David Inserra
At the end of last year, the Australian government banned minors from having social media accounts. The law required a broad range of platforms to “take reasonable steps” to prevent minors from opening or keeping their accounts, including a range of age-assurance and verification requirements.
Unfortunately for the Australian government (and fortunately for most kids), the implementation of a massive ban is going about as well as many critics predicted. Kids are largely avoiding enforcement, with 61 percent of kids ages 12–15 who had accounts before the ban still having access to at least one of them.
According to the most recent compliance report by the Australian eSafety Commission, the organization responsible for enforcing the ban, many kids are able to game the system by changing their appearance to look older and fool age-estimation software. Others have used false IDs or VPNs to maintain their access to their accounts.
Also known as teenagers being teenagers.
Still other minors, like 15-year-old Noah Jones, are suing the government for infringing on their right to free expression. Noah and most of his friends have managed to avoid the social media ban. Noah is also backed by his mother, Renee, who raised her son with responsible rules around the use of technology—including no devices in the bedroom, phones being locked up at night, and parental access to children’s passwords. Kids like Noah should give us hope for the next generation that is willing to fight for their rights.
Unfortunately, while many kids in Australia have maintained their accounts, many have not been so lucky. At least 4.7 million accounts have been disabled, and hundreds of thousands of new accounts have been blocked.
A recent poll found that about 60 percent of parents reported positive behavioral outcomes following the ban, and about 40 percent reported negative impacts—and these results are likely too rosy toward the ban, as Australian adults were largely supportive of the ban to begin with. But even as they are, the results showcase the darker side of the social media ban: 27 percent of parents reported that their kids moved to alternative or less regulated platforms, and 25 percent reported that their child was less socially connected or creative.
While no platform is perfect, many major platforms offer a variety of tools to support younger users, including parental controls, algorithms, and policies that aim to reduce certain types of potentially harmful content from reaching children. Pushing kids to smaller, less kid-focused, and more private platforms and corners of the internet generally don’t offer these tools, meaning children are now seeing more potentially harmful content and are in more danger of online abuse and grooming.
And for many kids, social media is a place to connect with others. For those kids with a fractured home life or a difficult time at school, social media presents an opportunity to find support. It also creates opportunities for kids to encounter others who share their interests and hobbies. From serious topics of faith, family, sexuality, and politics to joyful bonding over video games, sports, or literature, Australian kids are losing community and connection.
The inevitable objection to these harms imposed by the ban is that they are outweighed by the positive outcomes many parents are reporting. There is no doubt that placing some limits on technology use likely will be positive for many kids and families, including more in-person interaction, being more engaged at home, and better parent-child relationships.
But parents were already best positioned to set the rules for responsible technology use. As illustrated by Noah and his mother, Renee, adults can and should parent their children online. With engaged parents determining when and how kids are online, kids can still benefit from being online while avoiding overuse. Just as parents are responsible for the balance of food a child eats and the mix of friends they hang out with, parents are also responsible for the technologies their children use. And that will look different to each family. But the social media ban is trying to force every child offline, even if that is not what is right for them.
In other words, the benefits of improved in-person relationships that parents report from the social media ban were always achievable, even without a ban. But the ban is imposing harms on all Australian kids (not to mention the various harms to all users, including adults) that cannot be as easily remedied.
It’s no wonder that many kids are looking for ways around the ban. It is also not surprising that the Australian government is choosing to reinforce its faltering approach. The eSafety Commission is launching investigations into tech platforms for not cracking down hard enough. And Australia is begging other countries to follow in its footsteps, some of which are already doing so, despite the clear challenges and harms of its approach. While such a hard-and-fast ban would be constitutionally problematic in the US, that has not stopped federal and state policymakers from pursuing similar policies, ranging from a curfew on minor social media use to “age-appropriate design” requirements, as well as various age-verification proposals.
The government and tech companies will never be good parents. Rather than pursuing bans and other policies that make the government and companies responsible for children, policymakers should pursue answers that educate and empower kids and parents.