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”.
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?
Ask any teacher and they’ll tell you that A) kids are getting dumber and more behind academically every year and B) It’s because of phones/social media. When you have 8th graders reading at a 3rd grade level, like over half of the class, that’s a problem. It starts when irresponsible parents shove an iPad in front of their kid at 2 years old and since most parents can’t be bothered to do the right thing (like most people) laws like this are necessary.
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!