Nation Now Regretting Under 16s Social Media Ban As Teenagers Start Doing Teenage Shit Again

CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

A phenomena that almost feels foreign to suburban Australians, it appears that teenagers are getting outdoors and annoying everyone again.

Whether they are storming the woolies at a local beach town, or riding customised e-bikes on main roads as fast as they can while doing dangerous stunts in enormous convoys - today's youth are now behaving like they used to.

Before they were sedated by the dangerous social media platforms that commodified their attention spans and neurological reward systems - teenagers once caused endless trouble for cops and local communities.

Until the mid 2010s, this was part and parcel with daily life in the suburbs - with house parties, fist fights at the local show, and out-of-control New Years Eve street mobs all examples of the type of daily news stories that would make the newspapers when young people weree left to their own devices - without devices.

And now, with the government banning social media for anyone under the age of 16, it seems these kids are back causing unrest in public spaces - just this time they have really fast electric bikes and scooters - as well as vapes, nerf guns and alcoholic seltzers that look like soft drink to the untrained eye.

While 'youth crime' has been a popular political hot-button in the years since the pandemic, these kinds of public incidents aren't necessarily the work of organised criminal syndicates or at-risk children desperate for a fully belly.

It's more or less just a bunch of hormonal idiots, in the dumbest years of their life, doing dumb shit and getting excited about it.

And after years of complaining about all these bloody brain dead kids staring into their phones, the general public must now contend with the idea of a visible youth population potentially affecting their property value with their zest for life.

"Maybe the full social media ban was too much" says local boomer property investor, Glenn Glennson (69), as his car gets overtaken by 30 kids of hacked e-bikes on a major suburban arterial road.

"I liked the idea of the kids being bossed around at the time, but I didn't think it would mean I'd have to suffer through them living their lives outside"