This coming Wednesday, Australia will enact a landmark social media ban that could become a blueprint for other countries to follow.
Starting Dec. 10, all Australians under the age of 16 will be banned from social media. The list of banned platforms currently includes TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch, but it’s due to grow.
Discord, Roblox, Pinterest, WhatsApp and many more were excluded from the ban, but will continue to be monitored. AI chatbots, which have been under significant scrutiny globally for lacking safety guardrails that have allegedly led to the death of some teens, are so far spared from the ban but previous reports claim that at least OpenAI’s Sora was on the regulator’s radar.
Children and teens are spending the most formative years of their lives glued to screens. In a recent study, a British youth charity found that 76% of teens spent a majority of their free time looking at screens, and that 34% had reported feeling high or very high feelings of loneliness.
Meanwhile, the negative mental and even physical health effects of social media (and its addictive design features) on teenagers and children have been well documented. In numerous studies, increased social media use among minors has been linked to depression, anxiety, attention deficit, body image issues and poor sleep quality. Australian regulators have also voiced concerns over social media enabled peer pressure and cyberbullying.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that the abundance of smartphones and social media during puberty, the most sensitive and malleable point in time for the human brain, has fundamentally rewired people born after 1995. Haidt’s book the “Anxious Generation” detailing this rewiring was reportedly a jumping-off point for Australia’s ban.
Here’s how the Australian social media ban will work:
The ban will be enforced by tech companies through age assurance methodologies like official identification and facial/voice analysis, or via account data like how long it’s been active, how often it interacts with fellow underage users, or whether activity (or rather, inactivity) coincides roughly with school hours.
If an account is deemed to belong to a minor, it will be deactivated. If a tech company is found to be letting underage accounts fly under the radar, the Australian government will slap it with fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, which is around $33 million.
Will the Australian social media ban be effective?
If you are wondering just how good these measures will be at keeping children away from social media, you are not alone. The BBC recently spoke to teens that have already outsmarted the age verification technology. Many teens that do get banned are also likely to resort to VPNs to evade it, similar to the citizens of other countries with social media bans who have done so in the past.
Many teens across the country are also revolting against the law. Two 15-year old Australians have even filed a constitutional challenge on the basis that the ban infringed on teens’ “freedom to communicate on political and government matters.”
The potential pitfalls will all be part of a global learning curve. The ban is the first of its kind and is already widely referred to as an experiment in preparation for similar initiatives across the world, some already in motion.
Denmark, Malaysia, Norway and the European Parliament have all recently either called for or announced specific plans to enact a ban similar to the Australian law.
A potential hurdle in the globalization of this ban is Big Tech, which is squarely unhappy with the ban, and that community’s biggest American ally is President Trump. Trump has yet to voice his opinion on this specific issue, but he has historically sided with Silicon Valley against what he and the industry deem to be discriminatory practices against American tech companies.
“I am not intimidated by big tech because I understand the moral imperative of what we’re doing,” Australia’s communications minister Anika Wells told the BBC earlier this week. “We’re pleased to be the first, we’re proud to be the first, and we stand ready to help any other jurisdictions who seek to do these things.”
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