With only two months to go before everyone under the age of 16 is blocked from social media, we do have more detail about how the scheme will work – but I have serious doubts about its efficacy and safety.
Before I start, I want to make two quick statements, just to be clear.
- I do think it’s feasible and indeed desirable to have levels of regulation on social media – but there’s potential for a much better regime than the one that’s due to come into effect in Australia on the 10th of December 2025.
- I’m a parent, albeit not of children who will be impacted by this ruling. I mention this because inevitably I’ll get blowback in the “you wouldn’t understand, you’re not a parent” category. That does not apply here, and it’s a tiresome argument to be having.
Now, on with the show…
This morning, I guested on a couple of ABC Radio stations talking about the amendments to the Online Safety Act 2021 that will see access to social media services entirely restricted for Australians under the age of 16.
If you want to hear me, by the way, here’s the link to the Central Victoria episode (for as long as it lasts) – I’m on around 2 hours and 9 minutes into that episode — and here’s my appearance on ABC Radio Shepparton a little earlier in the AM; you’ll find me around 1 hour and 17 minutes into that show.
As I am wont to do before discussing any topical tech story, I read around quite widely. It’s important of course to be informed, but especially so when you’re going to be presenting in any form of live broadcast, because you have to be ready for all kinds of curly questions, whether they come from radio hosts or the general public.
I’d rather give good and accurate information and perspective than either be left without an answer, or give the wrong answer because I didn’t know enough about a topic.
Preparing for that kind of segment means I have to think about answers to questions but also about best approaches, and the more I read and pondered the latest information we’ve got around the social media ban – I know the eSafety commissioner would prefer it be called a “delay”, but if you can’t do something due to orders from a higher authority, most folks would call that a “ban”, and in any case that’s very much the popular terminology being used right now, but I digress…
The more I pondered, the more I saw problems from just about every angle. Here’s where I have some serious concerns and where I genuinely do think we could be targeting this kind of legislative approach to better effect.
Verification is a privacy and accuracy nightmare
While trials have been done on a variety of authentication methods and those results paint a very pretty picture of accuracy, diving into the details throws up a bunch of problems as well as a whole host of carve outs that do genuinely trouble me.
Take facial verification for example. Here the reported margin of error lies between 1-3 years in either direction from 16, which raises the spectre both of 13 year olds sailing through it while 19 year olds may have their accounts removed even though they’re well over the age limit.
As someone who looked significantly younger than I was even into my early 20s – but no longer, and not for some time – I went through more than enough of that kind of verification for years back when authentication involved showing a physical ID in a pub or similar. This is recognised as an issue by the authorities as being an “inevitable” problem, with the solution offered being using a secondary metric to fully verify age.
That’s more official ID in most cases, though to my understanding a designated social media service cannot rely purely on a single government ID as the only authentication method it will accept. There’s a number of problems here.
If a 17 year old fails video verification, they’ve already handed over a quantity of biometric information to a provider, and now they have to provide more – which presents a security risk, even though providers are not meant to keep this kind of information any longer than necessary to verify – to an entity that may not – and let’s face it, probably will not – be based in Australia or storing its data on our shores.
That opens a whole raft of geopolitical and legal messiness depending on the laws present where the data is stored and how those countries work within both mandatory data security and privacy frameworks.
The methods used are up to each service to determine, which means that in order to verify a bunch of accounts you might have to provide that data to a wide array of different verification providers, taking a personal risk every single time you do so.
There is the suggestion that identification of youth accounts might be on account of what’s being posted or the language used. If everything you post is how bad the food at the canteen is or how you’re planning not to turn up to Period 5 English, that might be a dead giveaway. Feels logical, right?
Not automatically so. This too could be highly problematic, and I gave an example of this on my radio chat this morning.
I’m a huge fan of the works of Jim Henson and the Jim Henson company, and this includes a lot of his work aimed at much younger people than myself.
I may have outed myself as a big Fraggle Rock fan on Radio this morning. I have no regrets.
Analyse my postings on that, and you might think that I was considerably younger than I actually am. Maybe I’m just young at heart, but the point here is that any kind of analysis of this kind is going to make all kinds of assumptions based on the content liked by users that might have absolutely nothing to do with their real ages.
By the way, because it did come up on the radio this morning; at the current time there’s not an expectation of social media providers to require verification of older users if they can reasonably derive age brackets.
My own Facebook account is more than 16 years old for example, so I don’t think Meta will be coming knocking at my digital door on the 10th of December for example.
However, the trap not particularly considered there is if I want to sign up to a new service, whether that’s new-in-market or just plain new-to-me because I never bothered to sign up before.
Something tells me that social media companies – a troublesome designation, I’ll get into why I think that’s so in a second – won’t particularly want to risk nearly $50 million in fines just for little old me, and that’s when I’ll also need to play the not-so-fun risk-my-identity-documents-roulette game too.
As a minor side thought, what happens to identified-as-under-16 account is also up to providers, which would totally suck if your 16th birthday fell on the 11th of December and your account got totally nuked by them one day earlier. It’s entirely up to them as to whether accounts are effectively paused or outright deleted, though I could imagine many wanting to “play it safe” legally and destroying all that social data and potentially useful connectivity, which also feels like a loss.
It will be bypassed… or worse
(This picture has nothing to do with the article; I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.)
It’s not a surprise to me at all in any way that there’s a lot of reporting around teenagers discussing ways they might get past the ban when it arrives in a little under two month’s time. Of COURSE they are, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
This is something I have written about previously, back when it was shown that the UK’s take on a similar scheme could be fooled with images of a video game character (no, really!), but that’s only the tip of the iceberg, really.
It would be wrong to say that every single teenager, tween and infant is automatically born tech-savvy these days, and the reality is that only a proportion of those users is likely to bounce past the bans by pretending to be older than they actually are, right back into the social media spaces that the government doesn’t want them to be.
I’m not a big fan of the fact that there’s absolutely no space in the legislation for parental approval here either, because every child and parent relationship is subtly different, as are their expectations and what they’d consider appropriate or wanted.
Frankly I’ve known some 15 year olds who were far more mature than some 85 year olds, and taking away a parent’s ability to choose feels draconian to me. Maybe that doesn’t matter, given that there’s no penalty at all for a parent or child illicitly accessing social media services, though this too isn’t well understood by many.
This raises up what I feel is a bigger problem.
It may become a cat-and-mouse game for younger Australians to leap over the social media ban hurdle, but for those who can’t there’s the very real prospect of them heading to currently-less-popular sites and services – and in being less popular there’s the very real risk of those spaces being considerably more dangerous. Add in the fact that a young person might (not unreasonably, though not accurately) figure that if they were “circumventing” the social media ban at DaVeZTota11yL3gitSocialMedia4Teens site (not a real thing, nobody make it, please!) they might get into some level of legal trouble and therefore keep it even more secret than they might otherwise. That way lies real online danger.
What is a Social Media Service anyway?
Here we do have an actual legal definition, as well as some defined exclusions. A social media service is a service where (and I quote):
companies will be required to restrict access to platform accounts for users under 16 where:
• material is accessible to, or delivered to, Australian users
• users can post material
• users can link to, or interact with, other users
• online social interaction is the sole, or significant, purpose of the platform.
That feels quite wide, and in one sense that’s a sensible move.
If this was the “Block TikTok Act 2025” then it might work for that site alone, but all you’d need is a competitor to launch, say, TokTik (I’m sure that’s been done, right?) to get past it. Keeping matters broad does give flexibility, but also invites some issues.
Maybe we can get around that with carved out exclusions. So what about those exclusions? Here we go:
The exclusions apply to:
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of messaging, email, voice calling or video calling
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling users to play online games with other users
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling users to share information about products or services
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling users to engage in professional networking or professional development
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the education of users
• services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the health of users
• services that have the sole or significant purpose of facilitating communication between educational institutions and students or student families
• services that have the significant purpose of facilitating communication between health care providers and people using those services.
However, even some months before the legislation kicks into effect, there’s a lot of scope creep kicking in under the guise of protection that seems to fly in the face of all of this.
The eSafety commissioner has already written to the likes of Roblox, Lego Play and Steam to see how their services might fit into the ban, and while Roblox has its own whole host of safety issues all of its own, I think you’d be hard pressed not to see it as a game platform; Steam even moreso.
Update: It now appears that Roblox reportedly might not be covered under the legislation — but there’s still other game platforms being pursued, and the reality here is that it was considered, if nothing else. I remind readers that we’re less than 8 weeks from when this is law, and we’re still finding out what the law seems to mean… which doesn’t inspire confidence, really.
The fines for social media services are quite severe, but that’s presuming that they’re designated as a social media service in the first place. Right now, YouTube is arguing that it should be excluded for example, and it’s not like Google/Alphabet is lacking in lawyer resources to take on that particular fight.
It does strike me as an unusual case too, because it’s possible to access YouTube content without being signed in, at which point not only can young people see any inappropriate comments or links to external dodgy sites or similar, but also they’d fall outside features like YouTube Premium that blocks ads… so they could also see some seriously odd advertising not suitable for their age group! That feels like a loss-loss scenario to me.
Didn’t you say you weren’t opposed to social media legislation, Alex? You sure sound like you are…
I’m genuinely not opposed to the idea that it could be a common and indeed necessary good to regulate social media.
I just happen to think that this particular legislation looks at it from the wrong angle and in a way that’s not likely to be that effective, while introducing significant privacy risks and arguably raising the risk profile for the very group it’s meant to protect.
What I think could work a whole lot better is to look at why social media is such a problem in the first place. Some of that is of course down to people – it turns out that people can be horrible, who knew? – but a lot of it comes down the underlying algorithms that try to maximise engagement and outrage in equal measure. Outrage + Engagement equals profit for social media companies, and it’s long been that way.
Regulating how those algorithms work for every social media user would go a lot further to fixing the harms that already exist across these platforms than simply saying “You can’t look at them until you’re 16, good luck with that”.
I don’t think that the legislation as it exists comes from a space of necessarily Big Brother style control over what we see and interact with online – though the way it’s being expanded even before it’s live doesn’t make me feel all that comfortable, honestly – and the intent to prevent harm to minors is of course laudable in concept.
In reality, though, I don’t feel that it’s likely to work very well, if at all.
Was this useful to you? It took a decent chunk out of my day putting it all together, but I do like to try to help people where I can. I can only do that if I can afford to keep doing so.
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