What would happen if Australia banned social media altogether?

On May 6, 2024By Vaseline

Governments and social media giants are facing a reckoning.

On the one hand, the Australian government has called on Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) to remove a video of the Wakeley Church stabbing from its platform.

On the other hand, it is battling Meta to pay for sharing Australian news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

US President Joe Biden recently signed a bill that would ban TikTok in the United States, citing security concerns, and in China Facebook and Twitter are among a long list of platforms already banned.

But what would happen if Australia took a similar route and banned social media platforms altogether?

The Australian government is battling social media giants Meta and X.(AP: Manu Fernandez, Stephan Savoia)

Can the Australian government ban social media?

According to business futurist Morris Misel, “anything is possible,” but whether governments would go that far is another question.

“If there is a desire to make it happen, then it can be done,” Misel said.

He said part of his job as a futurist was exploring why things matter to people – and in the case of social media, it was the ability to ‘look over the fence’ and see how other people lived.

“It’s trying to understand what someone else is doing, trying to use people’s gossip, trying to share news, trying to share information, that’s basically hard to make go away,” he said.

‘It seems so ingrained in our society and conversations that we can’t imagine a world without it.

“The core of what it offers, I don’t think we can get this to appear (elsewhere).”

Morris Misel says social media gives people the opportunity to “look over the fence” and see how others live.(Unsplash: Julian Christ)

Mr Misel said we would never really go back to a time when social media didn’t exist. It would probably just be replaced with something else.

“We can culturally decide as a society that we’ve had enough and just not use it, but I don’t see that happening,” Mr. Misel said.

He said the topic of access to social media is “very specific to Western countries” and to countries that have access to the internet.

“Four point six billion people on this planet, out of seven point billion people, have access to social media and use it every day.

“But the rest of the world doesn’t have it. They may want it, but they don’t have it and they still manage to keep going.”

‘Embedded in our lives’

Lisa Give, professor of information sciences at RMIT University, said social media had become too ingrained in our lives to be easily deleted.

“I think it will be a very big challenge to completely eliminate social media in the way we use it today,” said Professor Give.

“An individual platform can disappear in the same way we saw MySpace disappear.

“Certain things become more popular, less popular, but something always seems to pop up to fill the gap.”

Professor Given said technology has a range of different applications today, but social media has one key feature that many people would continue to look for.

“We don’t just use it to find information, read a book or listen to music, we use it to interact with other people and that’s really where it has become kind of embedded in our lives.”

She said social media, like technology in general, will continue to grow and evolve over time.

“Social media has been around for a long, long time, even though the types of social media may look or feel different than they did from the beginning.”

What would happen if social media were completely banned?

Mr Misel agreed that banning one platform, such as X, would lead to another platform emerging in its place.

“If the government does indeed close it down, wants to get rid of it and somehow succeeds, it’s a leaky sieve, because many people can find a way around it, as they do in countries that have tried similar things” , he said. said.

It is also unlikely that society could return to a time when social media was not part of our daily lives, Mr Misel said.

“Even though we nostalgically and romantically claim that we want (to return)… we’re just not that kind of animal,” he said.

Professor Give recalls that when social media was not yet fully used, communication and the way we lived were very different.

“It took longer because you didn’t have an easy way to do that kind of real-time engagement and get kind of automatic feedback from people,” she said.

“The challenge now is: if every platform were to disappear, what would we do? What would we be left with?”

Apart from generating new platforms in place of the old ones, other communication systems would still exist.

“We would still have to deal with email, with systems like Teams or Zoom to talk to people via video conferencing, we would still have the ability to text and call,” Professor Give said.

Life would go on, but it seems like we won’t be returning to a time before Facebook or X anytime soon.