On 10th December 2025 Australia's law to restrict under 16s accessing many social media platforms came into effect. It was declared officially in December 2024 with the affected social media companies being given a year to figure out how they could implement age checks. This also meant Australians had a year to speculate on whether that would mean forcing ID verification even on adults who had accounts with these platforms. It was a good opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons of interactions on the platforms and whether it would even be a loss to be forced off them if you chose not to submit to digital ID or biometrics in order to continue using them. For me it was a no brainer. I don't want to be dealing with the fallout of identity theft so I have always kept things as private as possible online and not shared any more personal details than I've had to. With reports on major companies and government agencies being hacked and people's data being stolen every few months as it is, why would I then want to give details to even more companies who don't even need them?
Having made that decision, in some ways I thought it could actually be a good thing to force me to move away from social media more and it's made me take a step back and assess whether it's necessarily even playing much of a useful or positive role in my life anyway. When it comes to Instagram I can catagorically say that provides very little that has been useful to me and mostly just loses what could have been productive time if I get disappear into a doom scroll spiral. YouTube, on the other hand, has always had a lot of useful educational content, so it can very easily be used in a positive way as well as a negative way. That established, I now have to honestly ask myself why I waited to see if I'd be kicked off Instagram and didn't just stop using it months ago anyway. At which point I have to acknowledge the highly addictive nature of these platforms.
There have various reasons cited for the under 16s social media ban, the main one at the start being trying to reduce suicides due to online bullying, although as the year progressed I didn't hear that mentioned much again. Other reasons given have been to protect them from inappropriate content and child exploitation. Yet, as many have pointed out, bans haven't been put on porn sites.
interestingly what I am coming across more often from parents and other adults is commentary on the fact that it might not be such a bad thing for kids and young teens not to be developing addictions to social media. Of course it's just as easy for an adult to get addicted and social media isn't going anywhere so you have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to learn how to self manage interactions on these sites with parental guidance while younger rather than just plunging into it at 16 when most teens won't really be open to advice and guidance and could be entering into it from a completely sheltered perspective?
One side of the argument is that parents' rights are being undermined while the other side argues that parents are just as addicted themselves and failing to monitor and supervise their children anyway, so governement needs to step in and supervise them (and probably us adults too) instead. Let's say we agree this is justified, you've got to ask yourself if it will even work. After all, kids are more adaptable and capable of navigating technology than the average adult. They are already circumventing the bans through a variety of methods, it is after all in the very nature of teenagers to be rebelious.
My children are in their 20s now, so these regulations don't affect them. As I think back, however, I did restrict and supervise their access to media and technology that could have been problematic. For example they didn't have mobile phones until they were teenagers. It was easy enough to make those restrictions until they reached their teens when they start to get more autonomy whether we like it or not. At which point we need to decide if we try and force things, which is likely to just make them do it behind our backs, or guide them so they are more likely to be open with us and consult us when they encounter dodgy things. I think most parents are familiar with the phrase "pick your battles" and this most certainly holds true for teens.
My eldest was actually the one who introduced me to TikTok and Instagram. Because we navigated them together she also took it upon herself to warn her sister about some of the more dodgy people and things that you can encounter on there. I recall them coming to me about a private message they got on a shared account from someone wanting photos of their feet and having to explain foot fetishists to them. We decided the best solution would be to use the provision to block that account and discussed how this could also be used for other situations like bullying.
All people, and that includes children, are different and motivated in different ways. I was recently talking about this with a mum of three whose eldest two are in their early teens and the youngest is soon to be a teen. We discussed the similarities between her youngest and my eldest who aren't motivated by the stick or the carrot and will usually have a come back for any argument. These are the people where if you tell them they can't do something they will prove to you that they absolutely can and there's nothing you can do to stop them because they will do it in a way that gets around any valid concern you have. These are the kids where a government social media ban is only going to make life harder on their parents to try and make them conform to it. They are the ones parents know very well they will find a way to circumvent it and they'll have a good moral argument as to why they did so it caught.
It's not like social media sites didn't already have age limits in place, but they were always easily circumvented by putting in a false date of birth when creating an account. What the Australian government is doing is demanding that they increase the age and are threatening fines if the platforms don't do more to police it.
Ironically, as a law professor pointed out, many social media platforms still allow you to view content without an account. Therefore, not having an account doesn't protect minors from viewing harmful content, it merely prevents them from posting their own content or interacting with other content to put forward their own opinions. However, I concede that for those platforms with private messaging the account ban could offer some protection from bullying or exploitation via that messaging service. That said, services like Messenger on it's own don't even come under the ban.
Do you think this ban will be helpful, harmful or have no effect at all?