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”.
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.
Ban it all, its a plague on civilization!
Although I agree that children should not be using social media at all, banning is not the solution. It should be for the parents to let their children use social media or not and if they should be using smartphones at all. If I were a parent I would give my kid a dumb phone just to call and sms (and maybe play snake). If they were to go on a trip, I would give a smartphone without any Appstore — just a dumb phone with parental restrictions, secure messenger like Signal (even Whatsapp if needed) to allow keep in touch with us and friends and any coordinators on that trip. If they were to use social media, it would only be on a Linux PC/Laptop.
Yeah, but at some point they will and then they’ll have to deal with all of the problems without anyone to help them manage the challenges. So either you parent them now or you just set them up to fail later. Take your pick.
Pretty vague but let me make the best out of it. I’d rather prefer my kids to physically explore the world and socialize rather than forming opinions of it and the society through an echo chamber on a 6 inch screen. It is more setting up to be a better human being (if not successful) than a failure. Most of social media is nothing more than following your favorite creators. Staying in contact with your friends is as easy as asking for their number or their home address so they can actually talk and socialize — you absolutely don’t need social media for it (you will only need, at most, Instant Messaging apps).
This results in segregation and bullying.
I mean there are other social activities — Sports, Reading clubs, etc. It is not as if the world didn’t socialize before social media. Bullying is not a new problem. Kids should be comfortable enough with their parents to share (which social media addiction doesn’t allow) that they are being bullied and not with random stranger online who doesn’t give a fuck anyways.
in 20 years Australia will be the source of all nobel prize winners :D
I mean, I am 100% pro-freedom of access and speech and all, but tbf anything that super murders social media is a net positive to the world at this point, until it’s less harmful and addictive.
Good. Time to consume quality media.
Great!
have a look at who proposed this change and you’ll see why it’s being done. it’s clear as day that this isn’t a win for anyone on the internet in Australia
This is a wildly popular measure in Australia.
Who’s next to be blocked?
I mean, now that the infrastructure and policies are in place, it’s only a matter of time.
Not every new law is a slippery slope that leads to something, this line of reasoning is literally a fallacy.
When we blocked youth from drinking, we didn’t inch towards making it illegal for people in their 30s did we? Worst we got was like 21 in some places.
I’m genuinely curious who you think will be blocked next?
People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.
Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.
Then other “undesirables” depending on who isn’t liked by whoever’s in charge.
And then the goalposts for what’s desirable will start to move.
And the scope won’t just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn’t have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.
I’d be down with banning everyone from social media
I’d be down with banning everyone from social media
i’d just be down for banning social media. Not sure how that would look though.
Nice
Props to Australia for creating a generation of kids with above average tech skills.
So Australia is using facial scanning to verify age, allowing everyone else to remain anonymous? That’s how it should be done.
Here in Florida MAGA HQ, I’m hearing calls to verify the identity of EVERYONE on the Internet, because that’s the ONLY way they can keep the kids off. I even heard one MAGA state legislator say that it’s no difference then carding people for buying alcohol. That’s how we keep booze out of the hands of kids, so it will work to keep the Internet out of their hands, too.
They want to kill Internet anonymity, just as a report comes out that the DoJ wants to pay bounties to people who report “anti-Trump behavior.”
This will go to the Supreme Court before we’re finished.
This comment reads like you believe only people under age 16 will be required to verify and anyone above won’t.
Yeah, I assumed. Are they verifying EVERY adult who wants to get on the Internet? That’s a problem.
How else will they know if the person is over 16, or just pretending to be over 16?
Gotta verify everyone, scan all of their faces.
Here in America, they want Driver’s Licenses, with names and addresses. There is no good faith in this effort. They want to tie every person to their online activity, and protecting kids is just an excuse, as usual.
Same thing in Australia
That sucks. My kid was in the Internet as a teen, and he hardly ever killed himself.
Ofcourse, it’d be impossible to only card minors…
Minors don’t have to prove they aren’t adults, adults have to prove they aren’t minors.
It’s for the kids, you Commie.
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?
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.
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.
Bingo.
It’s never about “the children.” It’s a way to normalize handing over biometrics and anonymity to an assumed authority to use the internet.
It’s always about control, control, control. It’s about tying real identities to online activity, then it’s about wholesale harvesting your secrets you didn’t even know you were keeping.
Then it’s yet another instrument to make sure you shut up and don’t step out of line or else.
First they take us away from our kids by necessitating that entire households need full time careers to survive.
Then as a substitute for education and actual parenting we’re so eager to offer up our childrens’ futures in the name of “protecting” them from the inevitable consequences of parentless households.
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.
I just expect that they dont end up making social media super cool
OMG! This is an outrage! What will the shareholders do!!! Make less money?! Never!!
Where are children supposed to meet and socialize? We already took away all their in-person spaces.
This. I feel so bad for teenagers.
They’re at a time in their lives where community and free association are vital to them, and yet since they’re not necessarily a profitable demographic, they’re kicked out and shunned by everywhere that’s not home or school, because all that’s left is “commercial spaces.”
People then wonder why teenagers flip off society and get up to no good, and then maybe wonder why we all turned out to be lonely adults with like maybe one long term friend if we’re lucky…
We already took away all their in-person spaces.
Arcades and malls have been dead for a long time. Capitalism took them away.
Everyone is missing incentive to go outside and hang out with real people, but that’s only because we have an alternative that fills you up and requires less effort. Our “socializing” is junk food, it only harms you.
Maybe more young people will start doing what kids have been doing since the dawn of time, and making their own communities and their own places to hang out and play and do active things together, face-to-face.
Most malls ban unaccompanied minors. And most places where kids used to hang out similarly discourage their presence. The death of third places is a well-documented phenomenon, one that goes back decades before anyone dreamed of social media. And while kids have been forming their own communities since the dawn of time, kids haven’t been raised in suburban hellscapes since the dawn of time. If you can’t drive. If there’s no way to your neighorhood except a giant highway that’s impossible to bike on, how in the hell are kids supposed to meet up with each other in person? Digital technologies are really the only way kids have to socialize nowadays. We’ve taken everything else from them.
Digital technologies are really the only way kids have to socialize nowadays.
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.
Arcades and malls have been dead for a long time.
Comment clearly made by someone who does not actually live in the country this discussion is about. Shopping centres are doing just fine.
(To be clear, I am firmly against the ban)
In Australia we have this thing called school, all the kids go there.
I have kids at ages affected by this ban. They don’t care about it at all. They already communicate with their friends via iMessage and FaceTime (both unaffected by the ban), they walk to school - so they often walk with friends. Theres a small skate park near the local shops they also walk to and hang out with friends sometimes, they also walk to the shops and practice basketball with friends at nearby ovals with practice courts regularly. They go to cinemas or big shopping centres (malls) with their friends sometimes - but have to be driven there anyway so parents have to coordinate.
TLDR: the ban doesn’t affect a lot of kids at all, and they socialize more or less the same as I did when I was a kid.
The only kids heavily affected are those with Snapchat, Tiktok, Facebook and other crap that they shouldn’t be on to begin with, and are getting a huge favour done to them by removing them for a few years.
They will probably increase their profits, by finding methods of marketing to kids at increased prices like the tobacco and alcohol industries have done for ages.
