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”.
Discord isn’t covered by the ban surprisingly enough despite being one of the platform more ripe for exploitation. I get that you’d want kids to be able to DM each other and voice chat but Discord is closer to a forum than it is to say, Signal.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up on the ban list later on.
That is a lot of drug addicts to cut off at once.
Dw guys we’ve tested it and it’s a certified bad idea. You’re welcome
No offence, children, but this is great news.
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)
But how will the sites make money? Will someone please think of the lost profit!!!??
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
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.
Good. Now the U.S please.
“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
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.
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.
This is a solution for people who don’t need a solution because they’re already great parents.
The vast majority of parents aren’t going to take their kids’ phones away.
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.
I setup my wife’s old Android phone to be super locked down via parental controls. Only approved apps, no installing apps, time limited etc. set it up so my kids can use it on days when we need them to zombify for a bit in the afternoons
Its kinda mind blowing how YouTube Kids is their go to and they don’t move to any other apps until they’ve run out of time on it (family had already let the cat out of the bag about the existence of YouTube so I had to limit rather than block) and we still have had to block a number of concerning channels they kept watching. Its crazy how they’ll just zombify staring at YouTube but then for the age appropriate games they’re so much more engaged and actually seem to have a healthier interaction. Its also sad how some of the content I see the kids watching on YouTube Kids has writing and direction about on par with Disney’s current crop of age appropriate shoes for 3-6 year olds (and from what I’ve seen Nickelodeon isn’t much better right now). My kids primarily watch PBS Kids and a handful of shows we carefully selected on DVD because we want to minimize the brain rot (as well as minimize annoyance for us)
can i also block developer options and apk sideloading?
The way I see it, if my kids start finding ways to circumvent parental controls we should be able to have some frank discussions about what the parental controls would be setup for
should be able to
well good luck then :)
That’s not really a thing on iOS, and if they figure that out anyways then enjoy the arms race
and if they [children] figure that out anyways then enjoy the arms race
yeah that’s what i was talking about in my previous comment. today, there’s no simple way to just enable “parental control” on an android phone.
and i’m not paying these stupid overpriced apple phones, no way.
Children lost access to social media? And nothing of value was lost.
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
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.
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 don’t get it. This “ban” is going to last days or hours before the kids just find an app that does’t check their age.
It also will allow the big platforms to drop any pretence that their users need to be protected and take the gloves off with their algorithms to increase engagement to replace the kids.
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.
Maybe (OK, this won’t happen, but I like to imagine it would), someone will figure out how to use one of the hundreds of chat programs that are out there, github or wherever, and get that going. Still able to be social with their group, without having all the bullshit social decline that comes from using the big chat platforms.
australia should become a socialist country. seriously!
