Australia’s Online Safety Act (2021) has recently been amended to establish a minimum age for the use of social media in Australia. This age requirement will place responsibility on social media platforms to appropriately regulate access to their platforms for anyone under 16. Social media use has been proven to be harmful to teenagers, with the harm to younger users being particularly detrimental due to their inherent heightened vulnerability. This new requirement aligns with the societal expectation that social media platforms aim to protect the wellbeing of their users, and will hopefully help decrease the harms we see from social media on the younger generation. This ban will take effect in November 2025, with the next 12 months used to try out enforcement methods.
Some highlights:
- The law sets the expectation for social media platforms to take reasonable steps to implement appropriate age assurances.
- Penalties may occur if the platform does not implement appropriate age assurances. These penalties are intentionally large ($9.9 million-$49.5 million) to reflect the significance of harms this law aims to protect against.
- The law lists no clear parameters to help determine what “reasonable steps” may be, therefore leaving it to be subjectively determined.
- Not all social media platforms are affected by this law. The exclusions from this bill are messaging apps, apps/services that primarily support health and education, and online gaming services.
- This law will not penalize users who circumvent the age restriction, their parents, or their caretakers.
- User privacy protections are enhanced, restricting the use of information collected as a part of age assurance purposes, unless explicitly agreed to by the individual.
- There will be an independent review completed two years after this age requirement takes effect to determine the effectiveness of this law.
The growing concern of how social media affects its users, and particularly children, has inspired the amendment to this law. While there have been age restrictions on social media use since the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Australia has deemed the previous limit of 13 years of age to be too young a threshold. During the creation of this law amendment, the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts had extensively consulted with various groups such as younger teenagers/children, parents, mental health professionals, legal professionals, community and civil society groups, state and territory first ministers, and industry representatives to gain an understanding of what these groups may think an appropriate age limit for social media use should be. Upon this consultation, they found that the age preferences ranged from 14-16 years of age, with some groups suggesting 18 years of age.
While this law has the intention to protect the younger generation, there have been mixed public opinions about whether or not this is a good decision. One of the highlighted problems with this bill is its lack of specificity on how social media platforms are supposed to meet its requirements. As previously stated above, the “reasonable steps” social media platforms are expected to take for age assurances are subjective. This leaves social media platforms with ambiguity around whether or not they are properly adhering to this law. Another highlighted problem is the concern of this backfiring and instead heightening the very issues this bill is trying to address. Since messaging apps and online gaming platforms have been excluded from this age requirement, the use of these platforms may spike, and these platforms still have addictive features and still present dangers such as exposure to sexual predators or bullying. Instead of helping the younger generation avoid the varying potential harm from social media, it has the possibility to heighten those harms or change nothing at all. This law is intended to help decrease the use of social media in the younger generation, but like all age-restricted laws, there is no good way to ensure it will not be disregarded.
Once this ban is officially implemented, it will be fascinating to see how it affects the younger generation. If it positively impacts the younger generation, then this may be a pivotal change for the protections of the digital well-being of our younger generation. Another thing to look out for is how well social media platforms adhere to this age restriction. What changes are necessary to ensure the user's age is being confirmed, will this require more personal information to be provided during the account creation process? Will this introduce more privacy concerns with how that personal information is stored and managed?