Australia has enacted a world-first ban on social media for users aged under 16, causing millions of children and teenagers to lose access to their accounts.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and TikTok are expected to have taken steps from Wednesday to remove accounts held by users under 16 years of age in Australia, and prevent those teens from registering new accounts.
Platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to $49.5m.
There have been some teething problems with the ban’s implementation. Guardian Australia has received several reports of those under 16 passing the facial age assurance tests, but the government has flagged it is not expecting the ban will be perfect from day one.
All listed platforms apart from X had confirmed by Tuesday they would comply with the ban. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said it had recently had a conversation with X about how it would comply, but the company had not communicated its policy to users.
Bluesky, an X alternative, announced on Tuesday it would also ban under-16s, despite eSafety assessing the platform as “low risk” due to its small user base of 50,000 in Australia.
Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.
Others said the ban “can’t come quickly enough”. One parent said their daughter was “completely addicted” to social media and the ban “provides us with a support framework to keep her off these platforms”.
“The fact that teenagers occasionally find a way to have a drink doesn’t diminish the value of having a clear, national standard.”
Polling has consistently shown that two-thirds of voters support raising the minimum age for social media to 16. The opposition, including leader Sussan Ley, have recently voiced alarm about the ban, despite waving the legislation through parliament and the former Liberal leader Peter Dutton championing it.
The ban has garnered worldwide attention, with several nations indicating they will adopt a ban of their own, including Malaysia, Denmark and Norway. The European Union passed a resolution to adopt similar restrictions, while a spokesperson for the British government told Reuters it was “closely monitoring Australia’s approach to age restrictions”.
Social media use by kids and teens has been demonstrated factually to cause harm to people’s mental health and social lives. The sources are plenty and widespread.
I still don’t know if a ban is the answer, but at least it’s an attempt to address a problem. I’m curious what your answer would be to this growing problem?
I figure holding tech giants directly accountable for the specific harms they’ve caused would be better than punishing an entire population but unfortunately our politicians are mostly either invertebrates who are too cowardly to pick fights with foreign corporate entities (so they’re useless drains of political will) or they’re actively supportive of them on the grounds of being ideologically pro-business (so, evil).
They feed us their poisons (surveillance capitalism and an unhealthy information ecosystem driven by algorithmic optimisation for advertising revenue) so they can sell us their “medicines” (age gating and mandatory identification online—more data harvesting as a selling point to advertisers) while they suppress our cure (an internet by independent creators as opposed to capitalist brands)
What if; the social media giants are in another country. Your country doesn’t have jurisdiction there and can do fuck all in reality.
Maybe fine them??? Sure, which they will fight in court until the end of time; all the while the harm continues.
I don’t know if a ban will work, or what extra harms it will cause. But there are no good options to tackle this on the large scales of whole countries.
Algorithmic social media is mind cancer; if you have a better suggestion for tackling this issue. Let us know.
Lemmy is social media; but there is no algorithmic feed, my views are not being manipulated by some engagement maximizing machine.
The ban proves it’s possible to legislate, so maybe they should just legislate something better lol? Holding platforms accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against misinformation, bullying and harassment might be a starting point. And hey, if socmed’s really that bad for you, then us adults could benefit from this alternative, too! In any case, this ban is literally worse than just leaving the problem be.
I don’t really agree; the ban will do two things.
1/ it will show the social media companies that, Australia at least; has tools that they can use to reduce their power.
2/ show kids that this is really serious; it is not just your parents saying shit you can ignore.
Will some kids work out how to get around it; yep, 100%. Will it be a big portion; maybe, tech literacy is not as high as it could/should be.
This would be great; but it is also too little too late. They have tried, and failed at exactly this for years.
It is that bad for you! Algorithmic social media is doing you harm.
Wall of text incoming.
I don’t see how both these claims can simultaneously be true. Either Australia has tools to hold these companies to account, in which case, how would they have previously failed if they’d already tried? Or it doesn’t, and this is just one more completely futile policy that won’t give companies any more than the usual slap on the wrist if it ever goes to court.
I argue that they didn’t try, because they never actually cared about children’s wellbeing, because if they did they’d have done better than this, ergo this policy isn’t really about that and is actually about making citizens more easily identifiable online.
Additionally, it does nothing to reduce the power of seppo tech giants. On the contrary, they’ve got money, they’ll be fine. Independent social media sites however, don’t all have the resources to implement verification systems, so some will feel the financial burden of compliance a lot harder, and others will simply cease serving Australian users, further strengthening Silicon Valley’s hold over the internet.
As I have said over and over again in this thread, what the ban will do is cut children suffering domestic abuse (a problem that is absolutely rife in this country) off from their support networks. It’ll cut minority kids that’re subjected to bullying by their peers off from their communities. It’ll drive more kids to shadier corners of the internet where they’re at greater risk of predation. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is going to get children killed.
Furthermore—and again, as I’ve been repeating all over this thread—everyone—yes, that includes adults—will be required to submit personally identifiable information to private organisations just to communicate with other people online, making anyone in this country who uses social media a potential victim of identity theft the moment a data breach happens. And happen it will. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
What’s more, knowing that the platforms they’re using have their identities will make a great many people more hesitant to speak critically about existing power structures, especially the government. This is bad.
I stand by my previously stated opinion that all this is worse than the status quo, but even if it weren’t you should be asking why this is the solution that the government came up with.
Sorry, my poor communications…I was referring to the social media companies, when I said they had been trying and failing for years. Not trying that hard mind you; moderation is a very expensive problem to solve, and they don’t want to spend money they don’t explicitly have to.
Maybe. That is speculation, probably a nice little side effect. But not the primary goal.
This is a great point; and there is an easy way to solve this problem. Not that the govt will care that a simple solution exists. If you don’t have an algorithmic feed a lot of the spread of misinformation is curtailed. If you are not allowed to host images/video etc directly than the moderation of them can be off loaded to 3rd parties.
Another great point. I don’t have a good answer to this one, but there are anonymous leak avenues etc for serious stuff.
I don’t disagree that the entire institution is rotten and causing harm, but in terms of just socializing online, just the act of forming communities and forums and discussion groups and sharing content, the essence of what’s becoming harmful, what is the right answer here? The stuff that causes a lot of the harm is just what people tend to do online, because humans broadly are not meant to substitute real social connections for whatever is happening when we scroll and type and read other people’s thoughts and fantasies and depressed manifestos of strangers every day.
Even now, you’re reading my text inside your head in your own voice. The act alone of having this discussion is creating an entirely new kind of information pattern in your brain that we haven’t had in the last half-million years or so since our brains evolved. Do you know what this new kind of information processing is doing to your view of the world? Do any of us?
I know if you type “research teens social media health” into google you will have days of reading material about the research done and how harmful these practices are. But I’m not sensing that anyone even cares honestly. Is it better that we let whatever happens happen? I’m not being facetious, I want to know if people genuinely think that this isn’t a problem worth fighting.
The online harms I’m concerned with are bullying, harassment and misinformation. Platforms should be required by society to moderate against these, or face penalties proportionate to revenue. Instead just banning under 16s, even if it could be done in a way that is both effective and respectful of everyone’s privacy (I’m not convinced that it can) would still be a lazy abrogation of this responsibility, still leaving kids vulnerable to the same behaviours in offline spaces and everyone else vulnerable to the harms purportedly being caused among the youth online currently.
But the government isn’t interested in this because these behaviours serve to entrench existing social hierarchies, and the government—being in charge of the nation-state—likes existing social hierarchies.
I know parents who successfully regulate their kids access to social media, games, tv, movies. Pushing this regulation is not the solution. Does more damage and will only make parents more complacent.
I don’t disagree with any of that.
I am mostly asking people here what they think the alternative should be. Like you say, parents who manage and monitor this are going have better outcomes… but that’s not the norm, and the problem is getting worse despite all of us having more knowledge and proof how vital it is for their kids to have their internet use managed. So I am not convinced any kind of education campaign is going to do much. Most parents are just as addicted to their phones and rather scroll than parent. This is a societal problem with many intersecting problems.