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”.
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.