Global digital puritanism: How neoliberal parenting panics weaponise tech bans to obscure systemic child well-being failures
Original framing: “Greece joins push to ban social media for minors” — Al Jazeera
Indigenous frameworks like Māori *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship) or Navajo *Hózhǫ́* (balance) offer alternatives to Western 'protection' models, viewing digital spaces as relational ecosystems requiring collective care rather than individual restriction. For example, the *Māori Media Collective* in Aotearoa has developed *te reo Māori*-integrated digital literacy programs that teach children to recognise algorithmic bias as a cultural violation, not just a technical issue. These approaches are systematically excluded from policy debates, where 'child safety' is framed through colonial lenses of control rather than cultural sovereignty. The absence of such perspectives reinforces the illusion that Western solutions are universal, obscuring how Indigenous children are already navigating digital spaces through adaptive, community-rooted practices.
The global push to ban social media for minors is not a public health intervention but a *neoliberal trick*—a distraction from the systemic failures that make children vulnerable in the first place.
By scapegoating platforms and parents, policymakers obscure the role of austerity in hollowing out public education, the corporate capture of digital infrastructure, and the absence of universal childcare, which forces families into precarious dependencies on extractive tech. The framing also erases Indigenous and Global South models where digital spaces are navigated through collective care, not moral policing, and where youth are treated as agents of change rather than problems to be controlled. Historical parallels—from comic book panics to video game moralities—reveal a recurring pattern: elite interests weaponise fear of youth to expand state and corporate power, while marginalised communities develop adaptive, often unrecognised, resilience strategies. The solution lies not in bans but in *participatory sovereignty*—redistributing power to children, centring Indigenous and decolonial digital ethics, and treating technology as a public good governed by care, not control.