Just out from my ARC DECRA project, a new Open Access paper with James Goring and Natalie Hendry in the Journal of Youth Studies: ‘Guiding young people’s social media use in school policies: opportunities, risks, moral panics, and imagined futures’.

Robards, B., Goring, J., Hendry, N. (2025) ‘Guiding young people’s social media use in school policies: opportunities, risks, moral panics, and imagined futures’, Journal of Youth Studies, online first: https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2025.2468477

In this paper we look at 38 high school policies that seek to govern how social media is used by students in Australia, to explore themes around opportunities (social connection, self-expression, citizenship, and ‘digital skills’) and ‘risks’ (privacy, sexting, alcohol and other drugs, mental health concerns, etc.).

We wrote it well before the Australian social media ban discourse kicked off (again) but this paper shows how we’ve been having these discussions for a long time now. While there is unsurprisingly a focus on risk in the policies, schools have actually come a long way in a more nuanced framing of social media, that the looming attempt at a ban in Australia doesn’t provide space for.