended targeted initiatives to strengthen young people’s ability to critically evaluate online content and misinformation.¹⁸
• Recognising risks requires that young people are equipped with emotional and cognitive tools to identify potential harms, whether that be cyberbullying, manipulative platform design, or harmful content. Research indicates that self-awareness and peer support are protective factors, but they need to be reinforced by school-based initiatives and parental modelling of healthy digital behaviours. Governments also have a role in mandating transparency from platforms, such as requiring disclosure of engagement metrics and algorithmic impacts, to help young people understand the risks they face.¹⁹
• Managing risks depends on accessible mechanisms, relationships, and skills that allow young people to respond effectively when harm occurs. Families need resources to guide open dialogue about online experiences, while schools must foster safe reporting pathways and peer-support structures. Platform accountability is also critical, current ‘teen accounts’ and screen-time tools remain largely cosmetic, and deeper structural design changes are needed to reduce manipulative engagement patterns. 
• Recovery is about supporting young people to not only cope with adverse digital experiences but to grow from them and build future readiness. Recovery is strengthened by social support, trusted adults, peer networks, and accessible mental health services, as well as by opportunities for children to reframe experiences as learning moments.²⁰ Policy responses must also avoid marginalising vulnerable groups: for geographically isolated youth, young people with disabilities, or minority groups, digital platforms may serve as vital sites of belonging, meaning that recovery strategies must balance harm mitigation with preserving positive engagement.

Above all, co-design with young people is essential. Young people themselves must be engaged as active agents in shaping safer, healthier digital environments. Co-designing interventions with them not only ensures relevance but also nurtures agency, a core element of resilience development across all four domains. ACIL Allen research has identified that co-design and youth-led approaches as international good practice, ensuring interventions are age-appropriate, inclusive, and credible to young people themselves.²¹ Youth co-design panels should review school protocols, reporting flows, and platform settings to keep supports credible and usable.²²

References 

• ACIL Allen. (2022). Strengthening young people’s resilience to extremism in NSW: Research report. Report prepared for the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet. Sydney, ACIL Allen Consulting. https://www.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-08/NSW-DPC-Youth-Resilience-Report.pdf 
• Crowley, T. (2025, September 15). Final rules for social media ban set to be revealed, with no legally‐enforceable effectiveness standard. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-media-ban-final-rules-announced/105776730 
• eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Digital use and risk: Online platform engagement among children aged 10 to 15. Canberra: Australian Government. 
• Hammond, S. P., Polizzi, G., & Bartholomew, K. J. (2023). Using a socio-ecological framework to understand how 8–12-year-olds build and show digital resilience: A multi-perspective and multimethod qualitative study. Education and Information Technologies, 28(6), 3681–3709. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11240-z 
• Ross, D. A., Hinton, R., Melles-Brewer, M., Engel, D., Zeck, W., Fagan, L., Mohan, A. (2020). Adolescent well-being: A definition and conceptual framework. Journal of Adolescent Health, 67(4), 472–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.06.042 
• Stankov, I., Tefera, Y., Bradley, M., Pickering, A., Willoughby, E., & Williams, C. (2025). A precautionary approach to social media: Protecting young minds in an evolving digital world. Medical Journal of Australia, 222(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.52722 
• Freed, D., Bazarova, N., Consolvo, S., Cosley, D., & Gage Kelley, P. (2025). PROTECT: A Framework to Foster Digital Resilience for Youth Navigating Technology-Facilitated Abuse. Social Sciences, 14(6), 378. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14060378 
• Livingstone, S., Mascheroni, G., & Stoilova, M. (2021). The outcomes of gaining digital skills for young people’s lives and wellbeing: A systematic evidence review. New Media & Society, 25(5), 1176-1202. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211043189.

¹ eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Digital use and risk: Online platform engagement among children aged 10 to 15. Canberra: Australian Government.

²eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Ibid

³ACIL Allen. (2022). Strengthening young people’s resilience to extremism in NSW: Research report. Report prepared for the NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet. Sydney, ACIL Allen Consulting. https://www.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-08/NSW-DPC-Youth-Resilience-Report.pdf

⁴Stankov, et al. (2025). A precautionary approach to social media: Protecting young minds in an evolving digital world. Medical Journal of Australia, 222(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.52722

⁵Crowley, T. (2025, September 15). Final rules for social media ban set to be revealed, with no legally‐enforceable effectiveness standard. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-media-ban-final-rules-announced/105776730 

⁶eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Ibid

 ⁷Hammond, et al. (2023) Ibid

 ⁸Stankov, et al. (2025) Ibid

 ⁹Stankov, et al. (2025) Ibid

 ¹⁰Stankov, et al. (2025) Ibid

¹¹Problem recognition, Reaching out, Organising support, Training, Engaging experts, Continuous support, and Tackling safety

 ¹²Freed, D., et al. (2025). PROTECT: A Framework to Foster Digital Resilience for Youth Navigating Technology-Facilitated Abuse. Social Sciences, 14(6), 378. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14060378

¹³Hammond, S.P et al. (2023). Using a socio-ecological framework to understand how 8–12-year-olds build and show digital resilience: A multi-perspective and multimethod qualitative study. Education and Information Technologies, 28(6), 3681–3709. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11240-z

 ¹⁴ACIL Allen. (2022). Ibid

 ¹⁵ACIL Allen. (2022). Ibid

 ¹⁶Hammond, S.P et al. (2023). Ibid

¹⁷Livingstone, S., et al (2021). The outcomes of gaining digital skills for young people’s lives and wellbeing: A systematic evidence review. New Media & Society, 25(5), 1176-1202. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211043189 (Original work published 2023)

¹⁸ACIL Allen. (2022). Ibid

 ¹⁹Stankov, et al. (2025) Ibid

²⁰Ross, et al. (2020). Adolescent well-being: A definition and conceptual framework. Journal of Adolescent Health, 67(4), 472–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.06.042

 ²¹ACIL Allen. (2022). Ibid

 ²²Livingstone, S., et al (2021) Ibid, Stankov, et al. (2025) Ibid