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”.
The ban also affects everyone who isn’t willing to undergo the age check.
Kids will find a way around is. They’ll move to fediverse, and the cooler kids will still hang around the mainstream platforms thanks to their older friend, sibling or cool uncle.
The Fediverse is social media. Wouldn’t instances be required to do age verification? I mean, I guess that’d only be enforceable on Australian instances, but it seems like the whole world is going in that direction.
Exactly, people keep talking about VPNs, but where will we connect to if the whole world goes to shit?
Canada is trying pass this nonsense.
Kill bill s-209
Lemmy requires you to be over 18 to open an account in Australia now.
It’s not designed to be perfect, it’s designed to influence a population towards better practices. If it even makes just 10% of young people grow up a little less alone and less asocial, it will be a success. That success can be built on and maybe in time we can push cultures in regions to not want to use social media as a substitute all the time. There is a very real effect how laws influence the attitudes of people.
It’s not designed at all. Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.
The social media companies all looked at the free, government mandated access to user biometrics and complied.
Do I think that social media should be restricted for children and teens? Sure. Do I think this if going to go about as well as the 2007 porn filter that the government tried to implement? Absolutely.
Okay, I agree and I am not exactly cheering for government telling anyone what they can and can’t look at… but what’s the alternative here? I am cautiously siding with the idea behind the regulation if not the execution, but so far nobody has suggested what we do about a problem that is real, proven and studied and is leading to a worse world.
I’m being serious here and in good faith. Should we do anything?
Am I in the wrong here for thinking we need to do something about this? Or is everyone just okay with whatever the end-result will be from subsequent generations of people growing up anxious, depressed, lacking social skills, without relationship partners? We already have “loneliness” being considered a global health risk, and it’s tied directly to digital communication habits. I would ask you or anyone here to just type “research on health social media teens” in google. Just try it and see how much work has gone into studying this problem.
yeah we need to do something about it, and people seem to be trying their best to come up with bullshit arguments against it. “people will find ways around it” and then saying not to bother etc i mean, people under 18 sneak into clubs and get beer… or maybe fake an ID and hit a pub… or get an older friend to do something for them… it doesnt stop us as a society holding a view that under age drinking isnt great, and we make some effort to enforce that even if its not perfect.
Wait, do you honestly believe that drinking age laws like the US has leads to less alcoholism, less underage drinking and less deaths from teenagers overdosing on alcohol?
Are you out of your mind?
do i think that drinking age laws restrict access to drinking? well, yes, i do. if i consider the impact of going from “drinking age laws existing” to “no laws existing at all”… would i be surprised to see a surge in drinking sales for minors? no. its not magic, and it doesn’t fix society issues, but that doesn’t make drinking age laws wrong either.
If that occurred that would only conclusively prove an abrupt non-linear change may be bad with a law that impacts so many people and aspects of society…?
It’s more than pearl-clutching though.
Kids dependency on social is a genuine social problem. Any parent that cares about their kids is deeply concerned about this.
I don’t really buy the “govt access to biometrics” angle. These companies have all the biometrics they could ever want.
The ban is going to be easy to circumvent technologically, but not so much socially. At this very moment, being the evening of 10 December, families around Australia are having conversations about social media and the problems it can cause.