Australia Wants to Boot Kids off Social Media. Meta Says: Make Apple and Google Do It.

Meta thinks it’s a wonderful idea to safeguard children on its vast social media platforms, and it wants Apple and Google to get right to it. 

Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the government will push ahead with plans to introduce a new law banning children from using social media as a way of shielding them from the various harms that lurk online. Details on what the law might actually look like are scant, but Meta came in hot on Friday suggesting that the burden of keeping minors off the socials should fall on app stores, i.e. Apple and Google. It’s part of Meta’s broader beef with the app store operators over age controls.

Do Australians Love Their Children Too?

Australia isn’t the first place to think seriously about age-gating social media and mandating some form of age restrictions. Texas brought in a bill in June last year that requires parental consent for under-18s to access digital services. In response to the emerging trend for more stringent policies around children accessing social media platforms, Meta has done all it can to put the onus of age verification on the app store operators, arguing kids (just like the rest of us) primarily access Meta’s services via their phones. Meta has even proposed US federal legislation to that effect, and to eschew any accusations that it’s shifting blame, it insists that it would apply to its own app store for its VR platform.

There is the distinct possibility that Australia’s proposed ban never materializes, but assuming it does, few expect it will achieve what it set out to do, which is improve the lives of young people: 

• “It’s probably well-meant, but very, very poorly thought out,” Andrew Przybylski, Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology at the University of Oxford, told The Daily Upside. “The evidence is really clear that young people use social media to reach out and to receive social support,” he added.
• “What is being described is a direct violation of the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child,” Przybylski said. “Children have a right to be safe, and we should be protecting them much more […] but they have a right to association, they have a right to play, they have a right to information.”

Przybylski isn’t the only skeptic, more than 120 academics and experts wrote an open letter to Albanese saying a ban would be “too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively.”

Everything’s Social Now: Quite apart from whether a ban would help children’s wellbeing is the question of how on earth Australia would enforce it, and what it would count as social media. “Fortnite is social media, Roblox is social media, YouTube is social media, GitHub is social media — it’s not just TikTok,” Przybylski said. Even Google Docs could be a weapon for mass socialization.