Josephine Le, founder of the social media platform The Hood, writes for Splash today about what shipping can learn from Australia’s decision to restrict social media access for children.
Australia’s decision to restrict social media access for under-16s has been widely framed as a debate about parenting, screen time, and youth protection, but that framing misses the point and allows industries such as shipping to treat it as someone else’s issue rather than a warning that should feel uncomfortably familiar.
What Australia has done is acknowledge that platform design shapes behaviour in ways that are neither neutral nor harmless, and that acknowledgement matters in an industry where human performance, rest, focus, and judgement are central to safe operations.
The legislation does not prevent communication or isolate young people from parents and relatives. Messaging apps, email, and voice or video services remain available. Instead, it targets a specific category of platforms built around open feeds, algorithmic amplification, and engagement models that reward attention above all else, a distinction that carries real weight in safety-critical environments.
The government’s reasoning is direct. Mainstream social media platforms are engineered to capture and monetise attention, with cyberbullying, harmful content, sexual predation, and addictive design functioning not as accidents but as predictable outcomes of platforms optimised for scale and advertising revenue. Delaying access is an attempt to reduce exposure to those dynamics during formative stages, not a rejection of digital connection itself.
What shipping has been slower to confront is that these same design mechanics do not stop influencing behaviour once people reach adulthood.
Endless scrolling, constant notifications, and algorithm-driven content loops disrupt sleep, fragment concentration, and make disengagement harder, particularly in environments where downtime is limited and recovery matters. In many sectors, this is still framed as a general wellbeing issue, but in shipping, that framing falls short, as fatigue and distraction remain persistent contributors to incidents at sea, with human error continuing to dominate casualty investigations.
Seafarers also interact with digital platforms under conditions very different from those experienced ashore. Connectivity is intermittent and unpredictable, time online is compressed, and access often comes in short windows that encourage intensive rather than moderate use. When those windows open, platforms designed to maximise engagement perform exactly as intended, capturing attention quickly and holding it far longer than planned. At the same time, the industry continues to invest heavily in safety management systems, training, and fatigue mitigation, while largely ignoring how unregulated digital design competes for attention in the background.
This is where Australia’s decision becomes directly relevant to maritime, because it exposes a blind spot the sector has tolerated for too long. The issue is not whether seafarers should be connected, but whether the platforms they rely on are compatible with the demands placed on people working in safety-critical roles.
One weakness in the wider debate is the tendency to treat all digital platforms as interchangeable, when the risks policymakers are responding to overwhelmingly stem from platforms built for virality, growth, and advertising, whose success depends on keeping users online for as long as possible, regardless of downstream effects.
The Hood Platform was built around a different set of priorities shaped by those realities. There are no advertisements, no algorithmic feeds, and no incentive to drive endless engagement; users are verified, communities are moderated, and interaction is intentional rather than addictive, reflecting design decisions informed by life at sea.
In shipping, digital platforms are not lifestyle products. They form part of the industry’s human infrastructure, supporting connection with employers, professional peers, and support networks during months away from home, and that reliance demands higher standards than those typically applied to consumer social media.
Australia’s move is not about banning connection, but about recognising that design choices create risk or reduce it. Shipping understands better than most that ignored risks rarely stay small for long, and digital platform design should not be the next one the industry explains away after the fact.
