Children must be 13 to create social media accounts but a Change.org petition calls for the Australian government to raise the minimum age to 16.
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00:00It would be good if people weren't on social media till they were like 16 or at all
00:05But because it's you know, deeply deeply bad for all of us and probably none of us should be looking at it
00:21Wish I was being dramatic, but the numbers are horrible and you've got social media affecting the mental health of one in two kids
00:29So 50% of kids. It is having a devastating impact on the mental health of too many of our young Australians
00:36most content made for social media isn't really made for
00:39Safety in mind it's made so that people can make money or can get popular
00:43I think almost everyone is on social media before
00:46The time that you're technically allowed to be anyway, and I don't think changing the rules is really gonna do anything
00:52I do think it's really hard to encourage kids to get off social media because it is such a prominent part in everyone's lives these
00:58Days, it's the way everyone runs all of their entire social lives
01:01So like if you don't have Instagram, you don't get invited to anything and none of you
01:06You don't understand anything that your friends talk about because they're all on the internet all the time
01:09So they just talk about internet stuff
01:10but there's also other things that like
01:13You can't control seeing and some sometimes that can be incredibly damaging to people's mental health
01:18I want to see that that age of
01:22Social media is raised by the time my children are teens because I don't want them exposed to it
01:26And I think it will be much easier for a parent to enforce this if it's law and it's the same for all children
01:32Just wanted to say how much this petition means to me
01:35I'm a primary school teacher and I see the impact of social media on kids every day
01:56You