World watches first teen social media ban start in Australia
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Australia's new law mandates services such as TikTok and Instagram to keep those under 16 off their platforms.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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CANBERRA – Australia’s social media ban for youth took effect on Dec 10, a landmark move that has drawn global attention at a time governments are increasingly enacting rules to shield minors from toxic content and cyberbullying.
The law, passed in 2024, mandates services such as ByteDance’s TikTok and Meta Platforms’ Instagram to keep under-16s off their platforms
It is likely to be the first of many.
Policymakers in Indonesia, Denmark, Brazil and other nations are moving to rein in Big Tech, which counts young users as a key demographic since they are likely to fuel future growth.
Additional platforms affected in Australia include Snap’s Snapchat, Alphabet’s YouTube, Reddit and more.
All have said they will comply, though many have voiced opposition to rules they noted were rushed through and risk pushing children into more dangerous corners of the internet. Still, Reddit said this week it is launching new safety features globally for all under-18s.
“It is a profound reform which will continue to reverberate around the world in coming months,” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Sydney on Dec 10.
“This reform will change lives for Australian kids, allowing them to just have their childhood.”
There are early signs that young users in Australia are adopting rival services
On the morning of Dec 10, alternative social media platforms like ByteDance’s Lemon8 and Yope, surged in popularity in Apple’s App Store.
Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like service also known as Rednote, saw weekly active users of its mobile app jump 37 per cent over the week of Dec 1 compared with a year earlier, according to market intelligence firm SensorTower.
Coverstar, a service that bills itself as a safe social platform for Generation Alpha, saw usage in Australia skyrocket 488 per cent over the same period, SensorTower added.
Virtual private networks (VPNs), which can disguise a user’s location and offer a potential workaround for accessing banned platforms, are gaining in popularity.
Demand for VPNs rose 103 per cent on Dec 7 compared with the daily average for the previous 28 days, according to global monitoring platform Top10VPN.
Some young people took to TikTok on Dec 9, using the hashtag #socialmediaban to express their opinions on the issue.
One influencer who said she was 14 complained about the new law, though many commentators disagreed with her. Several TikTok users said they supported the ban, saying they think it will help protect younger generations.
For now, Australia’s measures have spurred an increasing number of governments to seek to hold social media firms accountable for content they display.
Interviews with policymakers from Jakarta to Copenhagen to Brasilia show they are watching the roll-out in Australia closely and planning moves of their own to shield young users.
Indonesia has announced that those under 18 will need parental approval.
A representative for a major social media company told the government that such a move would be a “disaster”, said Ms Fifi Aleyda Yahya, a director-general at the country’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs.
“So our response was ‘well the disaster is happening already. Look at our children’,” she told the ASPI Sydney Dialogue Summit recently. BLOOMBERG
