Quite a decisive move by the Australian government. I don't know if it's a move in the right direction or not but the research clearly shows that around the time social media became mainstream, teens' and preteens' mental health took a nosedive (Especially girls).
maybe it's a step in the right direction but you can't regulate away ALL parenting. I know kids in the 5th grade getting brand new Iphone 17s! i've even seen one kid at the age of 7, getting their own Ipad. some parents even force their kids to use play on their iphone, just so they don't have to keep an eye on their kid anymore. My jaw really dropped to the floor on that one.
at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that bad.
How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is just band-aid.
the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens" until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed device that just lets them get their homework done.
The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.
If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.
The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.
If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.
I don’t have kids, but I can see how one parent banning their kid from social media could create issues when the others are on it. I was a quirky kid that already struggled to make friends and any additional imposed quirkiness would have been devastating.
That said, and I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but what about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the point where you have shared moments laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I’m a few multiples of the age in question and I haven’t used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the main issues is people only showing the doctored up highlight reel of their life. If that’s still the issue then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that’s also part of real life and a teachable moment. Granted I wasn’t bombarded with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI Edition”, but the concept of someone being ‘fake’ isn’t new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it and mentally deal with it. That is the world they’re going into, whether it’s a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex, or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.
i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?
in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.
is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
it does help. i think this is a good step in the right direction.
but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).
Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the problem. They still see the exact same content shared by friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do damage.
We have had 10+ years of asking parents to solve the problem and the situation has only gotten worse. "Just parent better" is good advice at an individual level but it doesn't solve problems at a society level.
This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then blame everything on parents.
Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad thing, even though they paid for all the public infrastructure we use every day.
As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the better.
* The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
* Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
This is considered a startup phase AFAICT, with others being looked at as necessary.
> The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
Sure, but it stops kids bullying each other, and a service you can't fully interact with is not very interesting, stops kids putting their pics/videos/whatever online.
> Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
They are using heuristics and then an external verification service if the heuristics set off an alarm. It's not perfect at present, sure, but I don't think it has to be.
Hugely decisive! Feels more like a policy for idyllic hypotheticals. "Suppose we could ban social media..." well, hey, they actually did it.
I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We shall see!
I think one must also re-evaluate how in modern times a parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the crime of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove unrestricted outside (within reason). I've heard of this happening in both the US and Australia, the HOA mindset really needs to die.
I live in Philadelphia in Mt Airy. I see kids of all races around all the time. Sometimes my kids. The only place I read about parents being jailed for their kids being outside is HN.
Where are you from? Sweden? Denmark? Fun fact for Europe: America is quite a dangerous country. At the very least, this is why parents fear the outdoors. And much of our nature is polluted. There are cases of this. I agree it's wrong, but it's good to understand the background.
And as far as the internet: I am part of the younger generation and I welcome this change. I see how it affects my generation every day.
I am also from a younger generation and from a state that has experienced quite a bit of pollution, but before the popularity of the smartphone ~2012 or so, there was still much more play outside. As for crime, it has been on a downtrend for decades, and many areas are the most peaceful they've been in years¹. I admit this may still be higher than in Europe, but this is exactly the fearmongering message platforms like X try to spread to garner support for authoritarian policy
1. I am not saying people are playing outside at the same levels.
2. I live in the rust belt and don't need to be told what I see is fearmongering. I have been personally affected by it.
America isn't universally dangerous, but it is very diverse. Where I am (Western Pennsylvania) there are kids outside running around all the time (maybe less now that it's very cold out). It just depends where in the country you are.
I read this book in school and it's about this difference between Europe / Scandinavia and a rural part of Indiana
I'm not saying kids don't play outside, just that the violence is why some parents fear it. I agree the internet makes this fear worse but frankly, EVEN ONE CRIME is scary enough if you ask me
A 26 year old girl was set on fire in Chicago public transportation. It's really unforgiveable to me when people then say I'm "fearmongering"
I think a huge part of that is context. Age, location, time of day, etc. I’d be curious to see numbers on this, usually it’s just asserted as “back in my day we played outside and got dirty all day!” but then I hear those same (usually now grand-) parents talk about all the tv shows/movies they watched as they espouse their views on modern media!
My assumption is a lot of those people who proudly proclaim that lifestyle were raised in (segregated) suburbs and have rose tinted glasses. But I’m also making assumptions like them, so again I’m curious to find info on this.
You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then. Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on them for riding their bikes around the block, and the cops followed the kids back to their front door and then talked with the parents.
The success so far is really just political, which has largely been shutting down debate and dismissing calls for some kind of cost analysis of what we risk losing in enforcing this.
Whenever someone brings up this stuff, the politicians take the tone that "we won't let anyone get in the way of protecting children", and this is in response to people who in good faith think this can be done better. Media oligopolist love it because it regulates big tech, so they've been happy to platform supporters of the policy as well.
Third spaces won't reappear because the planning system in most cities shuts anything down the moment someone files a compliant. They get regulated out of existence the moment police express concern young people might gather there. The planning system (which in NSW/Sydney is the worse) has only gotten worse since the 80s after the green bans. It was largely put in place to allow for community say in how cities are shape, which sounds nice but it's mostly old people with free time participating who don't value 3rd spaces, even if they might end up liking them. They just want to keep things the same and avoid parking from getting overly complicated (and this is a stone throw away from train stations and the CBD).
Third places can be fixed by reforming planning which is slowly gaining momentum via YIMBY movements, but this social media ban is just not a serious contribution to changing that. If anything Social media phenomenon like Pokemon GO contributed more to these third places lighting up.
Governance in Australia is very paternalistic, it's a more high functioning version of the UK in that sense. I think it might be in part due to the voting system being a winner takes all single seat electorate preferential voting system which has a median voter bias for least controversial candidates.
As a kid I always felt being in Australia you missed out on a lot of things people got to do in America, that has slowly changed as media and technology has become less bound by borders but looks like that being undone.
They actually did the experiment. While we're over here thinking social media is probably bad for kids and wondering what would happen if they weren't allowed to use it., Australia actually did that. Soon we'll actually know what happens when kids aren't allowed to use social media.
Given that “social media” is in fact not banned and all this does is impact a select (and frankly logically inconsistent) list of services, this seems very unlikely. Children are still free to be groomed and gamble on Roblox and join servers belonging to The Com on Discord. To be clear I don’t think those services should be regulated by this obscene law either but this isn’t going to bring back any kind of halcyon era for kids. It will expand the surveillance of and shame around young people’s internet use, however.
How so? It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation. The age verification service doesnt get browsing details, and the site providing content doesnt get any additional user details beyond what they would likely already have, including those subject to PII legislation.
This is false. Like all the age restricting laws being passed around the world, the implementation is not being specified and is being left to the individual platforms, which are using some combination of photo ID and video selfie in order to validate people's ages. Each platform is implementing it differently, and on different timelines. For example, X has failed to even respond for a while, but it's finally said they'll comply.
> Companies have told Canberra they will deploy a mix of age inference - estimating a user's age from their behaviour - and age estimation based on a selfie, alongside checks that could include uploaded identification documents.
> It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation.
This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify a single particular implementation for age-based verification and there's absolutely no single "age verification service" that platforms are legislated to use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based on several recommended methods, including age inference. https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-need-t...
Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding whether she's concerned about people bypassing authentication-based age verification checks: "If you’re an adult - you probably won’t need to do anything extra to prove your age, because like I said before, these platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
It will also massively expand the surveillance of adults: if a platform introduces face scanning or checking government IDs for "age verification", then they don't just scan the underage users.
What you’re implicitly saying here is that we should wait until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because you’re dealing with a soft science. At that point the damage will have been done and much harder to address.
If you don’t think attention spans are on the downtrend & that social media has something to do with that, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear.
Thinking about this this will of course fail. Because teens will do what they did before online: make their own social networks. But by necessity these will be small.
I hope that's what will happen. That this is only really a problem for FANG, for the tech industry and doesn't actually prevent social media.
Funny, but I (and I believe many who support this law) would say that's a good thing. The problem is not (and never was) social interaction online, it is large corporations designing their algorithms to be as addictive as possible to tie kids as early as possible to their services.
I have had to recently get back to using Facebook (after creating the account ~15 years ago and leaving it dormant for >10 years), due to several sports clubs using it as their only means of communication. It's scary how good these algorithms have become, I often only want to look up something related to the club and end up being roped into 1h of doomscrolling. And I'm an adult with significant better impulse control than most teenagers.
While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or predation.
At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.
Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.
Even if it achieves only a small reduction in usage (say 10%), i would expect that should have a measurable effect on happiness if the hypothesis of [social media causes unhappiness] is true. If no increase in happiness is observed, i think we could say that social media does not cause unhappiness.
Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
If a kid uses a pseudonymous account and fraudulently bypasses an age verification system, I have a hard time believing that the company would be fined $50M.
I would guess that this massive fine is more for situations like if a company can be shown to have wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly negligent. (But I have not read the law!)
