Almost one year on from the start of Australia’s landmark social media ban, it is clear that the law has failed to stop most children from accessing the platforms. Meanwhile, teenagers are hoping to overturn the policy through a challenge at the nation’s highest court.

“I’m bringing the High Court case because young Australians have a right to be in the digital town square,” says Noah Jones, a primary witness opposing the ban in the case, which started hearings on 3 November. “This is the world of technology and I’m entitled to see it all and not be shut out.”

Jones was 15 when the ban came into effect, prohibiting under-16s from accessing social media sites, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. He was a plaintiff in the case, but withdrew due to the risk of costs being awarded against his family.

Now, the constitutional challenge is being led by advocacy group the Digital Freedom Project, alongside Reddit, which – like other social media behemoths – fears that Australia’s social media ban will be replicated elsewhere around the world. The primary argument before the court this week has been that the ban limits the freedom of political communication for under-16s.

In spite of this challenge and widespread concerns about implementing and enforcing a social media ban for children, numerous nations, including the UK, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and a number of EU members, say they, too, will follow suit.

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From the moment the policy was announced, many experts warned that it would be unworkable and could have negative outcomes, and that the real target of any policy should be the platforms, their algorithms and what they allow online.

The biggest failure of the policy highlighted by researchers is that most children have been able to keep their profiles. One study by Courtney Barnes at the University of Newcastle in Australia and her colleagues, who surveyed more than 400 under-16s prior to the ban and then again three months after it, were still using prohibited platforms.

Such research and similar findings from Australia’s forced the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to announce in June a from AUS$49.5 million to AUS$99 million ($35 million to $69 million) if breaches were identified. He also introduced a raft of new powers for the eSafety commissioner to compel companies to provide information about what they were doing to get kids off their sites.

At that time, Albanese said countries around the world were following Australia’s lead on social media reform, but that social media companies weren’t doing enough to exclude children.

Yet, nearly half a year later, and in spite of widespread evidence that the laws have had little effect on teens’ social media use, not a single fine has so far been issued.

“Some kids hid accounts and devices from parents at first, but when accounts shut down, we all just made a new one or had someone older do the face scan,” says Jones. “Kids just laughed and kept using socials. Most kids I know have more social media accounts than last year because new platforms popped up and we tried them out.”

at the Age Verification Providers Association in London says up to 80 per cent of children have kept their accounts, with half saying they were never challenged and over a third retaining access “thanks to the false ages they originally used to create the account”.

“Australia has been a missed opportunity for those who hoped it would provide evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of age restrictions for social media, because the platforms did not implement the law in good faith,” says Corby.

He says the UK’s communications watchdog, Ofcom, has been much clearer about the requirement for highly effective age assurance when the UK brings in its restrictions next spring, and that ministers are “alive to the need for robust legislation that pre-empts loopholes”. “The social media platforms may think they have muddied the waters and avoided a successful precedent being set by Australia, but it is clear that lessons are also being learned by observers.”

at CyberSafety Solutions, an Australian consultancy, says it is sad that teens around the world can access Instagram teen accounts with inbuilt safety settings, limited content and algorithmic controls, yet Australian children cannot because of the ban. She says this is pushing them to far less safe platforms. “I would never have found primary kids even knowing what Reddit was before the ban, but now it’s mainstream for kids as their vetting is easily bypassed,” says McLean.

at the University of Sydney says her children have been able to retain their social media accounts and a “tentative conclusion” can be drawn that not that much has changed for Australian teens. She says there is no point doubling the penalty for social media firm breaches if the government isn’t going to enforce the law. “What does enforcement look like? Are we going to see that? Are we going to see these platforms being taken to court?” Jeffery asks.

at RMIT University in Melbourne says governments around the world have been captivated by the headlines rather than the data. Instead of bans, efforts should instead be on online safety and digital duty of care, she says.

It is impossible to keep children from interacting online and the focus of governments should be on making platforms safe, says Given. “My main message is that this isn’t the solution,” she says. “I think other countries really need to actually look at the data.”

Noah Jones, the young witness in the High Court case, says the arguments made by the government’s lawyers in court this week left him dismayed. “I don’t matter as an Australian when they say I’m not an elector and they do not seem to know the shorthand of how people communicate today,” he says. “I resent when statements are made that I should form a local club to exchange ideas or drop pamphlets – that sounds like my mum’s childhood before the internet.”

As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.

by Anna Lembke

In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. It’s overwhelming. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change, there is a way out. The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally.

In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued. Watch out for our review on 5 November.

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by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend

Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”.

The best new popular science books of September 2026

Dive into new titles from major names including Carlo Rovelli, Maggie Aderin, Xand van Tulleken and Jim Al-Khalili, as well as a new biography of Stephen Hawking

by Amy Crawford

For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate. Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land.

“Whether it’s garlic mustard spreading through American forests or brushtail possums allegedly decimating the flightless birds of New Zealand,” Undesirable is a “multi-faceted story”, say its publishers. On top of that, exactly how to hold ourselves to account remains an open question. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”. Crawford, a freelance writer and long-time contributor to Smithsonian magazine, looks set to give us plenty to chew on here.

by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Illustrated by Paula Terán Ospina

Look closely at the list of creators on the cover of this book, aimed at a 5+ age group, about a cloud forest within the Intac valley in northwestern Ecuador, and along with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, you’ll spot a more unusual contributor: Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself. As the publishers (probably correctly) point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. To celebrate that fact – and the anniversary of a court decision recognising Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future – this is apparently “more than a book”, in that by making it, “we are recognising the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work”. When you open Song of the Cedars, the flora, fauna and fungi of Los Cedros Cloud Forest jump off the page in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as you wish. All the royalties from sales of the book, the publishers say, will be used to support the protection of Los Cedros. Fighting talk!

by Angèle Christin

What’s it like to make your money as a content creator? Angèle Christin, a digital studies scholar at Stanford University, California, takes us inside that world in her new book. The things these influencers post on social media range “from dance routines to political commentary, makeup tutorials to carpentry DIY”. She looks far and wide to explore what she calls their “golden dreams of passion, autonomy, and monetary returns”. No spoiler alert needed: the outcome for these creators and their followers shows how this digital work tends to fuel precarity, inequality – and much more. Christin’s bottom line: it’s more than time to rethink the economic structure of social media.

by Ashley Ward

Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than human blood, yet it has been central to our evolution – the  “amniotic fluid of life itself”, as the publishers of Saltwater: A natural history of the sea describe it. In this book, author Ashley Ward, a marine biologist, will bring readers face to face with the deep secrets of marine life. There will be jousting rival humpback whales, and claustrophobic journeys in a submersible to 600 metres deep to see an aurora of bioluminescence. We will also apparently encounter the complex seabird cities that develop along coasts, where auk fathers train their chicks to become skilful divers. And there’s mention of the ethereal song of a pod of belugas carrying across a fjord in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ward could hardly be better placed to deliver all this and more, given his background as a biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as head of its Animal Behaviour Lab.

by Baland Jalal

A sneak peek at the introduction of Baland Jalal’s The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep shows what we can expect from a researcher often billed as the leading expert in sleep paralysis. “One morning in my teenage years, I awoke gripped by terror… In horror, I realized a demon was on my bed. It grabbed my legs and began tossing them up and down in the air, while crushing my chest and squeezing my neck. While being strangled to death, I could somehow telepathically read the mind of the monster. It had one – and only one agenda: to destroy me.”

This terrifying no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became the territory of his research for the next decade or so. There are plenty more great stories in this highly accessible book, including one featuring Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears as a sleep-paralysis ghost to Jalal – and leads him off on a new train of thought about exactly how the ghostly figures people see in sleep paralysis are formed. The borderlands of sleep turn out to be a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. And watch out for our interview with Jalal, in our 14 November issue.

by Erica McAlister, illustrated by Natalie McIntyre

This is the latest in the Chicago University Press’s Day series. Earlier in the year, we enjoyed marine biologist Helen Scales’s Shell Day and behavioural ecologist Marty Crump’s Snake Day. Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives follows the same pattern, acting as an hourly guide, this time following insects as they hunt for food, mates or just plain safety from predators. Author Erica McAlister is a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. She starts at midnight in Africa with a female mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, which is out for the blood of any unwitting sleeper and may unintentionally transfer malaria. Who knew, by the way, that the males have no taste for blood?

By 7am, we’ve moved on to the Arctic circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, is basking within the flowers of the Arctic poppy. She can also keep warm simply by vibrating. Throughout the day, we meet the yellow-legged saddle casemaker (Agapetus ochripes), the blue-winged helicopter (Megaloprepus caerulatus), the Peruvian shield mantis (Choeradodis rhombicollis), the ferocious water bug (Abedus herberti) and Grote’s bertholdia (Bertholdia trigona). In its closing pages, Insect Day delivers a final punch: we’ve just toured insects, but there may be as many as 30 million more yet to describe.

by Richard Dawkins

A new Richard Dawkins book is always a bit of a treat, and 42 Tales from Life: A modern bestiary looks set to be no exception. This is a collection of animal tales, explaining how they evolved into the extraordinary, intriguing and often beautiful forms they have, with a colourful backdrop of illustrations by 19^th-century naturalist, morphologist and artist Ernst Haeckel. According to the publisher, Dawkins reveals “the fundamental truths behind even the most unfathomable animal behaviours”, such as the galloping of fish, the shape of the rhinoceros’ horn, the surprising similarities between horses and lizards, and why hummingbirds glow so brilliantly. The book starts with “The Cephalopod’s Tale” and “The Hummingbird’s Tale”, ending with “The Bat’s Tale” and “The Frog’s Tale”. They are accompanied by Haeckel’s art, whose depictions of plants, sea creatures and other animals turn out to have fascinated Dawkins all his life.

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The UK will ban children under 16 from social media by early next year, replicating a policy that came into effect in Australia in 2025. The move is intended to put children’s well-being ahead of technology companies’ profits. But how will scientists study the effects of the measure and determine whether it is actually having a positive impact?

“We have no evidence either way,” says at Bath Spa University in the UK, who is working with the Australian government to analyse the effects of its own ban and is also advising the UK government. “It’s such new territory.”

Leading the way on research in the UK is the Wellcome Trust, which is already deep into the IRL Trial in Bradford. This has recruited about 4000 kids from 10 schools, aged 12 to 15, who installed an app on their phones to track their social media use. For half of those children, the app also limits access to social apps. The researchers expect to publish their first results in the middle of next year, after the newly announced ban has taken effect. However, at the Wellcome Trust says the findings should still help inform policy.

They will also improve upon existing research that tends to rely on self-reported measures, like asking children or their parents how much time they spend on social media, rather than using more objective metrics. What’s more, the few interventional studies that do exist . “If you’re talking about big changes here around mental health and those sorts of things, you’re not going to see changes in two weeks,” says Etchells.

Australia’s ban came into place in December, which is too recent to gauge its long-term effects. But once national bans like these are in place, it is impossible to do controlled studies, in which two groups of similar people are allocated access or not. What’s more, the results from larger studies on the wider population before and after the ban will be impossible to unpick from other social impacts.

For now, Sebastian is gearing up to run additional studies that hopefully generate at least some results soon after the ban. The UK government expects to bring legislation to Parliament before Christmas, with the policy coming into force in early 2027.

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The Wellcome Trust has invited 14 research teams to submit plans, some or all of which will be funded, into the effects of social media on young people’s well-being. These will take varying approaches to capture as much data as possible, with the goal of eventually synthesising the data into a conclusive result.

Some of these studies will follow existing cohorts and regularly interview them about their mental health and well-being over time, before and after the ban. Sebastian says these approaches can be insightful, but rigid. Other studies are proposing momentary assessments, where participants are sent text messages asking them to complete short surveys on the spur of the moment, capturing a different kind of data. Others may look to analyse data that is already being captured for some insight, such as the rate of hospital admissions or school absences.

With time against them, Sebastian hopes that some results could emerge relatively soon after the ban, but they are likely to be nuanced. For instance, a social media ban could have some positive impacts, but also disruptive ones in the short term, as online supportive networks are lost.

The effects of such bans are also likely to change over the years or decades, as today’s children and younger teenagers approach adulthood having never had access to social media. “It’s not that this is a done deal,” says Sebastian. “Policies could be continuing to change over the longer term, and it’s possible that the findings from our study and others will help to shape those policies iteratively.”

The truth about social media and screen time’s impact on young people

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For now, some are wary that the UK government is taking a reactive stance in the complex problem of poor youth mental health, without the appropriate data. at the University of Oxford told the Science Media Centre that a blanket age ban is a “blunt tool” and a stronger step than current evidence can support, but adds that the Wellcome research is an opportunity to learn whether these measures will “help, harm or neither”.

One thing that could hinder research – and undermine government policy – is the ability of users to skirt the bans. Early reports suggest that facial-recognition technology designed to verify ages online can be , and VPNs make it trivial to appear to websites as a user from another country where age checks aren’t mandated.

Surveys in Australia by the Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide-prevention charity, found that 61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds who had accounts on restricted platforms before the ban came into force . The organisation said that given the findings, it would be a “high-stakes gamble” for the UK to follow suit at this stage.

Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (samaritans.org); US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988 (988lifeline.org). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for services in other countries.

Social media giants Meta and YouTube have been found liable by a California jury for negligence that caused harm to a young woman’s mental health. The landmark decision is among the first of many similar cases, and could be the beginning of a trend that may force major changes in how social platforms work.

The companies have been ordered to pay $3 million in compensatory damages, which are meant to cover the plaintiff’s financial losses related to the events relevant to the case, as well as pain and suffering. The jury has not yet decided the amount of any punitive damages – money the companies would pay as punishment for their actions.

The claim held by the young woman at the centre of the trial, known in court documents as KGM, was that the addictive nature of these social media products led to her anxiety and depression, and the jury agreed. Originally, the lawsuit included Tiktok (owned by ByteDance) and Snapchat (owned by Snap) as well, but they settled out of court before the trial began.

This case was not unique: thousands of similar lawsuits have been filed against social media companies across the US alleging that their products are addictive and harmful. Most of the cases have not yet gone to trial, but one in New Mexico was decided on 24 March, with a similar outcome. In that case, the state alleged that Meta failed to protect children from exploitation on its platforms, and a jury found the company guilty. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in damages.

The question now is whether cases like this will result in substantive changes to the social media products that have been ruled to be harmful. In the US, free speech laws have made it difficult to demand any changes to social media platforms – in particular, one called Section 230 that prevents companies from being held liable for content posted on their platforms by users. But those same laws have made it difficult to win lawsuits like these, so this may well be a turning point.

The New Mexico case is moving towards a second phase, in which a judge will decide what changes, if any, Meta will be required to make to its social media platforms going forward.

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A Meta spokeperson told New Scientist that the company disagrees with the verdicts and intends to appeal in both cases. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, stated that the company intends to appeal the California decision. Several more lawsuits are set to go to trial in the coming months, and if this trend continues, it could force sweeping changes to the social media landscape.