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.
We can rage against the social media giants all we like, but banning phone-carrying under-16s from their favourite pastime was never likely to be straightforward. Even the most sophisticated facial recognition software struggles to distinguish between a mature 14-year-old and a baby-faced 16-year-old.
Although they haven’t yet been tested, I’m confident Australia’s tech-savvy teenagers – just like those in the UK – are more than capable of faking digital IDs, downloading VPNs (virtual private networks that trick websites into thinking you are in a different location) or, as a last resort, roping in older friends and siblings to dodge the checks on their behalf. All of this was predicted before the legislation took effect.
Discussions in Britain suggest that everyone here also knows that the law will not keep children off social media. What’s bizarre is how little impact this knowledge has on those adamant that a ban is necessary. It will be ‘better than nothing’, say campaigners. Changing the law will ‘send a message’ to children, parents and tech companies that social media use is harmful. But what kind of message is sent by a law that more than 60 per cent of children blithely ignore?
It’s not that Australian teenagers are organising demonstrations to protest against online restrictions or are meeting up in secret to swap contraband passwords. They have simply rolled their eyes and carried on as before. It seems, then, that the primary ‘message’ they have been sent is that complying with the law does not really matter: it’s an interesting administrative detail, but nothing to stress about. 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’. It’s a gentle nag, but no biggie.
Unfortunately, here in the UK, the law increasingly seems to be viewed in the same way. School children have plentiful access to vapes. Adults routinely cycle on the pavements. An age-related phased smoking ban, which will eventually see 44-year-olds having to cadge ciggies off 45-year-olds, is as bizarre as it is unworkable. Shoplifting is endemic. Few stick to 20-mile-an-hour speed limits. Existing laws are not enforced, while new laws are never intended to be policed. Instead, they indicate the virtue of the proposers or hint at a future policy preference.
For too long, government ministers and campaigners alike have looked to use the law to avoid debates they might lose. Rather than discussing why children use social media, whether all use is harmful, and what role parents should play in determining rules for their family, ‘change the law’ is the battle cry. Rather than trusting adults to decide for themselves whether or not to smoke, the law is wielded and derided. Rather than having a national conversation about speed limits, new regulations are introduced and ignored.
When the desired effect is not achieved, legislators and campaigners up the ante, with calls for ever harsher restrictions. So, instead of enforcing a ban on selling vapes to children, they call for a ban on all disposable vapes and sweet flavours. And as laws banning under-16s from social media look likely to fail, there are increasing calls to restrict online content for everyone. The law becomes a way of responding to fashionable panics rather than something to adhere to at all costs.
Cowardly adults are telling children that the law is not meant to be taken literally. This risks dangerously eroding the social contract for generations to come.
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