On November 21, the Albanese government stated in a media release that it had officially ‘introduced world-leading legislation to enforce a minimum age of 16 years for social media.’ The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 was intended to ‘deliver greater protections for young Australians during critical stages of their development.’
It was clear that the government had little intention to subject the bill to much parliamentary, or public scrutiny. They had, after all, favourable polling figures for a social media ban for children under the age of 16, with a YouGov poll conducted over November 15-21 from a sample of 1,515 respondents revealing a 77 per cent approval rate. Australians were given a day to lodge submissions but even then, 15,000 submissions were received airing various concerns. A mere four-hour Senate committee hearing was granted. On November 28, the Bill passed in the Senate by 34 votes to 19. Crossbench senators and some opposition MPs expressed their indignation at the speed with which the bill had been rushed.
There is much evidence suggesting that harms do arise to various members of the community from using social media. But instead of focusing on the training, teaching and instruction on how best to use and engage such platforms, enlisting Big Tech in this effort, the Albanese government has preferred prohibition and moralising. ‘The law,’ states the November 21 release, ‘places the onus on social media platforms – not parents or young people – to take reasonable steps to ensure these protections are in place.’ If the platforms do not comply, they risk fines of up to A$49.5 million.
Even before it passed both houses of parliament, there were reservations aplenty about the viability, let alone the wisdom, of such a scheme. In May, documents uncovered under Freedom of Information by Guardian Australia revealed much worry from those in the Ministry of Communications. ‘No countries have implemented an age verification mandate without issue,’ states one document with dour severity.
Even that staunch advocate for restricting supposedly offensive material on digital platforms, the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, openly questioned the government’s own assumptions on any confirmed link between social media use and mental harm. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live, she was confident that the argument ‘is not settled at all’. With such views, it is remarkable that the government has not publicly released the findings of Delia Rickard’s review of the Online Safety Act before submitting the bill.
Some researchers in this field have gone so far as to accuse the Australian government of raiding the larder of literature for political convenience. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford, took issue with the way his co-authored Nature Communications paper from 2022 entitled ‘Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media’ was cited by the Australian Parliament as ‘support’ for this ‘sweeping policy’. The research, he explained in a LinkedIn post, revealed ‘that individual young people respond to social media differently based on various personal and environmental factors. We explicitly advocated for targeted interventions that could minimize harms while preserving benefits.’
This is certainly borne out by Inman Grant’s own findings on the subject. She goes so far as to point out that LGBTQ+ and First Nations groups ‘feel more themselves online than they do in the real world’. She proposes not ring fencing the sea if you are going to teach children to swim. Educate them instead. (The social media law exempts YouTube, Messenger Kids, Kids Helpline and Google Classroom, but that hardly counts.)
'Ultimately, will this law even do what it purports to, namely, protect children from harm occasioned by being online?'
Australian parliamentarians opposing the legislation also drew on other concerns. Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan noted how the legislation lacked a definition of ‘parent’, suggesting their replacement by government rather than assisting them in deciding how to deal with children and social media accounts. ‘Social media’, on the other hand, was defined to include all apps involving two or more end users, thereby limiting the use of alternative platforms used by young people, namely Strava and Deputy. Most strikingly, the threat to privacy and restrictions on rights had ‘not been properly scrutinised in the inadequate and truncated legislative process.’
The debate on restricting minors on the premise of protecting them online is a febrile one. In the European Union, the debate rages on how to reconcile the use of age verification technology with the privacy protections guaranteed by the General Data protection Regulation (GDPR). France has been particularly forthright on the issue, with President Emmanuel Macron declaring that minors needed to be protected from the ‘jungle’ that is the digital realm. It remains unclear how successful the pilot age verification system being used by the French regulator since 2023 will work in this regard, though it will involve the use of a gateway provided via the social security system.
In the United States, laws such as Utah’s Social Media Regulation Act, S.B. 152, place the onus on parental power to control what their children see and who engages with them online. This involves the age verification of Utah residents seeking to maintain or create a social media account. How effective this is remains to be seen, given the extensive circumvention of such restrictions through the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
Ultimately, will this law even do what it purports to, namely, protect children from harm occasioned by being online? For one, it uses what the Digital Industry Group Inc argues is a ‘20th Century response to 21st Century challenges’. In adopting such a prohibitionist method, children may well find themselves moving into ‘dangerous, unregulated parts of the internet’.
History also shows that children become convenient crutches of moral outrage and concern when it comes to the making of public policy. ‘Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians,’ wrote the technology mogul Elon Musk to a post from Albanese. You don’t have to agree with the man’s other views to see his point.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.
Main image: (Getty Images)