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Welcome to Tech Stuff.

I'm Kara Price, and this is The Story.

It's been two months since Australia's first of its kind social media ban went into effect.

On December 10, 2025, if you were under 16 in Australia, you could no longer create an account on TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, or threads,

to name a few. And if you had a profile, it was deactivated. Of course, there are a lot of

outstanding questions, including, can Australia effectively enforce this ban? But no matter how

airtight the law, my guest today thinks it could have a powerful downstream

effect. More than anything, I think that what it does is that it gives parents a thing to point to

to say, hey, like, you know, nobody else is on social media and therefore you shouldn't be as well,

which gets rid of one of the big problems with kids on social media, which is just that they feel like because everyone else is on it,

if they're not on it, they're going to be socially isolated.

This is Jay Caspian Kang.

He writes the fault lines newsletter for the New Yorker,

and he recently wrote a piece that caught my eye titled,

Americans won't ban kids from social media.

What can we do instead?

I'll let Jay answer his own question.

You wrote this article about why you think America won't implement large-scale social media bans for kids very soon after the Australian ban went into effect.

And before you launched into your argument,

you asked readers for the sake of the discussion to agree on three statements. What were those statements? They were. One, teenagers have First Amendment rights. Two, social media has become

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