(Article image made with AI, article written without.)
Australia has produced “world-leading” legislation to introduce a social media age limit.
The federal government has announced that there will be a minimum age limit of 16 years old to use social media platforms in proposed laws. Social media platforms will be granted a 12-month period to implement these changes. There will be no exceptions to the rule, like parental permission for underage users or for existing underage users’ accounts. There will also be no penalties enforced on users disregarding the ban, so the responsibility of upholding this ban will be placed on social media platforms themselves.
This ban is in response to both the rising cases of suicide in young people in Australia as a result of cyberbullying and sextortion, and the risk of online radicalisation into extremist groups and schools of thought.
Security intelligence expert Paul Raffile has been vocal in discussing financial sexortion schemes which have “surged by %18,000 in the last 2 years”. Nearly all of the victims Raffile has encountered were contacted via platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. “Instagram is the world’s largest directory of teens for scammers and predators. Criminals choose Instagram because of its lack of privacy safeguards.” Raffile highlights the tragic outcomes, including at least 39 teen suicides linked to these crimes: “this is a public safety emergency.”
In October, the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Mike Burgess, called the internet “the world’s most potent incubator of extremism.” Social media users can be radicalised in much shorter time frames compared to the pre-social media world.
“Social media allows extremist ideologies, conspiracies, dis- and misinformation to be shared at an unprecedented scale and speed,” he said.
Earlier this year, the South Australian government handed down one of the most detailed examinations of a possible social media ban, completed by former High Court chief justice Robert French. French noted “a third of girls and a quarter of boys [included in the review] had been contacted by a stranger online, and one in five had been sent unwanted inappropriate content that was violent or pornographic.”
“He concluded, while a state-level ban would be constitutional, the challenges of compliance and enforcement made it much more desirable for a nationally led ban.”
Opponents of the proposed social media age restriction argue that ultimately the ban is too simplistic a solution to effectively address the complexities of online safety. Over 120 experts, academics, and youth organisations recently signed an open letter asserting that such a measure does not adequately tackle the risks associated with social media use.
Dr. Jasmine Fardouly, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, stresses that the success of any ban hinges on reliable age verification processes, which would need to be implemented globally in order to be effective.
Scarlett Smout, a Research Associate at the Matilda Centre, highlights the absence of young Australians’ voices in these discussions. “Albanese’s comments focus on the concerns of parents, but studies show that parents and adolescents have differing perspectives on the mental health and wellbeing impacts of social media, with parents’ perspectives more negative than that of adolescents.”
Unsurprisingly, social media platforms are strongly against the ban, too. Ajit Mohan, President of Snapchat for the Asia Pacific region, suggests that age verification is more effectively managed at the device level rather than by individual platforms in an article by The Guardian. Mohan emphasises that this is an industry-wide issue that requires collective solutions. “We genuinely think that it’s an industry-wide problem, and it’s for the industry to find an answer to it.”
Snapchat’s Global Head of Safety, Jacqueline Beauchere, believes that decisions regarding social media access should be made by families. “The age might be 13, the age might be 16, but not every 13-year-old is the same, and not every 14, 15, 16-year-old is the same,” she said. “They have a certain degree of a maturity level that’s associated with where they are in life.”
Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, told The Guardian; “the idea that somehow you can sort of force the industry to be in a technological place that it isn’t, is probably a bit misunderstood in terms of where the industry is,” but has confirmed Meta will comply with the legislation.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters that there would be a review of the details of the ban after it commences. “This is world-leading legislation and we want to make sure we’ve got it right… we think there will be some, of course, exclusions and exemptions as well for this, to make sure that there aren’t unintended consequences — but we think this is absolutely the right thing.”
The ban will be enforced with age verification technology, the details of such being explored in a $6.5 million age assurance pilot which will be executed through the government’s communications department, without the participation of social media companies.
Bridget Gannon, Communications assistant secretary, who is responsible for the trial, said the department would be “consulting closely with experts, researchers, and with industry to ensure that the technology that is tested as part of the trial is effective”.
Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band). For 18+ content, the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.
As we continue to learn more about the specifics of this ban, a more comprehensive understanding of what it means for businesses and consumers from a marketing and security perspective will emerge.
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