It’s 2025 and the internet today’s kids have inherited looks nothing like the one many of us grew up with. What used to be a playground of memes and message boards has morphed into a marketplace of filters, loot boxes and endless ads, a space designed to harvest attention, not protect it.
And with Australia’s landmark under-16 social media ban just under two weeks away, the question of how to keep kids safe online has never felt more urgent.
At SXSW Sydney’s “Handle With Care: What If Kids Designed the Internet?”, digital rights advocates, regulators and youth voices came together to imagine a future where children aren’t locked out of the online world but invited to help reshape it.
“There’s this tendency to see children and young people as a monolithic group, but they’re not,” said Kate Bower, director of Privacy Reform Implementation and the Social Media Taskforce at the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
“Neither is the internet. So much of our lives are online, but the experience of young people is so often reduced to just the harmful parts.”
Bower said the upcoming Children’s Online Privacy Code aims to shift accountability from kids to companies.
“One of the things we’re trying to do with the privacy code is to put the onus back on the platforms themselves to think about how they handle children’s information, thus incentivising them to be better,” she said.
“What’s really interesting in the safety and privacy space is this allure of, if we just know everything, we can keep children safe,” she added. “I’m not saying there isn’t a space for that, but it is a bit of an illusion”.
Bower said the key is to regulate those causing the harm, not those experiencing it. “We’re focusing a lot on the content, but we aren’t really thinking about the revenue sources that build the internet the way it is today,” she said.
Ultimately, she said, “regulation needs to be on the people causing the harm, not the ones experiencing it”.
Telstra Foundation’s Youth Advisory Council’s Rispah Silenge warned that overprotection often backfires.
“Something that adults need to stop doing is viewing young people as having very similar internet habits,” she said. “Adults tend to follow the pattern that protecting young people means restricting internet access, this strips autonomy and digital literacy.”
Australia’s approach to online safety, she argued, is a lot like closing an unsafe road instead of fixing the potholes. Rather than repairing the systems that make the internet dangerous, the predatory algorithms, manipulative business models and unchecked data practices, policymakers are blocking young people from using it at all.
Silenge said adults need to fundamentally rethink what partnership actually looks like, not as a token consultation exercise, but as genuine co-design.
“Partnership isn’t just speaking on behalf of people, it’s bringing them into the conversation,” she said. “We need to put young people in spaces where they can comfortably and creatively express what they need”.
Sarah Davies, CEO of the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, took aim at what she called a structural problem, the fact that the internet, at its very core, was never designed with children in mind.
Every platform, feature and algorithm, she explained, has been engineered for adult users and commercial outcomes, not for the safety, wellbeing or developmental needs of young people.
“The internet was not designed and developed for children,” she said. “The products, services and experiences on the internet are designed by adults in tech, some are designed really well, others are designed really poorly and with complete disregard for their rights.”
“When an industry refuses to understand its users, customers and clients, or look at the implications of those risks and harms,” she added, “then there is no option but regulation.”
Davies said the online world needs the same care and design thinking that shapes every other part of childhood. “We know how critical play is to child development, this includes risky play as well,” she said. “The same amount of care, thought and design that goes into all other facets of age and stage child development needs to be present in their online experiences”.
Davies said that the very online spaces where children spend the most time are often the ones least designed to protect them. Gaming platforms, social media apps and video-sharing sites may dominate their digital lives, but they’re also where the highest risks lie, from data scraping and algorithmic manipulation to bullying and exploitation.
“What worries parents is quite different to what worries children,” Davies said, noting a growing disconnect between the fears of adults and the lived realities of kids online. Parents tend to fixate on screen time, addiction and the emotional toll of social media, while children worry about being tricked and having their data stolen.
“Nobody trusted tech,” she said, not the parents, not the children, and not even the experts trying to fix it.
That erosion of trust, Davies warned, is what happens when an entire generation grows up online without feeling safe or heard. Rebuilding that trust, she suggested, will take more than new laws or platform policies; it will require reshaping the internet from the ground up, starting with the people who use it most.
Bower summed it up perfectly, if Australia is serious about building a safer internet, it can’t keep designing it in rooms where no young people are present.
“It makes sense that if we are creating a code to protect children that our most important stakeholders are children themselves,” she said. Consulting kids might be messy, she added, but no more so than dealing with adults, and is far more likely to produce a digital world that reflects the people actually growing up in it.
So, if adults built the internet kids use today, maybe it’s time kids help design the one they’ll inherit tomorrow.
