Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday his left-wing government is preparing to impose a minimum age limit, probably between 14 and 16, for children to use social media.
“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts. We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” Albanese said in an interview with the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
“Parents are worried sick about this,” he said of social media. “We know they’re working without a map. No generation has faced this challenge before.”
Albanese said he personally would prefer an even higher minimum age than 16. His Labor government is planning to conduct “age verification” trials to test both its censorship technology and determine the ideal minimum age for social media access.
“What we’re looking at is how you deliver it,” Albanese said on Tuesday. “We know that it’s not simple and it’s not easy. Otherwise, governments would have responded before.”
The prime minister said the new policies had to be imposed at the national level, to avoid having “eight different states responses” with different minimum ages for social media.
Albanese added that state and territorial governments would be consulted before laws to restrict social media access are introduced next year. The state of South Australia has already proposed fining social media companies that allow children younger than 14 to use their platforms.
“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with. The bullying that can occur online, the access to material which causes social harm, and parents are wanting a response,” Albanese said.
Although Internet rights activists and civil libertarians are generally critical of proposals to ban young people from social media, there is little serious political opposition to the idea in Australia. The opposition Liberal Party, headed by Peter Dutton, is demanding a 16-year age limit. Only the Green Party strongly opposes the idea, saying it prefers better education about the perils of social media to banning young people from using it.
Critics of the minimum age proposal noted that it would prevent children from accessing useful knowledge online and might even force them into darker corners of the Internet as they seek to evade a social media ban.
Queensland University of Technology digital media director Daniel Angus warned the “knee-jerk move” could “create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world, potentially driving them to lower quality online spaces.”
“This is a very blunt instrument that’s going to potentially exclude children from some very, very helpful supports on social media,” said IT expert Lisa Given of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
University of Melbourne associate professor Toby Murray claimed that social media can offer positive support for troubled and marginalized teens and banning them from social media could cut them off from helpful communities. This would probably be an even more serious issue for people who happen to be 14 to 16 years old at the moment the social media minimum age goes into effect.
Other critics pointed out that “social media platforms” are an elusive concept. It is one thing to propose banning 14-year-olds from using Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter – but what about messaging platforms like WhatsApp, or games that include social media tools like Animal Crossing and Roblox? The latter game is already in hot water with some governments and children’s welfare advocates because predators have been found lurking in its social media forums.
The notion of keeping young people away from social media is not new, although Australia could become the first democratic government to implement a nationwide ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in March signed a bill that prohibits children under 14 from creating social media accounts and requires children 14 and 15 years of age to obtain parental consent before creating an account.
DeSantis said he wanted to “help parents navigate this very difficult terrain that we have now with raising kids,” a sentiment quite similar to Australian Prime Minister Albanese’s comments on Tuesday.
DeSantis notably vetoed an earlier bill that would have set the minimum age for social media to 16 and established ID requirements for Florida residents to create social media accounts.