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, but digital technologies are causing a lot of harm. I thought I would prepare for the discussion with a couple links to some suggestive studies, but there have been so many rigorous studies and scientific papers on the harm of social media on young minds that I don’t even know where to start. Denying it is like denying climate change at this point.
And maybe my take is becoming radical, but I don’t think we should be looking at it in terms of a youth/adult problem. There are likely far more adults addicted to the junk-food substitute that is arguing on twitter or making separate identities to fabricate ideas on message boards who have completely lost their handle on reality. Relationship rates are plummeting, people are so lonely it’s being declared a health emergency.
Like, seriously… what should we do? I know the popular answer is to attack the social media companies and “regulate” them but the problem is more fundamental than advertising, it’s that we’re not evolved to socialize with words on screens, seeing all these thoughts and feelings and unchecked wild, emotion-provoking, short-attention-span messages isn’t good for us. It may make you laugh spending an evening scrolling dumb memes, but if you do something like that every night, you’re missing time that you could be spending improving your life, your health, your relationships and so on.
And replacing those evolved drives with something else, something alien to us.
As a millennial I honestly just miss how something like MySpace was basically a micro blog, and otherwise, we just chatted with friends-only programs like Yahoo! Messenger / MSN / ICQ/ whatever. There wasn’t really some motive to “connect” you to a million “randos” and make you slavishly compete for their fickle approval.
Growing up in a weird kinda rural/suburb hybrid area, the Internet was my gateway to the world outside of school.
It definitely had its problems and drama, but mostly we chatted with people we actually knew (Yahoo chatrooms notwithstanding. Yikes lol) and didn’t care about what was “trending” across the world. Algorithms didn’t control and force perception of our reality then.
It was literally just about enabling communication.
Outside of that, there was also a much better culture of maintaining privacy and anonymity online, and that everything you see online is BS until proven otherwise.
Of course, this was before techbros decided we should use our real identity everywhere for all to see.
Nowadays it seems like every service is about using your friends as bait to connect you to some hivemind of toxic manipulation to farm you for ads. It encourages creating cults and scams and brainrot bullshit because it’s all about harvesting people’s already-strained attention for profit, instead of just being a communication platform.
TL;DR: I remember the Internet as a place to log in and hang out, then log off, when meeting with friends outside of school was a logistical nightmare reserved for things like birthday parties if you were lucky.
A lot of damage is already done, but I think if we obliterated the Facebooks and Instagrams and TikToks of “social media” and instead it focused on augmenting existing relationships rather than siloing people as a billion lonely socially-starved individuals in a crowd, we’d see it much differently…
Would you be in favor of nationalizing the internet in order for this to work? That is, no more commercial entities controlling access, no more media sites allowed to use algorithmic or artificially intelligent systems to influence the viewing habits of users, no more ads working their way into everything you see and do, no more sensationalized headlines and distracting video titles competing for attention because it will all be demonetized by law. (ideally, in a world of spherical, frictionless cows.)
In the US the government used to have standards and regulations for things like if a kid’s show could be exclusively used to market toys, or that news stations had to follow a fair press agreement. The reason for this was all access to television had to go through airwaves, and the broadcasters for those airwaves were US government property. All broadcasters had to follow a host of rules and guidelines. This is why cable news was such a world-changing thing. Cable was privately owned.
This also has the side effect of the government controlling the news narrative, and I think we have seen enough of that.
I just don’t really know if there’s a good solution here, for a problem that has to have a solution or we all suffer.