Australia will be establishing a hard opt-in ban for users under the age of 16 on eight key social media platforms. This new ruling goes into effect on December 10. E-safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Communications Minister Anika Wells announced the move together. They took this courageous step in response to the growing alarm over financial and sexual extortion of youth on these platforms.
These now-banned platforms include some of the most popular sites in the world, including Reddit, Kick, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and X. We’re particularly grateful that this legislation takes a strong and clear stance to protect children from harmful content and interactions that are endemic to social media.
Roblox is specifically excluded from the original legislation. Government officials are currently in negotiations with the company to put in place age assurance technologies that would block adult access.
“The other key consideration for us is whether the platform meets the criteria of a class of services where there is an exception, such as for messaging, online gaming or educational content,” Inman Grant stated. “Technology is fast changing and ever evolving, which means this will never be a static list.”
The legislation makes a clear distinction between online gaming and social messaging services. Features like Steam and its chat feature were reviewed separately by regulators. Steam received an exemption for the ban. Its basic purpose seems to be to help users get into online gaming with other people providing features for social interaction.
“E-safety platform assessments will be ongoing and will evolve as technology changes,” said Wells. We recognize that families want and deserve certainty immediately about the principal platforms included under social media minimum age laws.
Inman Grant and Wells’s commitment to protecting children. Or, in the case of Roblox, they’re embedding these new age assurance technologies into Roblox to provide an additional layer of protection. This last provision seeks to keep adults off of the service, thus fostering a safer ecosystem for its underage users.
There are so many signals that they can and are picking up now device IDs. Where the account is with their ISP, where they’ve downloaded from what app store, Inman Grant continued. “We’ve had deep conversations with companies about this.”
Although these measures are a step in the right direction, there are still many concerns regarding the impact of the social media ban. Read Melissa McIntosh’s Testimony Against Age Verification Technology Public representative Melissa McIntosh issues her concerns about the use of age verification technology “I’ve become really concerned that this social media ban is going to work,” she said. But now, we don’t know what the age verification technology is going to be and so many Australians reach out to me worrying that it’ll be digital identification that’ll be used.
The imminent ban reflects a growing recognition of the necessity for stricter regulations surrounding social media access for minors in Australia. By preventing users under the age of 16 from using these services, officials are trying to mitigate the potential dangers that can result from engaging online.
