HHello. Welcome to TechScape. Happy belated Thanksgiving to all my American readers. I hope you all enjoy a fun holiday party this weekend. I’m looking forward to baking gritty bunts for the Feast of St. Nicholas. This week in tech: Australia causes panic, Bluesky raises the issue of custom feeds, and we cover the online things that brought me joy over the holidays.
Australia on Thursday passed a law banning children under 16 from using social networks.
My colleague Helen Sullivan reports from Sydney: The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) would prohibit social media platforms from allowing users under the age of 16 to access their services, with penalties of up to A$50 million (A$3,200) for failure to comply. He is threatening to impose a fine of US$ 1,000,000. However, it does not contain any details about how it will work, only that companies are expected to take reasonable steps to ensure that users are over 16 years of age. Further details will be available by the time the Age Assurance Technology trials are completed in mid-2025. The bill will not take effect for another 12 months.
The bill also does not specify which companies would be subject to the ban, but Communications Minister Michel Rolland has said that Snapchat, TikTok, X, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook are likely to be subject to the ban. YouTube is not included because it is for “important” educational purposes, she said.
The new law was drafted in response to Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying there was “a clear causal link between the rise of social media and the harm it causes to Australian youth mental health.”
Please see the full text here.
***
Opposition to this law is active and diverse.
TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and X are angry. Following the bill’s passage, Mehta said the process was “fast-tracked” and that it would take a long time to hear from young people, the steps the tech industry has already taken to protect them, and existing research on the impact of their social media use. He said he did not consider the evidence.
Australian children are not a significant user base for these companies. According to UNICEF, in 2023, there were 5.7 million people under the age of 18 living in Australia. Facebook reported 3 billion monthly users in 2023. May 2023. There are approximately 370 million Facebook users in India. Even if all Australian children were to leave social media, which is unlikely, the number of users would not decline significantly.
If countries around the world turn their young people away from social media, social media companies will face an uncertain future.
Of concern to tech companies is the precedent set by the new law. Tech companies also fiercely opposed measures in both Australia and Canada that would require them to pay for news content. The issue was not the amount requested, but what happened next. If countries around the world required people to pay for news, the financial burden it would place on Facebook and others would be enormous, as would the responsibility of determining what is news. As countries around the world turn their young people away from social media, social media companies will face an uncertain future. The pipeline of incoming users will dry up.
What tech companies want in Australia is a measure that would require parental consent, but this would be a more vague standard and one that would divide responsibility between companies and users. Mehta and others opposed a 2023 law passed in France requiring parents to approve accounts for children under 15 with far less vigor than Australia’s new law. However, in an ominous sign for Australia’s measures, local French media reports that technical challenges mean the under-15 rule has not yet been implemented. Also, does the parental consent feature work? Data from several European countries shows that it doesn’t. Nick Clegg from Meta said the company’s data shows that parents are not using parental control measures on social networks.
Australian law shows that this is indeed possible in any country. We have seen the laws of one country tilt the global governance of social networks before. In the United States, a law governing children’s privacy passed in 2000 imposed a minimum age of 13 for social media users. Social network privacy policy.
Click here for a comparison of Australia’s social media ban laws with those of other countries.
What do you want from your social feed?
Source: www.theguardian.com
