Firms have come ‘kicking and screaming’, regulator says

Social media platforms do not want Australia’s social media ban to succeed if it encourages other countries to follow suit, the country’s internet regulator told the BBC.

“These companies came into this regime kicking and screaming, very reluctantly,” said eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

In December, Australia began forcing social media companies to block users under 16 from having accounts on their platforms, a policy that is being closely watched by other world governments.

The United Kingdom is also considering similar legislation; This week the House of Lords voted to back the ban on under-16s with an amendment to the government’s schools bill.

Australia’s ban has been justified by campaigners and the government as necessary to protect children from harmful content and algorithms on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

Companies including Meta said they agreed more was needed to keep young people safe online but did not think a blanket ban was the solution, with some experts voicing similar concerns.

In an update earlier this month, the Australian government declared the policy a huge success, with 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children having already been closed.

Inman Grant told the BBC that children were proving to be an “incredibly lucrative” market for social media platforms, highlighting the addictive properties of platforms originally designed for adults.

“They’re building a pipeline for the future and they don’t want this to be the first domino,” he said, adding that they didn’t have a “huge incentive” to comply with the ban “perfectly.”

“We’ve always had to do a bit of a dance with tech companies, they clearly don’t like being regulated.”

While the law went into effect a little more than a month ago, researchers are still carefully monitoring emerging behavioral changes among teens, Inman Grant said.

One criticism was that under-16s would migrate to other platforms following the ban, but Inman Grant said the data showed the opposite. He claims that while there was an initial increase in downloads of other social media apps, there was no sustained increase in their usage.

Another concern was that children could relatively easily bypass the ban, either by fooling the technology that performs age checks or by finding other, potentially less safe places to congregate online.

Under the law, firms face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($33 million, £24.5 million) if they fail to take “reasonable steps” to keep children off their platforms, and Inman Grant said a second set of notices of concern were about to be sent to companies, naming the Snapchat platform as a key focus.

“[The policy] “It’s certainly exceeding our expectations, but we’re playing the long game here,” he said, adding that regulators will always have to take a dynamic approach to young people’s online safety.

Australia is not the first country to try to limit children’s use of social media. But along with a higher age limit of 16, this is the first country to reject an exemption for parental consent in such a policy; This makes its laws the strictest in the world.

Ten platforms are currently included in the ban: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming platforms Kick and Twitch.

It doesn’t currently include dating websites, gaming platforms like Roblox and Discord, or AI chatbots, which have made headlines for allegedly encouraging children to kill themselves and engaging in “raunchy” conversations with minors.

While social media platforms have regularly pushed back against the legislation, Meta has argued that age verification should happen at the app store level (which they argued would reduce the compliance burden on both regulators and the apps themselves) and that exemptions for parental consent should be created.

Although Reddit complied with the ban, it has also launched a challenge in Australia’s highest court, which will argue that the policy has serious implications for privacy and political rights.

Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells has previously said the government will not bow to legal threats.

“We will not be afraid of big tech. We will stand firm on behalf of Australian parents,” he told parliament in November.