The panic about children and social media rumbles on. The Labour government’s national consultation on banning under-16s from Instagram and TikTok received close to 30,000 responses from parents and children in just three weeks. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is under pressure from the House of Lords and campaigners to bypass pilot studies testing how different restrictions affect young people’s day-to-day lives and get on with introducing new legislation.
Australian children have just learnt that the law is of no more consequence than a parent vaguely mumbling ‘go to bed’ or ‘eat your veg’
All concerned might do well to look down under and see how Australia’s attempts at banning children from social media have been playing out. Australian children were – at least in theory – booted off platforms such as X, Snapchat and Reddit in December last year. Tech companies must prove they have taken ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent under-16s from accessing their sites, and failure to do so can mean fines of up to AU$49.5 million.
Four months on, and the results are not pretty. The latest research suggests that six out of ten children aged 12-15 who had accounts on now-banned platforms have maintained access to at least one of their sites of choice. This means that for more than half of all underage users of TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, the ban has had no impact whatsoever. It’s not that children are being especially clever; only a tiny proportion admit to cheating age verification checks. They have not needed to go to such efforts: tech companies have failed to identify and restrict their accounts.
