It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good, but also much bad. Staying in control of their social media lives is difficult enough for many adults, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell.
Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Too many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, too many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken their own lives as a result of what has befallen them online.
In Australia, a campaign that started with parents who lost teens to online-related suicides, backed by the country’s most powerful media organisation, has led to a world first. Australia’s government has implemented age restrictions – a de facto ban – on children under 16 accessing social media platforms. Those restrictions came into force today, and the rest of the world is watching.
Tech-savvy teenagers – and the adults abetting them – will beat the ban
The ban is immensely popular. This week, a major opinion poll found 70 per cent of Australian voters back it, with only 15 per cent expressly opposing. With numbers like those, it’s no wonder Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and his opposition counterparts all endorsed the Let Them Be Kids campaign promoted heavily by the Murdoch family’s News Corp newspapers, committing to the ban before last May’s Australian general election. Both sides considered it good politics to be on board, but each also sincerely believed that doing so was the right thing by parents and children.
It isn’t a blanket ban. Rather, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner now has the power to age-restrict access to social media platforms she deems to put children at risk. As of today, the proscribed list includes platforms highly popular with children, notably Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. For now at least, platforms deemed still acceptable include Pinterest, Roblox, WhatsApp and YouTube Kids. It is a ‘dynamic list’, so if underage users flock to a given platform – for argument’s sake, let’s say Truth Social – it can be proscribed at the Commissioner’s statutory discretion.
The Australian ban isn’t directly aimed at under-16s. Rather, it is directed at the proscribed social media platforms and the companies that run them. As far as Australia is concerned, those proscribed platforms are required to remove identifiable accounts for under-16s and to take every reasonable step to verify that users are old enough to be on it. Simply asking the question, ‘Are you 16 or over?’ won’t cut it, but how platforms weed out under-16s is left to them.
Effectively, platforms are being told to spot under-16 users, boot them and keep them out, and ensure their algorithms comply with Australian law. If they don’t, they face huge penalties, up to A$49.5 million (£25 million), intended to focus the minds of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk. Certainly, their companies and US congressional supporters – although not publicly the Trump administration – have been vocal in their opposition. Their case is predicated on free speech, and it is ironic that Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is an expatriate American taught to revere the First Amendment to the US constitution.
Intentions may be good, but what of the reality? That same poll showing overwhelming support for the ban also found two-thirds of respondents do not believe it will work. Moreover, less than one in three parents of affected children said they would enforce the ban fully. Half said they would ‘pick and choose’, and 13 per cent said they would ‘take no action’. Not a good start!
As for the children themselves, if they’re determined enough, they will find a way. In more innocent times, teens used their ingenuity to obtain alcohol and cigarettes despite being underage. Now, tech-savvy teenagers – and the adults abetting them – will beat the ban. Anticipating today, youngsters have been on social media swapping ideas on how to do it, from fooling age-detecting facial recognition technology to using VPNs to deceive the system into thinking the user is in another country. Farcically, there are threads on Reddit (now captured by the ban) where questions asking how the ban can be beaten have been taken down in Australia as of today, but long strings of helpful answers remain. Where there’s a will, there are many ways.
Albanese does not claim the ban is perfect. Indeed, it is only about access, not specifically content or social media algorithms that serve up questionable content to young children depending on what they click on. Rather, Albanese asserts it sends a message to the tech platforms that enough is enough. ‘When we look at the rise in mental health issues faced by young people, when we look at the social harm which has been caused by social media, we want kids to have the opportunity to enjoy their childhood and we want parents to be empowered as well to have that discussion,’ he said in an interview last Sunday.
Other countries, including France, Denmark, Norway, Malaysia and New Zealand are considering following Australia’s precedent. The European Union’s Ursula von der Leyen endorses it. In Britain, Health Secretary Wes Streeting warned recently about the toxic effects of social media on impressionable and vulnerable young people. Albanese certainly believes such widespread international interest will force tech companies to comply with his ban. Perhaps they will, but just as likely they will strive even harder to prove it unworkable and stop it spreading.
As the older dad of an inquisitive but impressionable 7-year-old, I want to protect her from the online world’s many dangers as she grows older and will do my very best to do it. But is making her access to social media illegal, as Australia is, the right thing to do?
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