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In a move sure to delight parents, the Australian Government has voted 34 to 19 to ban children off social media apps like TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, and X (formerly known as Twitter).
According to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Social media is doing social harm to our kids. We’ve called time on it.”
The onus to enforce the ban is on the social media platforms – not young people or their parents. However, with the law simply saying that they need to, “take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having accounts”, it doesn’t quite provide a lot of details as to what these steps would be.
The fine for breaking the law is quite clear though, where systemic breaches could see platforms receiving fines of up to A$49.5 million (~S$40.1 million). Reports say that a trial of enforcement methods will start in January, with the ban to take effect in a year.
But with the bill making it clear that no Australian will be compelled to use government identification (including Digital ID) for age assurance on social media with the social media platforms needing to offer “reasonable alternatives” to users, just what these are meant to be remains uncertain.
As expected, the social media platforms have raised concerns over the ban and the speed at which the legislation was passed.
Tiktok Australia released a statement saying:
The safety of our community, particularly our younger users, is a top priority for TikTok. We will continue to work hard to enforce our high safety standards. Moving forward, it is important that the Government works closely with industry to fix issues created by this rushed process. We want to work together to keep teens safe and reduce the unintended consequences of this Bill for all Australians.
Meta said in it submission that, “The Bill in its present form will fail to achieve its goal of reducing the burden on parents to manage the safety of young people on social media, overlooks what parents have said they want with respect to managing young people online, and ignores the evidence provided by well over 100 child safety and mental health groups here in Australia and internationally.”
Whatever the outcome in Australia, it will be interesting to see how it plays out as the country is the first to take such drastic measures to regulate its social media platforms.
Source: The Guardian, PMO, Meta
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