Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is Just Training A Generation In The Art Of The Workaround

from the the-kids-are-alright dept

We’ve been covering Australia’s under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realized it was a total mess, and then documenting how the ban was actively harming kids with disabilities by cutting them off from critical support communities.

None of this was even remotely surprising. Critics around the world warned about all of it. The government went ahead anyway because doing something tends to poll better than doing something that actually works, especially when the thing that works is harder to explain. And government officials insisted (incorrectly) that the only ones who were complaining were the big tech companies or their proxies.

Now, three months in, the data is starting to arrive, and it confirms what should have been obvious from the start. New data from parental monitoring company Qustodio, provided to Crikey, shows that the ban has barely moved the needle:

While TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat all saw a decrease in use by Australians aged 10-15, the majority of teens who had been using the social media platforms pre-ban remained on the services afterwards.

That’s according to a new snapshot of data provided to Crikey by parental monitoring company Qustodio, adding to early evidence that there’s widespread circumvention of the government’s flagship tech policy.

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The usage drop was only marginally larger than the normal seasonal dip that happens every year. In other words, the “world-first” ban achieved roughly the same effect as summer ending. There was definitely a drop, but it’s just not a particularly big one:

For what it’s worth, others are reporting the same thing. The Courier Mail found that the majority of teens who were using these apps before the ban were still using them afterwards.

Defenders of the ban will usually say something along the lines of: “We had to do something. Children were at risk. Even if it’s imperfect, at least we tried.” That argument might hold some water if the ban merely failed — if it just didn’t work and left things roughly where they were before. A swing and a miss. You dust yourself off and try something else.

But that’s not what happened. The ban didn’t leave things where they were. It made things actively worse, through a mechanism that was entirely predictable.

The ban is basically a test of technical sophistication, rather than a test of vulnerability. The kids who can’t figure out how to get around it — or who don’t have friends or older siblings to help them — are the kids who are already isolated or lack the technical skills to bypass a block. Those are the kids with disabilities who lost their support communities, the ones we wrote about last month. Those are the kids in rural areas or difficult home situations who relied on these platforms for connection. The ban selected for vulnerability and filtered against resourcefulness.

That’s a hell of a result for a child safety measure.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of kids — the ones the ban was supposedly protecting — just learned to route around it. Rather than learning responsible usage and digital literacy, they learned that age verification systems are obstacles to be defeated… which, congratulations, is probably the single least useful lesson you could teach a teenager about their relationship with technology.

Actually, it’s worse: Australian adults now have a false sense of security — the comfortable belief that they’ve magically protected kids from the evils of the internet.

When you pass a ban and declare the problem solved, you eliminate the political pressure to do the things that would actually help. Why fund digital literacy programs when kids aren’t supposed to be on social media at all? Why push platforms to develop better age-appropriate tools and experiences when under-16s are “banned”? Why have conversations with kids about healthy usage of something they’re not supposed to be using?

The ban creates a fiction — kids are off social media — that every politician and regulator has an incentive to maintain, even though the data says the fiction is exactly that. Kids are still using these platforms. They’re just doing it without guidance or access to real safety tools, and with the realization that the adults in charge don’t actually understand how any of this works.

So you end up with the worst possible outcome: nearly universal continued usage combined with policy complacency and zero institutional incentive to teach kids how to use these platforms safely. Kids using social media without supervision or education, while the government pats itself on the back for a ban that exists only on paper.

This was all foreseeable. It was all foreseen. Critics said so publicly, repeatedly, before the law passed. And the Australian government did it anyway, because “ban the thing” is a satisfying political narrative, even when — especially when — it doesn’t work.

And now that it’s failed, rather than admit that the plan was bad and dangerous… they’re doubling down by blaming the tech companies:

An eSafety spokesperson said that social media platforms need to take “continuous action” to find underage users on their platforms, including those who’ve created new accounts.

“eSafety is aware of reports some under-16s continue to access social media accounts and is actively engaging with platforms and their age assurance providers to probe weaknesses and encourage continuous improvement of implementation and settings while continuing to monitor for any systemic failures that may amount to a breach of the law,” they said.

The spokesperson foreshadowed further announcements in the coming weeks, adding: “We will provide further updates on age restricted platforms’ progress in meeting their obligations when it is appropriate to do so but we must be careful to not compromise the regulatory process currently underway or prejudice any enforcement action we may undertake in future.”

The blame will keep flowing toward the platforms. The kids will keep routing around the ban. And the adults will keep congratulating themselves for solving a problem they made worse.

Filed Under: australia, esafety, esafety commissioner, kids, safety, social media, social media ban, teens