Australia is the first country to set the minimum age of social media access to 16, after a landmark bill passed in the Senate late into the evening on the final sitting day of the year.
Backed by both major parties, the ground-breaking legislation “seeks to set a new normative value in society that accessing social media is not the defining feature of growing up in Australia”, said Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.
TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram are among the platforms that will face fines of up to $50 million (USD $33 million) for systemic failures to prevent under-16s from holding accounts when the laws come into effect, 12 months from now.
Exemptions will allow teens under-16s to still access health and education related services – Headspace, YouTube, Google Classroom – as well as messaging services and online games.
“It’s about making sure children have a childhood and parents have peace of mind,” said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, assuring Australian parents, “We’ve got your back.”
New laws welcomed in Australia and abroad
Australia’s move to keep kids and teens off social media has been lauded internationally, including by prominent author Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness raised the alarm over the harms of excessive smartphone and social media use to young people’s mental health, particularly in girls.
“Australia is correcting two of the most consequential blunders in the creation of the early global internet: the setting of the ‘age of internet adulthood’ to 13, combined with the stipulation that companies have no responsibility at all to verify that anyone actually is 13,” wrote Haidt on Substack this week.
“We applaud Australia for stepping up and doing the right thing.”
Several U.S. states – Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and Utah – have legislated to limit access to social media for teens, but the Australian Government is the first to take this step at a national level.
In Australia, the reception has been mostly positive. Just over three quarters of Australians (77%) support the social media ban, according to polling by YouGov – up from 61% in August.
The Senate inquiry into the bill particularly noted overwhelming parental support for the bill, as parents grapple with the collective action problem of how to limit teens’ time on social media without being the only grinch on the block.
Why the rush-job?
However, much of the media commentary in Australia this week has centered on the breakneck speed at which the Government rammed the legislation through Parliament in a single week, leaving many wondering, why the rush?
After tabling the bill last Thursday, the Government allowed only two business days for the Senate to review it. This meant the public was given only one day for submissions, with just a three-hour hearing on Monday before the Senate had to bang out its report, due 9am Tuesday.
All in all, a process with as much consideration as “a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com”, quipped ABC journalist Annabel Crabb. Or, as Nationals Senator Matt Canavan put it, the rush-job appeared to be “a knee-jerk reaction to a complex problem”.
Despite the short timeframe, the inquiry into the bill attracted 15,000 public responses – a staggering number which was likely boosted by Elon Musk’s viral post on X suggesting that the new laws seemed like “a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians”.
Tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, called yesterday for the bill to be delayed over concerns that “the Government is rushing this legislation without adequate consultation or evidence and there are still many unknowns with respect to its implementation”.
Nevertheless, the bill was passed in the House of Representatives on Wednesday (101 Ayes to 13 Noes), and passed in the Senate late on Thursday (34 Ayes to 19 Noes) as one of the last orders of the last sitting day of the year, with truncated debate time due to there being some 30 other bills to be pushed through before the end of the session.
The bill was opposed by the Greens, some Teals and independents, and a handful of dissenters from the Coalition (conservative National and Liberal Parties), who crossed the floor to vote against it.
Broad political support despite criticisms
The bill, which amends the Online Safety Act (2021), had bipartisan support from the get-go, as the push for legislating a minimum age for social media access was initiated by the conservative Opposition leader Peter Dutton in June.
The state Governments of Victoria and South Australia soon announced plans to limit social media use for kids under 14, and the federal Labour Government jumped on the bandwagon, announcing its intention to follow through with legislation in September.
The Federal Government had already committed $6.5 million in the May Budget to conduct a pilot of age assurance technology, as recommended in the eSafety Commissioner’s Age Verification Roadmap in 2023.
Mobile phones have been successfully banned in most Australian schools under state and territory laws, but proponents of the bill said this did not go far enough.
On the other hand, the bill “could have far-reaching consequences for privacy, mental health, silencing young peoples’ voices and online safety for everyone in the long-run ‒ and may even be unconstitutional”, said Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, noting that experts consulted in both this inquiry and the related social media inquiry had recommended a more nuanced approach.
Privacy concerns were raised from Left and Right alike. Young Labour Left NSW expressed “deep reservations should the legislation require the provision of Government ID documents to platforms to social media companies, given how prone these companies are to leaks and data misuse”.
PM Albanese countered in Parliament that there will be “very strong and strict privacy requirements to protect people’s personal information, including an obligation to destroy information provided once age has been verified”. The Government is also progressing privacy reforms separate to this bill.
Another point of controversy was that the social media ban does not include porn sites, but the Government is reportedly considering separate legislation to restrict Australians under the age of 18 from accessing porn.
Almost half of the young people surveyed in research by eSafety had encountered pornography before the age of 16 – over a third of this group came across it via social media feeds, ads, messages and group chats.
A Trojan horse for Digital ID?
A key concern from critics of the bill was that the social media age limit is a Trojan horse for Government Digital ID, as the new laws will require all Australians to verify their age.
However, a last–minute amendment was adopted before the bill was passed to ensure that Australians will not be forced to present a Digital ID or other form of Government ID to use social media.
Platforms and third-party age assurance services can take Government ID for age verification, but only if other methods of age assurance are offered to the user. Platforms found in breach of these terms can be fined up to $50 million (USD $33 million).
The new bill does not prescribe how platforms must monitor and enforce the age ban – it will be up to the eSafety Commissioner to decide what “reasonable steps” social media platforms should take to stop Australians under 16 from creating accounts.
Informing the Commissioner’s decision on how platforms will ensure that Australian users are of legal age to use their services will be the outcome of the Government’s age assurance technology trial, which is not expected to report to Parliament until later next year.
The Government announced earlier this month that a consortium led by British company Age Check Certification Scheme had been contracted to explore technologies to estimate and verify ages, including biometric markers or digital usage patterns.
eSafety Commissioner calls for holistic approach
Despite having previously compared a blanket age ban to banning kids from the water rather than putting up pool fences and teaching them to swim, the regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, has welcomed the new laws.
“eSafety has long stated that while age assurance is an important step, it is one part of a holistic approach to protect children and young people from harm online,” said the Commissioner in a statement after the bill was tabled.
“We must also continue working to ensure online services are safe by design, and to build children’s digital literacy, resilience and critical reasoning skills so that when they are of age to use these services, or use services not captured by restrictions, they are equipped for the online world.”
In addition to the social media age limit laws, the Government committed earlier this month to legislating a Digital Duty of Care, which will put the legal responsibility for keeping Australians safe on tech companies.
The Digital Duty of Care will require that platforms incorporate Safety by Design principles – an initiative of the eSafety Commissioner – and take risk assessment and risk mitigation steps.
Australia was considered a world leader in online safety in 2015 with the establishment of eSafety (originally the Children’s eSafety Commissioner) under the centre-Right Turnbull Government.
With the passing of the social media age limit bill, the Albanese Government hopes to continue this legacy.
Politically, the passing of this bill is a much-needed win for Labour after its misinformation bill went down in flames over the weekend, and backlash for its failure to move forward on plans to rein in gambling advertising.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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