Written and contributed to The Smashed Avocado by Haylie.
The social media ban, created under the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, is a change to the Online Safety Act 2021, making the minimum age to use social media to 16.
The ban originated in South Australia after the Premier commissioned an independent report from the Honourable Robert French AC, who is a former chief justice of the high court. The 276-page long report provided ideas on what the ban could look like, which went through further discussion and changes. This report went on to inform the Children (Social Media Safety) Bill 2024 in SA.
The initial idea, outlined in the report, was a ban for under 14's, with 14 and 15-year-olds needing parental permission to hold social media accounts. When federal parliament joined in with the idea and planned to impose a nation-wide ban, the age was changed to under 16's in the federal Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, which was successful.
There is still a lot to be decided about the ban though, parliament needs to make decisions on what platforms are actually banned and how the ban is enforced, amongst other things.
Deciding what does get banned is the tricky part. This is because messaging platforms aren't a part of the ban, but some platforms like Snapchat do fall under this category. These are still being discussed, but once decisions are made they’ll be made public.
Age verification has been mentioned many times as a potential requirement for platforms to introduce when the ban takes place. This isn't an easy thing to do though, several other countries have attempted to introduce this technology before without success. The age verification roadmap previously made by the eSafety Commissioner highlighted that the technology wasn't developed enough to work yet.
There is however some potential in age prediction technology. While age estimates from a face aren't too accurate, there are other methods that the reliability has not yet been seen on, such as using artificial intelligence to track app usage and make a prediction on the user's age.
These decisions will come as recommendations from the eSafety commissioner, before being passed in federal parliament to be included in the ban. More information will be released during the year as the decisions are made before the ban comes into place at the end of the year.
