People under 16 in Australia will be banned from using social media on December 10th.
Mick Tsikas/Australia Associated Press/Alamy
A world-first attempt to ban all children under 16 from social media is about to come into effect in Australia, but teenagers are already fighting back.
Announced last November by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the ban is due to come into force on December 10. On this day, the accounts of all minor subscribers of services such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat will be deleted.
If social media companies fail to remove teenagers from their platforms, they face fines of up to A$49.5 million (£25 million). However, neither parents nor children can be punished.
The rest of the world is watching this law closely. a similar ban is being considered by the European Commission. Much of the debate around this law so far has focused on how it will be enforced and what age verification technologies will be introducedand possible detrimental effects on adolescents who rely on social media to connect with their peers.
But as online D-Day approaches, teens have already begun preparing to outsmart attempts to downsize their digital lives. The loudest example is 11th hourly rate from two 15 year olds, Noah Jones and Maisie Neilandboth are from New South Wales to take the case to the country's highest court to have the social media ban overturned.
“To be honest, the kids have been planning to get around the ban for months, but the media is only hearing about it now because of the countdown,” Jones says.
“I know kids who hide old family devices in their school lockers. They transferred the accounts to their parents or older siblings years ago and verified adult ID, and their parents have no idea,” he says. “We know about the algorithms, so children follow groups of older people, such as gardening or groups of over-50s walkers, and we comment in professional language so we don’t get noticed.”
Jones and Neyland initially sought an injunction to delay the ban, but instead decided to insist that their challenge to the ban be treated as a special case of constitutional law.
The couple scored a major victory on December 4 when the High Court of Australia decided it would hear their case in February. The main argument made by the teenage plaintiffs is that the ban is an unfair burden on their purported freedom of political communication. In their statement, they also argue that the policy would sacrifice “a significant area of freedom of expression and participation of children aged 13 to 15 in social media interactions.”
Libertarian advocates Digital Freedom Projectled by New South Wales politician John Ruddick, returned to the pair. “I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old, and they've been telling me for months that everyone on the playground is talking about it,” he says. “They're all on social media. They're all benefiting from social media.”
Ruddick says his children are talking about ways to get around the ban, including using virtual private networks (VPNs), new social media apps and ways to get around age verification technology.
Katherine Page Jeffrey from the University of Sydney, Australia, says it's only when the ban deadline approaches that it “becomes real” for teenagers. “My impression is that until now young people didn't really believe that this was really happening,” she says.
She says her own children are already discussing workarounds with their friends. Her youngest daughter has already downloaded another alternative social network called Yope. The site is not yet on the government list, but like several others, including Coverstar and Lemon8, it has been warned by the government to carry out a self-assessment to avoid being banned.
Lisa Given at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, say that as children flock to all corners of the internet to new and obscure social media platforms, parents will lose visibility into their children's online lives. She also expects a significant proportion of parents to help their children pass age verification by offering their faces.
Susan McLeanAustralia's leading cyber security expert says it will be a “complete game of hide and seek” as new sites pop up, children migrate to them and then the government adds them to the banned list. She says that instead of taking social media away from teenagers, governments should force big companies to fix algorithms that feed inappropriate content to children.
“The government is so stupid in its thinking,” she says. “You can’t ban your way to safety unless you ban every app and platform that allows children to communicate.”
McLean says a couple of weeks ago a teenage student told her, “If the reason for this ban is to keep bad adults away from children, then why are bad adults allowed to stay on the platform while I have to leave?”
Noah Jones, the teenage plaintiff in the High Court case, puts it even more bluntly. “There’s no newspaper big enough where I can find out what I can see on Instagram in 10 minutes,” he says. “My friends say that the pedophiles got off without consequences and we were banned.”
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