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”.
“One parent said their daughter was completely addicted to social media” Well then fucking take away her phone. Get her a dumb phone. Install parental controls. Go to a therapist if yo have to. But nooooo the government has got to do everything for us incompetent fucks
I had this issue with a 15 year old. Phone gone, just an analog flippy, put in parental controls to prevent loading brain rot apps.
He’s happier for it.
Absolutely. My kids are 11 and 9 and some of their friends have phones. I might provide a dumb phone when they’re a bit older, but if they want a smartphone they’ll.have to wait until they get a job and buy one.
Get her a dumb phone. Install parental controls.
If this actually worked. I tried it once and it did not work at all. Platforms/apps don’t seem to respect the device settings at all.
You can block apps or give them a time limit
block apps
block all 150000000 apps on the app store?
Yes. You can enable password requirements to install them. iOS at least, don’t know about Android.
can i also block developer options and apk sideloading?
Instead of punishing these cancerous cess pool manipulative platforms, they punish the kids.
The youth deserves to be able to communicate and use the web the same as the rest of the population.
Regulations should be such that these platforms are neutral, non manipulative safe spaces where people can come together share content and discussions.
The overall stupidity of decision makers is incomprehensible to me. Literal shit sacks politicians that should all be thrown into a hole.
Beat of luck youth, my heart is with you. Hope Lemmy will be the answer(or some other decentralized platform)
I agree that the ban is not good regulation. However, that some kind of regulation of those platforms get started is hopefully a milestone which gets the stone rolling. I consider those good news because of that.
I am cynically enough that I doubt that regulators around the world will learn and adapt, like I would wish for, but one can hope.
As I said, we all deserve safe online spaces, especially the youth but not only. I’m failing to see how this is the road to that.
It’s Australia, been heading in a fascist direction for the longest time, and people think it’s fine because it’s institutionalized direction, not a orange clown lead occurrence
Seems like the same story all around the world. Scary shit
But how will the sites make money? Will someone please think of the lost profit!!!??
They enforce laws that would punish the platforms if they dont abide by them. In what way are they not punishing the platform?
There will be other platforms and kids that deserve to be able to communicate will figure it out.
All i have to say about the ban is “fucking finally”. Cant wait for it to be enforced in Europe.
50mil for a company like meta is chump change, and it is not proportional to being a teen in today’s world locked out of all main communication hubs.
Youth are not the ones who need to ‘figure it out’. Massive companies, market leaders and decisions makers should, but they are all trash.
Its a sensationalist solution that will surely backfire, it only address symptoms while ignoring the underlying many many problems.
Very short sighted
It is for the people to understand not to use such garbage, yes. If they cant figure it out, there is always text and phones.
If it’s chump change, then why are they adhering to the new rules? There is something that you seem to have missed. You don’t seem to understand the manipulation that the social media companies are capable of, which is why rules are needed.
It is for the people to understand not to use such garbage, yes. If they cant figure it out, there is always text and phones.
You contradict yourself. So the ban is not needed? You were saying it’s up to the youths to find alternatives.
What I was saying that these platforms are toxic, they have a destructive affect on all, and we all deserve something better.
A government ban never worked on anything and jts the stupidest and laziest of all options.
If they cant figure out how to use other communication alternatives, they don’t deserve to use them. I can see how i fudged my words.
Some good silver linings here, but what everyone needs to remember here is that nobody would be supporting this at all if facebook wasn’t intentionally predatory and bad for (all) people’s brains.
If regulators in Australia had a spine they would call for an end to those practices, and now that’s infinitely harder to do
Some good silver linings here
Where?
The kids will move to less monitored platforms and even on things like YouTube, parental controls are now gone.
You need to have an account for parental controls to be applied to, kids aren’t allowed an account, vis-a-vis, no more parental controls or monitoring for problem content.
As someone that grew up with an “unmonitored” internet. I can say that it was significantly more healthy than the profit driven “keep watching” algorithm that is all of social media today.
Yeah. I saw “two girls one cup” and “lemon party”. But, did I slowly have my perspective of reality changed by the 30 second videos I swiped on for hours at a time for days on end?
No, most of my time was spent learning about computers, “stealing” music, and chatting with my real life friends.
I don’t think a kid today can experience that internet anymore. It’s gone. But acting like “unmonitored” internet access is worse is pearl clutching and ignoring the fundamental problems the profit driven internet has created at the expense of societies mental health.
Kids will absolutely find another place to connect online in Australia. But, honestly, I think whatever that is will be healthier than the absolute brain rot that is profit driven social media.
We got to this point because parents think that kids need a monitored internet. Afraid of online predators. So it was passed off to corporations that learned how to systematically institute mental abuse in order to keep their apps open longer.
I just wanna say hi, and I remember those days, too.
For a long time, I couldn’t understand people saying they hate the Internet or their phone or anything like that, because I had been having a blast for so long and thought it was one of the most vibrant, fun, educational and useful part of my life that has taught me a lot.
But at some point I found myself scrolling the same site for hours, trying to tear my eyes off screen and telling myself that I wasn’t enjoying myself and that I should stop, but I just couldn’t. That’s when I finally understood.
I try to bring back intention to this. I think what I want to do online first before I do it – what topic to look for when I want to watch a video, what kind of news or discourse I want to read, what’s that on my mind that I want to share. Talking to my peers, I often feel like this kind of approach has long been lost to not thinking for yourself and wanting entertainment to just sort of happen to you, predict what you want, guess.
Big money figuring out the Internet has been a very bad thing.
Preach it.
It’s a bandaid. And just like previous attempts like this all this will do is make Australian kids better at circumventing the censorship or using an alternative website. Which, honestly, is probably a positive in and of itself. I’d much rather my kid be visiting some random forum type website (like I grew up with) then the absolute brain rot that is social media algorithms.
Seeing “lemon party” posted before the mods removed it definitely fucked me up less than the slop being fed into the brains of teenagers on social media today.
Wow I’m shocked you have no downvotes. I totally agree but Lemmy seems to hate internet restrictions, especially porn. Don’t come for their porn. They’ll destroy you.
all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat
I love how this sentence is just casually sprinkled there. So platforms are getting $50m fines if they do not implement “age verification”, but no problem if they fail to identify minors as such? Tells you everything about how they really care about protecting children.
That’s not how the law is structured.
Sites are required to implement reasonable measures.
If kids are being evaluated as 18, with no additional checks, that’s not reasonable and they’re risking the penalties.
We’re going to find out whether the regulator has much appetite to issue those penalties, but we will see I guess.
but no problem if they fail to identify minors as such?
it’s a new technology. it will probably take years to figure out how to do age-verification properly.
Or, hear me out, let’s not waste time developing useless and harmful surveillance technology.
None of this is required to safeguard children, and it does a bad job in its attempt - while doing a great job of scanning every user’s face and documents.
Parents should be responsible, educated and empowered with tools to control their kids’ activities online. Networks and mobile devices can relatively easily be configured to restrict and monitor activity, especially for young children where you might want to choose what to allow, rather than to block. There will be ways around them, but if that 1% is motivated enough and knows they shouldn’t, I think that’s fine.
it will probably take years to figure out how to do age-verification properly.
yeah, what i actually meant with this was that it will take years for platforms to figure out how to do age-verification properly without infringing on the privacy of its users.
not because it is complicated, but because it is a societal process and these are always slow as hell.
No offence, children, but this is great news.
As long as social media’s goals are commercial and have the effect of “digital cocaine”, keeping kids and adolescents out of it should be the default, worldwide.
Honestly it feels like you should regulate how Facebook can interact with children instead of the children’s access to it
That is why I think FB and others might been quietly lobbying for this solution. This way they can stll be predatory, as long as the kids pretend to be adult. Or just abuse adult users. The alternative, of not being evil, is not compatible with their business model. But it is the business model that should be banned, not socializing online by teenagers.
Tech giants are well known for lobbying against any legislation that gives them less freedoms to exploit markets and regulations of any kind that impact them - but this legislation that was targeted specifically at regulating them and removes a significant number of users - “this is suspicious, I think they might be the ones pushing it!”
There’s so many people in under this post trying to turn it into anything but what it is - legislation attempting to protect kids from the harms of social media. Which, again - are well documented.
That was my first reaction after processing the news–lets hold them accountable for hate, exploitation, etc.
If they can’t play nice they don’t get to do business at all.
just ban advertisements, it’s that easy
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Children lost access to social media? And nothing of value was lost.
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.
Do I think that social media should be restricted for children and teens? Sure.
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 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.
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…?
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.
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.
One parent said their daughter was “completely addicted” to social media
Have you tried parenting her?
Meh. It’s societal level issue. It should be handled at the societal level
Yah, a lot of people are raging at this but not providing any alternative to a studied and proven problem.
Yes. The societal level solution is the parents of the society choosing to do their jobs.
True, but there’s also a little more nuance.
For a social media ban to be effective without ostracizing individuals, it has to include the entire friend group.
As an analogy, if the kid’s friends all text each other, but your kid doesn’t have a phone, they miss out socially. They miss out on organized and impromptu hangouts. And they miss out on inside jokes that develop in the group chat. Over time they feel like more and more of an outsider even if the ready of the group actively tries to include them.
Parents who were can’t anymore, since there are no longer any parental controls.
“Give me your phone, give me your laptop” works pretty well.
My phone has a giant “setup parental controls” button. You can block specific websites using tools like PiHole that are easy to set up.
Lol ok just ask every parent who already can’t manage their children’s online habits to set up a pihole. I’m sure they won’t have any issues with that.
Are you insane? That sounds like work LOL.
How dare you imply that a parent should educate their children? Don’t you know how much they have to work hard already every single day to grow up the child no one forced them to have in the first place??
Just going to teach those kids its okay to break the law.
A lesson that is not incorrect. Depends on the law.
Make it a world wide ban to the age of 80
That’d be an effective total ban, because noone would want to be on a social media platform with entierly 80+ year olds. It’d be all corny minion memes.
I wonder if after a few years we can stop pretending like social media caused every bad problem in society and instead we can focus on the wealth inequality and climate change apathy that is causing people to no longer want to support our broken society?
We’re not pretending, this is an asinine view.
Two things can be true at once. It’s surprising how difficult a concept this is to grasp.
Social media accelerated this, it provides the vehicle in which to make culture wars the only thing at the front of people’s minds. It accelerated division and hate, as these improve platform attention.
Let’s not even talk about the death of critical thinking which just allows this to happen to greater effect.
Rising wealth inequality because a side effect of us not fighting a class war which is a side effect of us being completely focused on culture wars which is a side effect of social media.
There’s an entire chain here and social media underpins most of it’s acceleration
Cool
We’ll see in a few years if it was phones that made kids disinterested in society instead of society.
My money is on society being shit, and when I ask kids why they feel the way they do it’s because society is shit, but let’s not listen and keep pretending
Agreed man, kids feel hopeless cos they genuinely don’t see a future for themselves and they understand they will never achieve the same level of success or comfort that their parents did. Like, sure social media is shit but the ban feels like people pearl clutching instead of actually reckoning with why the youth in Australia is growing up so troubled. It starts with having a conversation with u18s instead of dictating to them. IMO? Lower the voting age to 14 and create a youth parliament. If we genuinely believe in democracy should we not expand it to include everyone our laws affect?
hmm I thikk a lot of the apathy you speak of comes from social media influencing youth
Populism increases where people get better access to the internet. This is surprisingly well established because it’s easy to measure.
Of course wealth inequality and climate change are the bigger issues, but social media gets people to believe it’s actually minority groups behind the effects of these issues.
australia should really became a socialist country. seriously!
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Ban it all, its a plague on civilization!
Ham Radio Time
Damn kids with their hunky dory gadgetry them should touch grass and live outdoors like good ol days /s
