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Australia is going ahead with its plan to ban young Australians from having social media accounts. A late-night session of the final Senate sitting of the year — and perhaps this Parliament — passed the bill, meaning that the ban may come into effect as soon as the end of next year.
For a widely popular bill backed by both major parties, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 faced surprisingly fierce opposition. An unusual coalition of the crossbench, a few renegade Coalition MPs, the majority of experts on teen social media use, childrens’ and mental health advocacy groups, Elon Musk and thousands of people who made a submission to a snap inquiry all came together to voice their concerns — to no avail.
In a press conference on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese highlighted the ban among the many bills passed by Parliament yesterday as one of his government’s key achievements. “As a direct result of our legislation … parents can have a different discussion with their young ones, a different discussion that will result in better outcomes and less harm for young Australians,” he said.
It’s good that Albanese seems invigorated by the bill’s passage because passing the law was the easy part of the process. The hard part comes now: the matter of making a social media ban work in a way that helps young Australians. Here are some of the big questions to be answered over the next year or so.
The federal government’s law left the decision about what “reasonable steps” are out of the law, instead leaning on the eSafety commissioner to determine guidelines.
One of the major influences on these recommendations will be the government’s trial of the methods and technologies that companies can use to determine users’ ages (known as “age assurance” methods). This will look at everything from biometric analysis to using non-government IDs like credit cards to understand how well they work in this Australian context.
This is where the rubber begins to hit the road. For all the support for the teen social media ban and other policies that depend on determining people’s age online (such as taking more steps to stop kids from accessing online adult material), the reason that it’s not a widely implemented policy globally is because, practically, it will involve trade-offs for privacy, ease-of-use and effectiveness for all Australians.
It will give us answers to the questions: how well does facial analysis work for figuring out people’s ages? Is it easy to fool? Will it work on most people’s phones? Is it less effective for certain racial populations in Australia?
Politicians love to say we’ll figure it out but it’ll be great. This trial, and its subsequent guidelines that recommend which methods companies should use, means the government has to start making the hard decisions that, according to the man running the trial, only politicians and policymakers can make.
A major question that has already dogged the government pertains to the definition of “social media”. The bill’s definition is exceedingly broad — there’s a case to be made that the majority of apps and software that children use could qualify, considering pretty much everything has a social aspect these days — but the government has stressed it will exclude things like gaming, messaging services, and other platforms whose primary purpose is education.
This opens up what will likely be an ongoing line of inquiry: what’s in and what’s out? The government’s own analysis estimates 100 social media companies will need to comply with the law. It starts with big ones like YouTube (out), but then soon gets onto other, less popular but still widely used platforms that are each unique. Is Telegram, the messaging app with social features that is home to Australian neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists, okay to use? What about Kick, a more toxic livestreaming alternative to Twitch? Or Tumblr? Yubo? Gas? The list goes on.
As I’ve bleated about before, a lack of rigour underlying this policy means that there’s really nothing to fall back on when deciding, so every inclusion and exclusion becomes a completely subjective decision by the government.
It’s reasonable to expect the government will treat it like the news media bargaining code: suggest it’s in dialogue with these companies, then warn them but rarely (or never) use the stick. But this does shift the onus from the companies onto the government to respond to any bad behaviour and potential harm on social media apps that aren’t doing much to stop children from getting on their platforms. Suddenly, the question is: why haven’t you stopped this?
It might surprise you but social media companies aren’t that upset about the principle of limiting accounts for children under 16. All the major ones have a de facto social media ban for 13-year-olds, so this increase isn’t that drastic. Talk about Facebook shutting up shop in Australia is preposterous.
What they are upset about is the rushed process of the government’s teen social media ban policymaking because they have to take this law, being created on the fly, and actually comply with it. From their perspective, it’s about figuring out what they need to do to reach the “reasonable steps” so they don’t get fined $50 million.
One major swing point is about how confident social media companies think they need to be about a user’s age to have taken “reasonable steps”.
It’s important to understand how big tech’s incentives are different to the government’s. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t elected by Australian voters. He doesn’t have to make sure the steps Facebook and Instagram take to figure out your age are popular. He just wants to avoid breaking the law. This difference in objectives is how we might end up with some unpopular implementation that looks different to what the government promised and hopes will happen.
How will your average punter feel when he’s locked out of his Facebook account trying to access his local footy club group when he’s late for a game and he is told to either scan his face or upload his passport? Maybe he doesn’t want to do either. Maybe he’d be okay if there were some less invasive options, but the company doesn’t want to make things easier, it just wants to not get fined.
The difference between the teen social media ban being a seamless policy that doesn’t bother most Australians and something that is onerous and invasive depends on just how scared social media companies are that they’ll be pinged for not doing enough.
How does it actually affect young Australians?
There’s a case to be made that the social media ban will be less seismic in impact than predicted. There are heaps of carve-outs; it only restricts social media companies from letting children have accounts — it does nothing to stop them from using TikTok or YouTube Shorts without logging in. Kids will adapt and supplement their existing habits with new ones (moving their group chats from Snapchat to WhatsApp, for example). And, as the Prime Minister keeps stressing, teens will find ways around it.
What remains to be seen is how committed the government is to making it work as they promised. If it sets a low bar for the “reasonable steps” and doesn’t enforce its law for all but the biggest platforms, we could end up in a situation where life continues pretty much the same. Yes, kids aren’t supposed to be on social media, but it’s a kind of wink-wink-nod-nod to everyone involved — essentially, don’t make it so obvious that we, the government, are forced to do something about it.
(As an aside, if you want to get a sense of how much this ban is a complete reversal in the government’s previous approach to trying to regulate, rather than ban, social media for kids: last night the government also passed some long-awaited Privacy Act amendments which included a mandate to develop stronger privacy requirements for children by online providers — which, before the ban passed, would be been envisaged as affecting predominantly social media companies).
What will be the impact when children are suddenly cut off from the online accounts and communities they’ve leaned on? If social media companies don’t need to design their platforms for use by children, only to keep them out, what happens to the children who continue to use these platforms as we all expect they will? What happens to the kids who get into trouble online, as they have before, but feel like they can’t reach out for help because they weren’t supposed to be using social media? What about the diffuse impact of all the people who lose this connectedness that isn’t or can’t be solved by the prime minister’s repeated urging to go play footy or netball?
It’s much harder to show the impact of the absence of something — you can never really say for sure that someone’s life would have been better, perhaps even saved, if a counterfactual doesn’t exist — but it’s not impossible. There needs to be a serious commitment to understanding the impact of a policy that the government has stressed is a “world-first”. It’s a much nicer way to say that we’ve made Australian children into guinea pigs.
This is why the bill’s passing is not the end, but the start of the process. The Albanese government has stared down all the opposition to the policy and stayed steadfast in its claims that this is the best thing for young Australians. It is now its responsibility to prove it.
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