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”.
Some good silver linings here, but what everyone needs to remember here is that nobody would be supporting this at all if facebook wasn’t intentionally predatory and bad for (all) people’s brains.
If regulators in Australia had a spine they would call for an end to those practices, and now that’s infinitely harder to do
Where?
The kids will move to less monitored platforms and even on things like YouTube, parental controls are now gone.
You need to have an account for parental controls to be applied to, kids aren't allowed an account, vis-a-vis, no more parental controls or monitoring for problem content.
My greedy motivation is to not interact with children on the Internet. I don't actually care what other people's children do on the Internet beyond that.
I think that's easier said than done. There are a lot of negatives associated with social media and some are easier to put restrictions on (say violent content) but I don't think we really have a good grasp of all the ways use is associated with depression for example. And wouldn't some of this still fall back to age restricted areas, kind of like with movies?
But yeah, it would be nice to see more push back on the tech companies instead of the consumers
Its a very simple fix with a few law changes.
The act of promoting or curating user submitted data makes the company strictly liable for any damages done by the content.
The deliberate spreading of harmful false information makes the hosting company liable for damages.
This would bankrupt Facebook, Twitter, etc within 6 months.
I assume you don't mean simply providing the platform for the content to be hosted, in that case I agree this would definetly help.
This one is damn near impossible to enforce for the sole reason of the word "deliberate", the issue is that I would not support such a law without that part.
I left out the hosting part for just that reason. The company has to activately do something to gain the liability. Right now the big social media companies are deliberately prioritizing harmful information to maximize engagement and generate money.
As for enforcement hosters have had to develop protocols for removal of illegal content since the very beginning. Its still out there and can be found, but laws and mostly due diligence from hosters, makes it more difficult to find. Its the reason Lemmy is not full of illegal pics etc. The hosters are actively removing it and banning accounts that publish it.
Those protocols could be modified to include obvious misinformation bots etc. Think about the number of studies that have shown that just a few accounts are the source of the majority of harmful misinformation on social media.
Of course any reporting system needs to be protected from abuse. The DMCA takedown abusers are a great example of why this is needed.
It would also be easily abused, especially since someone would have to take a look and check, which would already put a bottleneck in the system, and the social media site would have to take it down to check, just in case, which gives someone a way to effectively remove posts.
Oh definitely not easy, my point is that it’s even harder now
Why do you say it's harder now?
You can't use the think of the children line
There is literally nothing negative about this. Children will be exposed to less internet propaganda, and forums are generally much better with fewer children. Everyone wins.
And the suicide rate of queer and other marginalized kids will skyrocket. What's a few thousand dead kids in the name of protecting the children, right?
You are a fucking imbecile.
I really hope you know we can tell you're a child
Certainly at heart
No, it’s the lack of self-awareness that’s the giveaway
Wow I’m shocked you have no downvotes. I totally agree but Lemmy seems to hate internet restrictions, especially porn. Don’t come for their porn. They’ll destroy you.