I joked with colleagues about getting my name added to the legislation. As much as I love social media, I fear that it has destroyed my focus, my concentration, and my free time.

France is reportedly considering a similar ban to protect its children from the harms of social media, but what about us adults? Can we make the social media ban opt-in for adults?

As adults, I recognise we are all completely capable of putting the phone down and picking up a book instead. Logging off is always an option. Shutting down your account is always an option. But the truth is, the social cost of opting out of social media is high because everyone else is on it. Then there are those of us who really need to be on social media for professional reasons, making it difficult to opt out altogether, even if you want to.

I will confess to being a total and complete luddite about the social media ban. I think it’s a great idea. I think smartphones should be banned from all schools. Perhaps because I’m an elderly Millennial who remembers life before social media and smartphones (video calls still feel like something from Star Trek to me).

Screens dominate our lives now in a way that wasn’t possible when I was growing up. Now, we carry the internet around in our pockets. When I was growing up, parents were worried about kids watching too much telly. Now people sit down with two or three screens – telly, laptop and smartphone.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like my smartphone and my social media have completely destroyed my concentration. I particularly notice it at this time of year because one of the joys of summer holidays is receiving books for Christmas and then spending whole days reading them for hours on end at the beach, or by the pool.

But the past few years, instead of getting completely absorbed by a book for hours at a stretch like I used to, I find myself checking my phone compulsively. It’s not even a Pavlovian response to hearing the “ding” of a notification. Often, there is no notification. But in the middle of reading-without conscious thought-I pick up my phone to check it anyway. It’s maddening. And it takes days to train myself out of the habit.

Another time, I heard an interview with Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, talking about how Big Tech has destroyed our concentration. I drove to my nearest bookstore, then made several attempts to read it, but ironically couldn’t concentrate enough to finish it. Eventually, I downloaded the audiobook and listened to it on a six-hour road trip to visit my Nan.

The fact is that smartphones and social media are designed to be relentlessly addictive. The algorithms ruthlessly serve up exactly the content you want, and you can scroll it to infinity and beyond with no interruptions. I had to delete TikTok from my phone because I’d think to myself, “I’ll just check it for five minutes” and I’d look up and three hours had passed. The algorithm is that good.

Companies are tracking our online preferences, our habits, our spending, accumulating huge amounts of real time data to better target advertising to sell us more stuff. As the saying goes with social media: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” And it’s not just our data that Big Tech is after, it’s our attention. The CEO of Netflix once named their biggest competitor not Disney or Amazon, but sleep.

Many brave whistle-blowers have alerted the public to many other harms caused by social media. Deliberately experimenting to alter user’s moods. Serving up eating disorder content to teen girls. And the harms get worse by orders of magnitude. Spreading rampant misinformation and disinformation. Whistle-blower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents from Facebook that demonstrate how the platform’s algorithms amplified hate speech, and it has faced legal action for the instrumental role it played in accelerating the genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

The under 16s social media ban shows the government is capable of acting decisively when it wants to. Banning kids from social media will help protect kids from harm, but a ban is a blunt instrument. It does nothing to protect 17-year-olds or 50-year-olds from from harmful content or practices.

To protect all of us, the government would need to properly regulate Big Tech. Australia has already done it once before, when the Coalition government implemented the news media bargaining code to help address the monopoly power of Big Tech when it comes to digital advertising.

But it is much more difficult to regulate properly than it is to implement a blanket ban. The government could force Big Tech to end things like “infinite scrolling”, to reveal information about how their algorithms work, or to crack down on hate speech that encourages racism, misogyny and violence. The government could impose a positive “duty of care” on platforms for their users. Better regulation of Big Tech would help protect all of us and our society, not just our kids.

The Albanese government’s under 16s social media ban is a giant experiment. It could fail. Plenty of kids are flouting the ban in creative ways.

I can also see that banning kids from social media could be damaging for many kids who might struggle to connect with kids in real life for whatever reason – neurodivergence, disability, sexuality, shyness, remoteness.

It could be a huge success. The ban will at the very least help parents limit harms from social media in a way that is almost impossible for any parent to achieve on their own.

In the meantime, I’ll try to hide my phone from myself so I can finish my book.