Australia plans social media minimum age limit, angering youth digital advocates

SYDNEY: Australia plans to set a minimum age limit for children to use social media citing concerns about mental and physical health, sparking a backlash from digital rights advocates who warn the measure could drive dangerous online activity underground.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his centre-left government would run an age verification trial before introducing age minimum laws for social media this year.

Albanese didn't specify an age but said it would likely be between 14 and 16.

"I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts," Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

"We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm," he added.

The law would put Australia among the first countries in the world to impose an age restriction on social media. Previous attempts, including by the European Union, have failed following complaints about reducing the online rights of minors.

Representatives of Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, which has a self-imposed minimum age of 13, YouTube owner Alphabet and TikTok were not immediately available for comment.

Australia has one of the world's most online populations with more than four-fifths of its 26 million people on social media, according to government and tech industry figures.

Albanese announced the age restriction plan against the backdrop of a parliamentary inquiry into social media's effects on society, which has heard sometimes emotional testimony of poor mental health impacts on teenagers.

But the inquiry has also heard concerns about whether a lower age limit could be enforced and, if it is, whether it would inadvertently harm younger people by encouraging them to hide their online activity.

Australia's own internet regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, warned in a June submission to the inquiry that "restriction-based approaches may limit young people's access to critical support" and push them to "less regulated non-mainstream services".

The commissioner was not immediately available for comment on Albanese's plan.

"This knee-jerk move ... threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world, potentially driving them to lower quality online spaces," said Daniel Angus, director of the Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Centre.

Jordy Kaufman, a psychology researcher at Swinburne University, said that "for teens who gravitate to social media because of their struggles, a ban could potentially worsen their situation by reducing one of the interaction options available to them".

A 2023 University of Sydney study found three quarters of Australians aged 12 to 17 had used YouTube or Instagram.

MAKE ONLINE SPACES SAFER: EXPERT

Social media platforms will likely face "fairly rigorous obligations" to restrict access to young people, said media and communications lecturer Catherine Page Jeffery from the University of Sydney.

"There are various mechanisms that might make that possible, but they do raise significant privacy concerns because they typically require young people to prove their identity through identification or photographs of their face and so on," she told CNA's Asia Now programme.

She acknowledged, however, that the government has not yet specified how these age verification processes will work in practice.

Jeffery also called for safeguards to be imposed to ensure these mechanisms and the technology used are effective.

"Rather than focusing on ways in which we should be excluding young people from these spaces, we need to focus on ways in which we can make these spaces safer for young people," she added.

She described a ban as a "pretty blunt response to a more complex issue", adding that any response should be multifaceted and also take into account how youths manage online risks.

"As we know, often banning things doesn't work. People will find ways around it, and I suspect that that's what might happen here."