Nau mai, haere mai.

My Gen Z daughter is part of the first cohort to have had access to social media and smartphones just as they hit their teens. Some of their early favourite sites no longer exist, but before long the likes of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok were integral to their lives.

In retrospect, and as many others have subsequently observed, it feels like a largely unregulated and untested social experiment. But for better or worse, today’s young people take social media for granted – good and bad.

And the bad is well documented by now. From coercive algorithms and smartphone addiction to misinformation and bullying, social media has been implicated in all manner of personal and collective ailments.

So, the desire by politicians and others, both here and elsewhere, to clamp down on the age young people can acquire a social media account is understandable. The big social media companies have done themselves few favours, too, avoiding national regulatory frameworks and remaining largely unaccountable.

Yet, as Melissa L. Gould argues today, there may be a much better way for New Zealand to confront the challenge to its young people from social media – a far bigger focus on teaching digital media literacy.

The aim, she writes, “is to enable young people to shift from being passive media consumers to critical media users. It also helps them understand how they use – and are used by – media platforms.”

As Gould also points out, young people are themselves social media experts, and they value the positives aspects of the technology. Taking more seriously what they are already dealing with, without stigmatising it with an outright ban, makes a lot of sense.

“Parenting and educating children experiencing childhoods so different from previous generations can be scary. Social media is complex and multifaceted – as should be our approach to learning how to navigate and understand it.”