Australian lawmakers on today approved a landmark ban on social media for children under 16, in some of the world’s toughest such controls.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The ban, which aims to address the impact of excessive social media use on children’s physical and mental health, affects social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit, but not YouTube.
The platforms, which bear sole responsibility for enforcement, have one year to figure out how to implement the age limit, which is the highest set by any country. If there are systemic failures to keep children from having accounts, the platforms are liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million).
Senators debated the legislation late into the night on the last day of their parliamentary session, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor government had targeted as the deadline for it to pass. The bill, which is also largely supported by the opposition Liberal party, passed the Australian House of Representatives on Wednesday by a vote of 102 to 13.
Supporters of the ban have cited the effect of harmful depictions of body image on girls and the effect of misogynistic content on boys. Its passage comes after a series of Australian teenagers died by suicide over what their families said was online bullying.
“The basis for this is that there is a feeling amongst the majority of Australians that social media does more harm than good,” said Rob Nicholls, a senior research associate in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney.
A YouGov poll released Tuesday found that 77% of Australians support the ban, up from 61% in August.
Other countries have tried to impose limits on social media for children, including the United States, which requires technology companies to obtain parental consent to collect data from children under 13. But the Australian proposal goes further, with no exemptions for parental consent or pre-existing accounts.
Opponents have criticized the Australian ban as too blunt an instrument and said its passage was too rushed.
The bill, which was introduced in Parliament last week, allowed for only one day to submit opinions on it. Sen. Matt Canavan, who opposed the bill, said there had been 15,000 submissions on it during the one-day period and that lawmakers had been able to review only a fraction of them.
“This is a highly emotional issue and there is an understandable demand for politicians to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about it. Yet it is also a highly complex area that should be examined carefully not in the hasty fashion that has beset this process,” he said Tuesday in a dissent that was published as part of a Senate committee report.
Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, on Tuesday had urged Australia to delay the legislation’s passage, saying more time was needed to assess the potential impact of the ban. ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, also said more consultation was needed.
