Australia could ban children under the age of 16 from using social media, to fight what the country’s Prime Minister has called a mental health “scourge”.
Anthony Albanese vowed to get children off their phones and iPads and back “onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts” as he announced his government would introduce new legislation later this year.
“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” Mr Albanese told national broadcaster ABC.
“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with.”
Parents are “worried sick” about the impact of prolonged and unsupervised social media use, he said, adding that “no generation has faced this challenge before”.
The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok had not yet been decided but was expected to be between 14 and 16 years.
Most social platforms already make users declare that they are above a certain minimum age – Instagram, Facebook and TikTok all say users must be above 13 years old – but they only require the person setting up the profile to tick a box.
The government of South Australia announced on Sunday it wanted to fine companies like Elon Musk’s Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, in order to make them take “systemic responsibility” for the safety of children.
In a 276-page report by former High Court justice Robert French, the SA government set out draft legislation including a proposal to set up a regulator who could penalise social media companies each time they allow children under 14 to access their platforms.
“At the moment these companies are effectively operating unregulated … that leaves parents almost powerless,” said Peter Malinauskas, the state’s premier.
“We want to create a big, massive deterrent against these giant companies where they do harm to our children.”
Mr Albanese said on Tuesday that a national approach was necessary and that the federal government was supporting an age verification trial to test various approaches to restricting access to pornography sites and social media.
“What we’re looking at is how you deliver it,” he said.
“We know that it’s not simple and it’s not easy. Otherwise, governments would have responded before.”
The Labor government’s “landmark” plan was first announced by the News Corp newspapers which called it a “win for kids” and the result of a nationwide campaign led by the company’s major tabloid newspapers which featured front page stories showing “skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other harms among children and teens”.
Families of young people who had self-harmed or died by suicide as a result of online bullying welcomed news of an age verification trial but said further limits should be in place, including a curfew on young people accessing social media at bedtime.
Move to legislate for an age limit also had the backing of the country’s conservative opposition, with Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton saying that every day it is delayed “leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media”.
But some experts were unconvinced it would solve the problems faced by children.
Daniel Angus, professor at Queensland University of Technology, said the government’s plan was “reckless”, coming before the final report of a joint parliamentary inquiry into the impact of social media on Australian society.
“This knee-jerk move undermines the joint inquiry and deliberative democratic principles and threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world,” he said, adding that the legislation could drive children to “lower quality online spaces”.
Toby Murray, associate professor in computing and information technology at the University of Melbourne, said it was not even clear whether the technology existed to reliably enforce bans on children.
“The government is currently trialling age assurance technology. But we already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy,” he said.
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