Australia's under-16 gamble: Social media ban's impact may take 10-15 years

The country is running a real-time experiment on a whole generation-the true effects of its social media ban for children won't be clear for 10-15 years

Australia’s restrictions on access to social media for under-16s affect platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming sites like Kick and Twitch.  These must now set up age verification to prevent Australian kids setting up accounts and close down existing accounts of under-16 Australians. The Australian government is considering expanding the ban to some gaming platforms. There will be legal challenges, and there may also be copycat legislation in other nations.

 

The proximate trigger for the ban was the tragic deaths of cyberbullied children. The results of a study commissioned by the Australian government indicated that not only cyberbullying, but also sexual assault and the grooming of minors by paedophiles were common on social media.

 

One big implication is loss of privacy for every Australian social media-user. The verification will be invasive and enable the platforms (and perhaps the government) to collect private, personal data. Although the platforms must destroy data after verification, this may have a chilling effect on free speech since anonymity will no longer be possible.

 

The ban means loss of engagement for platforms. Young users are not only a big chunk of the social media population, they are the most engaged, spending more time on social media and interacting more on it. That translates into higher ad revenues.

 

Remove those users and the ad revenue, which is by far, the largest income stream (ads generate over 90 per cent of revenues for Meta) diminishes.  While platforms must destroy the new data they collect in Australia, they will probably find ingenious ways to monetise it.

 

The new processes of verification are also going to be leaky. The targeted cohort is digital-native. They will find ways around the bans by using VPNs, fake IDs, impersonating adults, finding platforms not currently banned, etc.

 

The platforms may respond by setting up global verification systems and collecting this data for all users because, why not?  Many governments may be happy to let this happen, so long as the governments can also get their own hands on the data, even if the platforms have to delete it post-verification. So loss of privacy, and anonymity and the associated chilling effects on free speech could be global. There may certainly be a spillover effect in India where legislation like the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act makes exceptions for governments and does not always guarantee the right to erasure for data held by government agencies.

 

It will require both time and data to judge the effectiveness of the ban, in terms of mitigating cyber-bullying and reducing the reach of paedophiles. It will take longitudinal studies that last years or decades to assess some other potential effects.

 

Social media is embedded into the digital ecosystem. Kids who use Reddit, Twitch and YouTube learn coding, maths, languages, geography, biology, among other things, on these platforms. Moreover, social media helps mitigate loneliness in tiny, physically isolated communities. Australia has plenty of those.

 

Australia pioneered distance learning via radio and TV over 60 years ago to serve kids on far-flung sheep stations across the Outback. Banning social media may lead to a learning deficit and leave aching holes in the lives of kids growing up in the middle of nowhere.

 

Another imponderable is neurological development. There are some hypotheses that children introduced early to social media (smartphone usage starts at around age 3 for many) suffer from poor development of the “3Rs”. Their reading, verbalising, calculating and overall learning skills may be stunted.

 

Cutting them off may lead to higher educational attainment. Australia could be a “test” case.  Around 10-15 years down the line, we’ll have a sense of whether Australians who grew up post-ban are smarter, better adjusted individuals, or if they lag peers from “no-ban” nations in educational attainment, and/or are more socially awkward.

 

It makes sense, therefore, to see the ban as an experiment involving large populations. To put it in a broader context, Australia’s sexual age of consent is 16, and it issues driving licences to 16-year-olds, while alcohol consumption is legal at 18, and that’s also the voting age. So the ban implies using social media is about as dangerous as having sex, or driving a car, but less dangerous than alcohol, or the right to choose people who may choose to ban social media. Only time will tell if this is true.