Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced plans to ban social media for all Australians under the age of 16. Social media companies would be responsible for imposing restriction technologies to ban new early-teen users. But similar proposals, including those in the U.S., have shown that such prescriptive bans do little to protect young teens and often violate their privacy.
Opposition toward a potential ban was already mounting before Albanese announced the proposal. Last month, 140 Australian international academics signed an open letter opposing a social media age limit. Among the group's concerns was the potential to hurt children's "opportunity to benefit from engaging with the digital environment" and that "there are not yet effective techniques for age assurance nor to verify parental consent."
The letter also noted that ineffective measures to prevent early teens from accessing social media could cause greater harm to users who bypass age-verification measurements. Without incentives to provide safety protections for minors, young users who do gain access would be at greater risk online without child-specific privacy settings, parental controls, and other content-blocking features. Social Media platforms might be wary of retaining these feature if they signal to enforcers that they still expect a large portion of their user base to be underage.
The types of protection which would prevent this come with their own concerns. Harsher restrictions, including handing over government ID or facial biometric age estimation, which the Australian government is exploring, raise significant privacy concerns.
The enforcement structure of Australia's proposal will only penalize social media companies for underage users. This will incentivize stricter verification methods and more data gathering, which puts individuals at risk. As a report by New America shows, "operators verifying users' ages through government-issued ID or credit card information put data at risk if secure processes are not in place for use, collection, processing, storage, or deletion of" personal identifiable information.
Earlier this year, a facial recognition data breach occurred in Australia involving a company that used kiosks during the COVID-19 pandemic to check temperatures. More than 1 million records were reportedly leaked.
Outside of violating users' privacy, blocking social media to protect children's mental health may ironically block pathways to finding help. Jackie Hallan, director at the youth mental health service ReachOut, told the Associated Press that "73 percent of young people accessing mental health in Australia did so through social media."
Similar legislation in Florida, Arkansas, Ohio, and Utah have run into many First Amendment roadblocks. Florida's House Bill 3 (H.B. 3), for example, prohibits users under the age of 14 from using social media and requires parental permission for users aged 14 to 15. Prominent tech industry trade groups, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice, have sued the state of Florida, arguing that H.B. 3 violates the First Amendment and ignores parental rights.
Still, Australia's proposed ban is far more strict than H.B. 3; it has a higher age restriction and parental consent cannot override the government ban. Albanese has stated that some exclusions and exemptions will exist for access to educational services, but otherwise parents lose their control over whether or not their children are allowed on social media.
Antigone Davis, head of safety at Meta, told A.P. that "what's missing is a deeper discussion on how we implement protections, otherwise we risk making ourselves feel better, like we have taken action, but teens and parents will not find themselves in a better place."
If passed, social media companies will have one year to decide what kind of restriction technology to implement. The legislation is set to be introduced in Parliament by November 18, during the last two weeks of Australia's legislative session.
The Australian government is disregarding the privacy of teens, the rights of parents, and the counsel of social media companies who warn there is no effective method to ensure teen user's safety. A better solution would be to let parents be parents and kids be kids, instead of the nanny-state insisting they know better.
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