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”.
Literally the fault of the parent.
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my kid was becoming a piece of shit watching all the YouTube/tiktok bullshit. so, I blocked access to those domains and now limit device access to a couple hours a week.
as a parent it’s my responsibility to protect my children from the dangers of the internet. it’s not the corporations responsibility to ensure the internet is safe for kids. the internet is not a fucking daycare.
since the change they have been far better behaved and respectful. so much so that teachers asked what changed and are currently trialing similar solutions with other parents with success.
you’re just giving excuses and zero solutions, I doubt you even have kids.
That’s something I’ve been telling people for years… Treat the Internet as you would the largest city you know of.
Would you take your kid to Times Square, turn them loose and say “Go have fun!” Of course not, that’s insanity.
My parents had a two hour per day limit on using the computer. The one exception was if we were using it to do homework.
You’re just not very imaginative.
Agreed.
Two for two. With you so far.
I think I like where this is going…
What? How did you make that jump??? No, you fucking dolt, this is abysmal. “Good parenting from the government” would be holding said companies accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against mis- and disinformation and bullying and harassment on their platforms. Cutting off the most vulnerable people in our society from their support networks is even more damaging than just doing nothing. Make no mistake, this will make it harder for children in abusive situations to find support, and is going to get people killed.
And doing it by requiring social media sites to collect highly sensitive personally identifiable information from all users is leaving pretty much everybody more vulnerable to identity theft.
What’s more is that this isn’t in any way reining in the tech giants. Au contraire, it’s further pushing control of internet communications into their hands because they’re the ones who have the money needed to implement the verification systems in the first place, while independently run sites that can’t afford to implement such systems will either just have to hope they can fly under the regulator’s radar or cease providing service to Australian users. Just look at the floating pile of rubbish off the French coast, just east of Ireland if you really need an example of a precedent.
No wonder we live in such a fucking nanny state.
Parents who were also raised by social media? This isn’t a new problem but it is a problem that’s getting worse, I don’t know if a ban is the answer but so far nobody has even suggested an effective alternative to reducing screen-time for both adults and kids.
This ban isn’t supposed to solve a problem overnight, but it’s supposed to influence some segment of the population to socialize, to form real communities and to hopefully grow up capable of helping their own kids not get addicted.
This is a real problem, it’s widespread across the globe and many, many studies have shown the harm social media has on a huge percentage of teens.
Also, parents work. Parents sleep. You can’t fucking hover over your teen night and day, you would hate that worse.
The solution is education not bans. This is crazy. Regulating social media access has some major privacy concerns, will make parents more complacent and will only cause kids to seek other more dubious means of communicating. It also places a major wall in front of the development of new social media platforms.
I agree.
But what do we do about the fact that even though our knowledge, research and understanding of the problem has increased, the problem has gotten worse? Is there more that can be done on that front that you think would be effective? Genuinely asking to help me shape my opinion.
It’s blooming into a larger-scale societal problem than just hoping enough people pull through, a lack of stable mental health and attention spans across large swaths of your population start to erode your society.
Yes: their problem.
I’m saying this is a societal problem, you may be 100% correct that it’s the parent’s responsibility to manage, but that isn’t happening and we can’t make it happen. Unless you think a law enforcing parental monitoring would be less fascist than a social media ban.
Again, their problem: let them go to shit. It’s everyone’s fundamental right to fuck themselves over.
Okay so you’re just some completely unserious edgy kid who doesn’t care about the betterment of anything, I am no longer interested in your opinions. Go live in the wilderness.
No, society doesn’t owe people whatever you’re pushing. Liberty > bullshit state intrusion to act as everyone’s nanny. No one has to agree with your bullshit concern or agree to nonsense impositions.
The concept of society is fundamentally opposed to your “everyone is responsible solely and completely for themself” ideal up there. I have a vested interest in people not throwing their life away.
There is precedence though. We age gate: nicotine, alcohol, gambling etc…
we shouldnt expect parents to be monitoring children 24/7. actually, as children get older they should be given freedoms, parents have the right to expect our society has some guardrails.
The guardrails already exist. Put parental controls on your kid’s devices. Done, solved. Block social media sites, monitor what they’re doing online. Don’t go making it mandatory for everyone to give social media companies more information than they already have.
A better comparison would be “let’s put a government mandated ID scanner on everyone’s liquor cabinet so that their kids can’t access it! Oh you don’t have kids? Too bad, still need that ID scanner!”
Maybe the focus should be on a free (government funded, ideally FOSS) parental controls software suite that makes blocking social media on all major platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux) simple and easy. Promote it to parents, and get them to parent, instead of deanonymizing the internet for everyone.
The bans are for under 16s, not just 7 year olds. Parents don’t control all internet activity for 15 years, at that age they are going to have some autonomy outside of the house.
I’m not sure there is a direct irl analog when it comes to controlling digital spaces, since they are personal by nature. and I think this is where the debate comes in.
Should parents be following their teenage child into every store to make sure they aren’t buying alcohol?
I get the concern with providing social media companies a government ID, I certainly would never give them one! I would just not use them. But they provide net negative value in my opinion so no loss.
I like the idea of FOSS parental controls.
But nobody does that, and the problem is getting worse.
What’s your answer if you can’t get a population to make better choices and people are being harmed by something?
I’m not saying there’s a right answer here, I am genuinely looking for alternatives on a societal level to address a proven health problem.
Past an education campaign, that’s a them problem. Imprisoning everyone would fix problems, too. Why don’t we do that?
Do you understand that most of all your comforts and life-saving blessings like our medical science, our transportation and infrastructure, and our logistical distribution systems and more come as a direct product of having enough intelligent, stable people to work through complex problems not just once, but every single day? What is the critical level before loss of this population becomes an existential threat to our survival and progress?
Cool catastrophizing. Humanity will cope. People have a fundamental freedom to fail by their own doing.
But children need to be raised and parents shouldn’t have carte blanche to fuck their kids up in the name of personal liberty.
Not to say it’s never the parents fault…