I’ve been using “social media” since the old days of USENET in the early ’90s, and am familiar with both the old school bulletin board websites, blogs and more “modern” social media websites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and (just recently) Bluesky. I’ve seen the dangers, I’ve seen the nonsense, and I’ve probably spent too much time on these platforms. But there’s no way I’d want to return to a pre-social media landscape, where all the information is gatekept by a few big media organisations.
Last Thursday, November 21, I found out that public submissions were open via this post on Bluesky by Senator David Shoebridge: “Government and Opposition only allowing 24 hours for a supposed ‘inquiry’ into this absolute mess of a bill is utterly ridiculous. Share the link around!”
Government and Opposition only allowing 24 hours for a supposed "inquiry" into this absolute mess of a bill is utterly ridiculous. Share the link around! www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentar…
— Senator David Shoebridge (@davidshoebridge.bsky.social) 21 November 2024 at 14:45
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While submissions were still open, the instructions stated: “Due to the short timeframe of this inquiry, the committee would appreciate submissions being limited to 1-2 pages”. Well, that’s an inducement in itself: I don’t have to write very much. I might have a go.
It took about an hour to complete (including visits to the fridge to get another beer). I decided I’d start by introducing myself as a father, someone who knows the risks of social media, but also its strengths — and someone who really thought the under-16s ban was a stupid and harmful idea, especially to my daughter.
Beyond that, I’d invite people to read the submission itself.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I write to submit my opinion on the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024. My opinion is that it is a bad, dreadful bill, because the main aim of the bill — shutting off people under 16 from social media — is a bad, dreadful aim. I believe that the best thing to do is withdraw the bill from Parliament.
I should clarify that I write as a father (52) of a daughter (10) who would be affected by the bill. I gather that the reasons for the bill are to protect her (and people like her) from bad things that happen on the World Wide Web. But the only way that “protection” occurs is to prevent her from accessing the WWW in the first place. It shows such a lack of imagination and courage from Parliament.
To use a crude analogy here: do we protect children from drowning by preventing them from accessing standing bodies of water in the first place? Of course we don’t. We provide a whole range of strategies: building fencing around pools, providing water wings/floaties/whatever you call them, and most importantly, teaching children to swim! So when children find themselves in the water, they know how to keep themselves safe!
Of course, we could go with the alternative strategy of preventing children from accessing the water until they reach some age… like (for the sake of the argument) 16. And you know what would happen? Lots of teenagers would now get the chance to experience this strange, formerly forbidden yet exciting thing they’ve heard about called “swimming”. And since no-one was able to teach them stuff like freestyle or even the backstroke, you end up with a lot of teenagers drowning when they reach their 16th birthday.
At this point, members of the committee may be asking themselves, “Isn’t this analogy a little crude, Mr. Murphy?” It isn’t crude at all. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 doesn’t even allow for people — say, like my daughter — being trained to handle social media, under the careful guidance of people like her teachers or myself. Instead, they’d go in cold to the big bad social media platforms on their 16th birthday, experiencing the dangers (from stalkers to bullies) without being… well, not quite “none the wiser”, but more “never given the opportunity to get the experience to be wiser”. The bill doesn’t even have any clause [that says] “under 16s can experience social media with parents and other responsible adults to teach them about the dangers”. This omission is not just foolish — it is obscenely dangerous!
A better way to go is to take a leaf from Finland, as explained in this article on The Conversation, “Educating young people about social media would be far more effective than a ban — Finland can show us how”. To continue my analogy — it’s the equivalent of mandating swimming lessons to everybody:
Finland’s education system embeds digital literacy as a fundamental component of its curriculum, integrating technology across all grade levels to prepare students for the digital age. From preschool education, students are introduced to digital tools, safety and technology to learn responsible online behaviour.
There are other objections I have to the bill. As [the study] “Mandatory age verification for pornography access: Why it can’t and won’t ‘save the children’” states in its abstract:
The systems being proposed to automate age verification create greater user data privacy risks and divert resourcing that could be spent on strategies that are proven to support healthy sexual development.
But my final comment is that the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 is a bad bill — even if I agreed with the aims of banning under-16s from social media (which I don’t!) As the explanatory memorandum for the bill states, under “regulatory instruments”:
While the definition of age-restricted social media platforms casts a wide net, flexibility to reduce the scope or further target the definition will be available through legislative rules made by the minister for communications. In exercising the rule-making power, the minister will be required to seek and have regard to advice from the eSafety commissioner, and may also seek advice from other relevant Commonwealth agencies.
Which really means that rather than having actual, well-defined rules that everybody can follow, the minister for communications can make the rules up as they go along, doesn’t it? What an utter omnishambles of a bill. It should be rejected post haste.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Murphy
