Australia’s Social Media Ban
Danah Boyd (2024):
Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.)
[…]
Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.
Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.
[…]
Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.
This is pretty clearly a response to arguments pushed by people like Dr. Jonathan Haidt.
[…]
Then again, why not both? Kids can be educated on how to use new technologies responsibly and platforms can be pressured to reduce abuses and hostile behaviour.
[…]
I find it plausible it is difficult to disentangle the influence of social media from other uses of a smartphone and from the broader world. I am not entirely convinced social media platforms have little responsibility for how youth experience their online environment, but I am even less convinced Haidt’s restrictive approach makes sense.
Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel good, because it gives them something to blame for lots of really difficult things happening with kids today.
The fact that it’s wrong and the data don’t support the actual claims is of no matter. It feels like it could be right, and that’s much easier than doing the real and extremely difficult work of actually preparing kids for the modern world.
[…]
Earlier this year, we had Dr. Candice Odgers on our podcast. Unlike Haidt, she is an actual expert in this field and has been doing research on the issue for years. The podcast was mostly to talk about what the research actually shows, rather than just “playing off Haidt’s” misleading book. However, Odgers has become the go-to responder to Haidt’s misleading moral panic. She’s great at it (though there are a ton of other experts in the field who also point out that Haidt’s claims are not supported by evidence).
Still, Odgers keeps getting called on by publications to respond to Haidt’s claims. She’s done so in Nature, where she highlighted what the research actually shows, and in The Atlantic, where she explained how Haidt’s supported proposals might actually cause real harm to kids.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Hacker News):
Children and teenagers under the age of 16 could soon be banned from using social media after Labor announced it would back the higher cut-off limit.
The government had previously committed to introducing the legislation that would get kids off social media by the end of the year, but earlier suggested it would not announce a specific cut-off age until after a trial of verification technology.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also confirmed on Thursday that the proposed legislation would not include grandfathering arrangements — meaning young people already on social media would not be exempt — nor would it allow for exemptions due to parental consent.
A social media ban for children under 16 passed the Australian Parliament on Friday in a world-first law.
The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.
As to how exactly age verification would be executed, Rowland said that was part of the purpose of the nation’s $6.5 million age assurance trial.
[…]
Meta posted a blog last week in which it made a case for parental approval for under-16s rather than a ban. That approval, it suggested, could be executed in the app store.
[…]
Social media’s harm to children has been extensively documented. For example, US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy cited adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media as having double the risk of developing depression and anxiety. Murthy has advocated for health warning labels on social networks.
The US has been working on its own age verification software, but the results of its efforts remain unreliable.
University of York (Hacker News):
Psychologists at the University of York, who tested the impact that smartphones have on children’s behaviour for a new two-part documentary series for Channel 4, found that a ban in school impacted positively on sleep and mood.
Hunt Allcott et al. (Hacker News):
We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls.
Paris Buttfield-Addison (November 2025):
Australia’s world-first ban on social media for children under 16 takes effect in just over a month on December 10, 2025, yet nobody knows exactly how it will work.
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 passed parliament in a rushed process in November last year, imposing potential fines of up to $50 million on platforms that fail to keep out underage users. While 77% of Australians support the ban, only 25% believe it will actually work, and with weeks until launch, the mounting controversies, technical failures, and expert warnings suggest it’s becoming exactly the shitshow sceptics predicted.
[…]
The age verification requirement creates a piece of backdoor surveillance infrastructure that affects every Australian, not just children. Elon Musk labeled it “a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” a rare instance where his fevered ranting and hyperbole aligns with expert consensus.
[…]
The paradox is built into the law itself: s 63DB prohibits platforms from directly collecting government-issued IDs or requiring Digital ID systems, yet platforms must verify ages. This forces reliance on unproven technologies like facial biometric scanning, behavioural tracking, and AI age estimation, all of which require invasive data collection.
Beginning December 10, 2025, a new Australian law will require certain social media platforms operating in Australia to prevent people under 16 from having a social media account. Impacted developers are responsible for making sure they follow the requirements of the new law, including deactivating any existing accounts for users under 16 and monitoring new signups.
Apple provides several tools to help meet the requirements of this law[…]
Australia’s social media ban for kids is now in effect. As we’ve discussed, this is a monumentally stupid plan that will do real harm to kids. It’s based on a moral panic and a wide variety of faulty assumptions, including that social media websites are inherently bad for kids, something that none of the evidence supports.
Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. Though these mandates claim to protect children, in practice they create harmful censorship and surveillance regimes that put everyone—adults and young people alike—at risk.
Rahm Emanuel, who is mulling a presidential run, is pushing for the United States to follow Australia’s lead in banning children under 16 from most social media.
Forum site Reddit has filed a case that seeks to exempt itself from Australia’s ban on children under 16 holding social media accounts.
But late last week, some additional news broke that makes the whole thing even more grotesque: turns out the campaign pushing hardest for the ban was run by an ad agency that makes gambling ads. The same gambling ads that were facing their own potential ban—until the Australian government decided that, hey, with all the kids kicked off social media, gambling ads can stay.
Kristof Van Landschoot (Casey Liss):
Has anybody figured out if it is possible to update the age rating on App Store Connect without submitting an update to the app?
Previously:
- Imgur Blocks UK Users Over Age Verification
- Complying With Texas Age Verification
- Updated Age Ratings in App Store Connect
- Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
- Tim Cook Opposes App Store Age Verification Bill
- iOS Declared Age Range API
- Age Verification and the App Store
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Important to note that this is not in any way actually a "ban" on children's use of social media. It affects only the holding of an account. Children are still able to access any and all social media that allow access without an account. Hence they may freely continue view any and all content on Youtube, X, TikTok etc. On the other hand, it does silence them and force them to be passive observers of such content.
The law is highly ill conceived and cannot possibly fulfill its stated aims. When introduced to Australian parliament, it was extremely rushed, providing just a single day for any public feedback to be submitted. Clearly the proponents knew that while its has great politically shrewd sound bites such as "save our children", it was so flawed in its construction that they couldn't afford to let it be scrutinised before being rammed through.
@Graham most of these services are already unusable without an account. Instagram for example severely limits what can be seen without an account. This is just more ammo for them to continue and worsen that practice.
Also I don’t think there’s any question that social media is bad for kids. It’s bad for everyone. But this is more than likely just another lever to pull towards more government control over the internet in general. Think of the children, after all.
@Bart I don't think "most" is correct - eg. the three major platforms I named. I also strongly question your blanket assumption that social media is somehow universally bad. It is simply a modern aspect of society which is still rather unrefined in many ways, and as with many other aspects of society, kids need and benefit from parental guidance and oversight. And here's the thing. When kids DO have accounts, those accounts can have child appropriate restrictions put onto them. By imposing a simplistic, blunt, blanket ban such accounts, kids will inevitably simply resort to non-account based consumption of social media instead - and hence without possibility of controls designed specifically for them. Fortunately I see that a number of other countries considering social media legislation are not falling onto the same blanket-ban trap. I seriously hope Australia realises its legislative faux pas sooner rather than later and adopts more realistic and potentially effective mechanisms.
