At risk and risky young people: symbolic repertoires in online safety policy in Australia and the UK

Across areas of governance, children and young people are invariably represented rather than meaningfully engaged, particularised figures who are emblematic of social ills/political debates rather than democratic participants. This paper argues that current online safety policies are legitimised through a repertoire of symbolic action that casts young people, particularly teenagers, as at once both endangered by and also dangerous when using digital technologies. Rooted in long-standing cultural narratives of moral panic, paternalism, and nostalgia for childhood, these images provide political leaders, policymakers, and media outlets with affectively charged and popularly recognised symbols that can be leveraged to legitimise surveillance, banning, and censorship of online spaces (Lorenz, 2025; Robards et al., 2025). Using a comparative analysis of evidence and submissions made to policymaking committees for Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 and the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023, and subsequent debates about their implementation, we examine how these policies mobilise symbolic repertoires of young people as at risk and risky to mobilise public support and legitimise troubling interventions into social media and other online spaces. We show how popular claims about mental health crises, screen addiction, cyberbullying, pornography access, and (misogynistic) radicalisation fuse claims that appeal to commonsense political mores with emotionally resonant anxieties about generational decline and the fragility of childhood. We also look at who tells the stories to propel dominant narratives: parents, politicians, celebrities and experts. The strategic privileging of one narrative over others, highlighting how particular stories of individual tragedy, parental fear, or undesirable youthful behaviour become politically valuable resources through which regressive policy agendas acquire moral urgency. Importantly, these constructions of young people ignore the testimony of young people themselves and foreclose on alternative rights- and justice-informed policy approaches. Methodologically, we adopt Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2025) ‘what is the problem represented to be’ approach to qualitative coding of policymaking materials and media coverage to capture how these narrative practices are integral components of legitimisation in this policy arena, functioning to narrow the scope of debate and leave unexamined the social, economic, and structural factors that inform young peoples’ experiences online. These are key mechanisms through which policymakers legitimise contentious agenda and manufacture consent for heightened control over the digital. References Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. (2025). Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorenz, T. (2025). 'The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit’, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/09/uk-online-safety-act-internet-censorship-world-following-suit (Accessed: 8th September 2025). Robards, B., Goring, J., and Hendry, N. A. (2025). 'Guiding young people's social media use in school policies: opportunities, risks, moral panics, and imagined futures', Journal of Youth Studies. pp.1-17.