Australia has passed a law to prevent children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms.
The bill, which the government calls a “world leading” move to protect young people online, was approved in the Senate on Thursday with support from both of the country’s major parties. The lower house of Parliament had passed it earlier in the week.
“This is about protecting young people — not punishing or isolating them,” said Michelle Rowland, Australia’s communications minister. She cited exposure to content about drug abuse, eating disorders and violence as some of the harms children can encounter online.
The legislation has broad support among Australians, and some parental groups have been vocal advocates. But it has faced backlash from an unlikely alliance of tech giants, human rights groups and social media experts.
Critics say there are major unanswered questions about how the law will be enforced, how users’ privacy will be protected and, fundamentally, whether the ban will actually protect children.
What’s in the law?
The law requires social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to verify the age of users and prohibit those under 16 from opening accounts.
It does not specify which platforms the ban will cover — that will be decided later — but the government has named TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram and X as sites it is likely to include.
Three broad categories of platforms will be exempt: messaging apps (like WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger Kids); gaming platforms; and services that provide educational content, including YouTube. Those 15 and under will also still be able to access platforms that let users see some content without registering for an account, like TikTok, Facebook and Reddit.
Ms. Rowland, the communications minister, said the restriction on creating accounts, rather than on content more broadly, would mitigate harms associated with online life — like “persistent notifications and alerts” that could affect young people’s sleep and ability to focus — while limiting the law’s effect on the broader population. And supporters of the ban say that delaying children’s exposure to the many pressures of social media would allow them the time to develop a more “secure identity,” while taking pressure off parents to police their children’s online activity.
But digital media experts and some parental groups have said that the patchwork nature of which platforms will and won’t be included in the ban makes it unclear what exactly it is meant to protect children from.
A more effective approach would be to address the problem at its root by requiring social media companies to do a better job of moderating and removing harmful content, said Lisa Given, a professor of information sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne.
The new law “does not protect children against potential harms on social media,” Professor Given said. “In fact, it could create other problems by excluding young people from helpful and useful information, as well as opening up a number of privacy concerns for all Australians.”
How will it be enforced?
That’s not yet entirely clear. The bill states that social media companies must take reasonable steps to assess users’ ages, but the platforms are left to decide how to do that. Those that don’t comply could be fined up to 49.5 million Australian dollars (about $32 million).
In a measure that was added in response to privacy concerns, the law states that providing a government-issued identity document cannot be the only option social media platforms give users for verifying their age.
Other methods the government has suggested include so-called age assurance technologies, like using a facial scan to determine a user’s approximate age, or estimating it based on online behavior.
Some of those technologies are already being tried. Facebook, for example, is teaching A.I. to estimate users’ ages by looking at things like the birthday messages they receive. The Australian government is conducting its own trial of such tools, and the results will inform how it defines the “reasonable steps” that social media platforms must take.
But Daniel Angus, the director of the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, said it was unrealistic for the government to base its law, even in part, on that kind of technology, which is often driven by A.I., largely still in development and in no way foolproof. He added that “there are huge, huge privacy concerns around these, huge tracking concerns. All of this allows, in some way, the ability to track users online.”
What has the response been?
Polls show that the majority of Australians favor the ban. Parental groups have been broadly supportive — although some say the law does not go far enough and should cover more platforms.
Some parents who blame social media for their children’s deaths have been particularly vocal campaigners for a ban, such as Kelly O’Brien, who said that her 12-year-old daughter, Charlotte, died by suicide after experiencing bullying on and off social media.
“Giving our kids these phones, we’re giving them weapons, we’re giving them the world at their fingertips,” Ms. O’Brien told an Australian news outlet.
Social media companies have criticized the law. Elon Musk, the owner of X, said on the platform that it “seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said the proposal “overlooks the practical reality of age assurance technology, as well as the views of a majority of mental health and youth safety organizations in the country.”
(LinkedIn argued that it should not fall within the scope of the ban because, in part, it “simply does not have content interesting and appealing to minors.”)
Some commentators have described the ban as performative. “The primary use of this legislation — let’s not pretend otherwise — is to make it look like our Parliament is taking a stand,” Annabel Crabb, a top journalist at Australia’s national broadcaster, wrote.
Human rights groups have also raised concerns.
The post How Australia Will (or Won’t) Keep Children Off Social Media appeared first on New York Times.
