MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Riley Allen, a 15-year-old schoolboy living on an outback sheep ranch, doesn't know how he'll keep in touch with his circle of distant friends when Australia's world-first social media ban goes into effect Wednesday.
The Rileys live 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Wudinna, a town of just over 1,000 people in the state of South Australia. But some of his school friends live 70 kilometers (43 miles) away.
“I don't think the impact will be very positive for us. We don't have a lot of people here to interact with each other,” Riley said.
“I'm not sure how we'll keep in touch with each other over the holidays,” he said, referring to the Southern Hemisphere's summer holidays, which start on Thursday.
Starting Wednesday, Riley and others under 16 will be legally prohibited from having accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch. Platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($32.9 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove accounts.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, was the first tech giant to respond, ruling out young child suspects starting last week.
Riley has accounts on most platforms that have age restrictions, and some have asked him to confirm that he is at least 16 years old. But by Monday, no one had ousted him.
Mom won't help her 15-year-old son get around the ban on social networks
Riley's mother, schoolteacher Sonya Allen, said she would not help her son get around the ban, but suspected other parents would do so.
“I wouldn't. I know there are other people who would do it. If there's a rule, there's a rule. But I know what kids are like, and I was a kid before, and they're going to bend the rule if they can,” she said.
While the law does not give parents discretion in allowing their children to have social media accounts, Allen said parents should regulate their children's social media use.
A few years ago, she banned Riley from social media for several weeks.
“We used to have to take action to restrict his use because we found him on social media at midnight and he wasn't doing his homework and stuff like that. We ended up taking him away from that for a couple of months,” Allen said. “Because of this, he learned to use it more responsibly.”
Riley, who turns 16 in April, said he understands the ban's goals, but there are other ways to achieve them. He suggested introducing a social media curfew for young children from 10pm to stop them losing sleep.
Teens challenge ban in Australia's highest court
Riley has an ally in Australia's largest city, Sydney: schoolboy Noah Jones, who turns 16 in August.
Noah is one of two 15-year-old plaintiffs challenging the constitutional law in the High Court. Another person involved in the case brought by Sydney advocacy group Digital Freedom Project is schoolgirl Maisie Neyland.
They argue the law wrongfully deprives 2.6 million young Australians of their right to freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution.
The Australian government is seeking to defeat the issue on behalf of what it says is the vast majority of parents who are demanding the government take action against the harms caused by social media.
Many children with disabilities have told the media that they welcome their exclusion from platforms with design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens, as well as providing content that could be harmful to their health and well-being.
Parent group Heaps Up Alliance, which lobbied for age restrictions on social media, supports the theory behind the blanket ban that “when everyone misses out, no one misses out.”
Before Parliament passed the ban last year, more than 140 Australian and international academics with expertise in areas related to technology and child welfare signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arguing against age restrictions on social media as “too blunt a tool to effectively address risks”.
Noah said the ban would lead to young Australians moving away from age-restricted platforms to riskier and less regulated options.
“I am against banning social media because we young Australians will be completely silenced and cut off from our country and the rest of the world,” Noah said. “We grew up with this our whole lives, and now it's suddenly taken away from us. We don't even know what else we can do.”
His mother, Renee Jones, is also involved in the court case as her son's guardian since he was unable to make legal decisions for himself as a child.
She considers herself a relatively strict parent on social media and has never allowed Noah or his two older brothers to take devices into their bedrooms. But she supports Noah's position.
“My parents would never have thought that my children would be so lucky to have such a library of knowledge,” Jones said.
“But I really give Noah credit for being a young man who understands the dangers of social media. It's not all sunshine and lollipops,” she added.
Plaintiff says tech giants' money would be welcome
Digital Freedom Project President John Ruddick, who is also a state legislator for the minor Libertarian Party, said he initially intended to file for an injunction to prevent the ban from taking effect on Wednesday. But his lawyers advised against this.
A referral hearing will be held at the end of February to set a hearing date for the constitutional challenge, which will be heard by a full panel of seven judges.
Ruddick said the case was not funded by any tech giant, but they would be “extremely happy” to make a financial contribution.
Ruddick expected children could circumvent the ban, including by using virtual private networks to make it appear they were offshore.
“They are going to bypass this and remain on underground social networks and, worse, without parental supervision,” Ruddick said.
“It's much better for it to be out in the open and for parents to take a very, very active role… in monitoring what they're doing on social media,” he added.
