Dr. Mary Aiken:

The problem in dealing with most social justice issues is that we cannot look at the problem space, with due respect to my learned legal colleagues, through the myopic lens of a single discipline. Looking at a legal solution alone will not work. Mr. Lupton spoke about good practice and conduct, but there is also an ethical and moral dimension in speaking about these very large social technology industries. It is a question of fundamental design that must asked. Are they now big enough to fail or not be able to self-regulate in a way?

Let us take a sociological construct. The social media and social technology companies have been designed on the premise that greed is good and that more is better; therefore, the more connections a child has, the better. It could be 1,000 or 2,000 across multiple platforms. In the social sciences we have Dunbar's number.

It is a number that dictates the number of relationships we as humans can maintain and sustain before we begin to suffer from social stress and exhaustion, which can lead to some of those negative behaviours. That number is 150, which is about the size of someone's Christmas card list or the number of people someone asks to one's wedding. The question we could ask is whether we should look at structures whereby we recommend a cap on the number of connections for teens and young people who are going through developmental periods so that they do not get to that point of social stress and exhaustion where other negative behaviours can come into play. The way that we can bring about these solutions is by taking a much broader view at governmental level, involving various Departments, to craft and architect solutions that recognise, in effect, that we are not just talking about points of law. We are talking about children, humans and the impact on the individual and society.

In response to Senator Conway, these problems are uniform worldwide and, collectively, we need to come together in a transdisciplinary way to look at solutions.