As of December 10th, Australia introduced it’s social media ban on certain websites for children under 16. I do not have accounts with any of the affected platforms and I had assumed that this effectively requires everyone who uses them to prove their identity going forward. So far at least, I have no noticed any change at all. The websites affected as of writing are:
Kick
Snapchat
Threads
TikTok
Twitch
X (formerly Twitter)
YouTube
With many of these such as Reddit, YouTube and Kick, you can still access them and see much of the content but under-16s are restricted from creating accounts and account features such as commenting, private messaging etc. With many of the others, they would now not be able to access the platform at all. As for people over 16 with existing accounts who get caught up in the restriction: they will have to confirm their age. For Facebook, the instructions are:
Users aged 16 and older who mistakenly receive a notification or lose access to their accounts have the option to confirm their age through Meta’s third-party partner, Yoti, by providing a video selfie or government-issued ID. Yoti deletes this information once the age check is complete.
By “have the option to confirm their age”, it means they have to do this or will not have access to their account whether they are 17 of 50 year old. I am sure with Facebook at least, that it is not much of a problem. I haven’t used Facebook for almost a decade but given I was an early adopter and am now in my forties, they may as well be banning under 16s from MySpace. Others on the list like TikTok and Instagram will hurt a lot more.
Like many, I have no doubt that this ultimately is a trojan horse for forcing digital ID as Western governments continue to chip away at basic civil liberties. It certainly isn’t to protect children as I will quickly demonstrate with the platforms that have been exempted from the ban below. Though I certainly believe all of this, I don’t in principle have a problem with doing more to protect children online.
The thing about this “ban” or “restrictions” as our American “e-Safety Commissioner” prefers, is there would be no reason for this if parents did their jobs. Every family will be different but I immediately saw the danger of allowing my children to create accounts and interact with people anonymously online. In the earlier days of the Internet, nobody really knew what was happening but now everybody should be well-aware of the dangers from experience if nothing else. Still, it is clear that many young people are allowed unrestricted (and largely unmonitored), access to the many horrors available on the Internet. Most of the worst stuff isn’t even behind a paywall.
Weird fetish groups like “Furries” which I remember making fun of with many others in the 2000s, have now spread to primary age children and schools are apparently tolerating these new absurdities. Outside of parents and peers, the only way young people would even be aware of these fetish groups is if they are exposed to them by online freaks. This is also true of many, many other sexual perversions including transvestitism that their parents are readily allowing them to have access to in their own home.
Where someone of my generation would have to be secretive on the one family computer in the living room or watching a salacious movie after 9pm, many children today can take their phone into their room without their inattentive parents having any idea what they are doing. Simply not allowing children to have these phones until a certain age or at least restricting their use to the family room, would make a significant difference but not even that can be expected of many parents.
So as with many other problems, the behaviour of the population has given the state a legitimacy to step in and now it has. What they have done is ineffective to the purpose and quite by design as can be shown by the platforms that are exempt:
Discord
GitHub
Google Classroom
LEGO Play
Messenger
Roblox
Steam and Steam Chat
YouTube Kids
A number of these are probably fine but Roblox and Discord in particular stand out as immediate concerns. Roblox is currently in some legal trouble due to the presence of sexual predators on their platform. This video goes over this and I will post it below. Discord (and quite possibly Steam Chat), would also have similar concerns. I can’t speak for LEGO Play but I’d bet if it isn’t tightly monitored, there are dangers there too.
The main danger should be obvious with all social media platforms and that is with the chat/communication functionality. Anything that enables communication between minors and people they don’t know is a danger and so it would have been more effective to outright ban private communication on all accounts rather than restrict certain platforms. This would of course make many of these platforms useless to minors but it would do the police work that many parents aren’t doing. What the current arrangements do is mostly restrict platforms young people don’t use but leave open the pedo pipeline to others.
As for actual solutions, first and foremost, parents need to monitor would their children are doing online. Do they know what apps they are using on their iPad or phone? Do their children have private emails to register an account? Do their children communicate with people they don’t know in real life? Do they check what videos they’re watching? Do they know anything I’m talking about at all? Sadly, probably not.
As mentioned earlier, this is really a trojan horse that will continue to be expanded and probably until all online access will be tied to digital identification that monitors everything. It will not be to protect children who have destructive influences on their lives actively promoted in schools and wider society. Their main concern is ultimately with monitoring everyone.