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Fencing the Ocean: Australia’s Social Media Safety Bill

The Australian government is being run ragged in various quarters. When ragged, such a beast is bound to seek a distraction. And what better than finding a vulnerable group, preferably children, to feel outraged and noble about?

The Albanese government, armed such problematic instruments as South Australia’s Children (Social Media Safety) Bill 2024, which will fine social media companies refusing to exclude children under the age of 14 from using their platforms, and a report by former High Court Chief Justice Robert French on the feasibility of such a move, is confident of restricting the use of social media by children across the country by imposing an age limit.

On November 21, the government boastfully declared in a media release that it had officially “introduced world-leading legislation to enforce a minimum age of 16 years for social media.” The proposed legislation, known as the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, is supposedly going to “deliver greater protections for young Australians during critical stages of their development.”

The proposed legislation made something of an international splash. NBC News, for instance, called the bill “one of the toughest in the world”, failing to note its absence of muscle. To that end, it remains thin on detail.

These laws constitute yet another effort to concentrate power and responsibilities best held by the citizenry in the hands of a bureaucratic-political class governed by paranoia and procedure. They are also intended to place the onus on social media platforms to place restrictions upon those under 16 years of age from having accounts.

The government openly admits as much, seemingly treating parents as irresponsible and weak (their consent in this is irrelevant), and children as permanently threatened by spoliation. “The law places the onus on social media platforms – not parents or young people – to take reasonable steps to ensure these protections are in place.” If the platforms do not comply, they risk fines of up to A$49.5 million.

As for the contentious matter of privacy, the prime minister and his communications minister are adamant. “It will contain robust privacy provisions, including requiring the platforms to ring fence and destroy any information collected to safeguard the personal information of all Australians.”

The drafters of the bill have also taken liberties on what is deemed appropriate to access. As the media release mentions, Australia’s youth will still “have continued access to messaging and online gaming, as well as access to services which are health and education related, like Headspace, Kids Helpline, and Google Classroom, and YouTube.”

This daft regime is based on the premise it will survive circumvention. Children, through guile and instinctive perseverance, will always find a way to access forbidden fruit. Indeed, as the Digital Industry Group Inc says, this “20th Century response to 21st Century challenges” may well steer children into “dangerous, unregulated parts of the internet.”

In May, documents uncovered under Freedom of Information by Guardian Australia identified that government wonks in the communications department were wondering if such a scheme was even viable. A document casting a sceptical eye over the use of age assurance technology was unequivocal: “No countries have implemented an age verification mandate without issue.”

Legal challenges have been launched in France and Germany against such measures. Circumvention has become a feature in various US states doing the same, using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

While this proposed legislation will prove ineffectual in achieving its intended purpose – here, protecting the prelapsarian state of childhood from ruin at the hands of wicked digital platformsit will also leave the apparatus of hefty regulation. One can hardly take remarks coming from the absurdly named office of the eSafety Commissioner, currently occupied by the authoritarian-minded Julie Inman Grant, seriously in stating that “regulators like eSafety have to be nimble. Restrictions, prohibitions, bans and censorship regimes are, in their implementation, never nimble.

For all that, even Inman Grant has reservations about some of the government’s assumptions, notably on the alleged link between social media and mental harm. The evidence for such a claim, she told BBC Radio 5 Live, “is not settled at all”. Indeed, certain vulnerable groups – she mentions LGBTQ+ and First Nations cohorts in particular – “feel more themselves online than they do in the real world.” Why not, she suggests, teach children to use online platforms more safely? Children, she analogises, should be taught how to swim, rather than being banned from swimming itself. Instruct the young to swim; don’t ringfence the sea.

Rather appositely, Lucas Lane, at 15 something of an entrepreneur selling boys nail polish via the online business Glossy Boys, told the BBC that the proposed ban “destroys… my friendships and the ability to make people feel seen.”

Already holed without even getting out of port, this bill will serve another, insidious purpose. While easily dismissed as having a stunted moral conscience, Elon Musk, who owns X Corp, is hard to fault in having certain suspicions about these draft rules. “Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians,” he wrote to a post from Albanese. One, unfortunately, among several.

 

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5 comments

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  1. Anon E. Mouse

    Laws to make the platforms responsible are a good idea. It means that if a parent or other responsible entity like police raise concerns the platforms can no longer ignore the problem.
    Leaving it in the hands of children and parents hasn’t worked, with one report of a kid who was bullied and trolled ending their life – and the trolling of her account continued for 12 months +.
    The platforms did nothing. No consequence

  2. Tony

    The Social Media Safety Bill amendment appears to be aimed at under 16 yr olds, but the real target is adults.
    You want to be able to say something online that goes against the official government or media narrative?
    Think again. Soon you will need to provide your real identity or else no internet or banking or anything online.
    Imagine how guarded online interaction will be the day that comes in.

    The death of free speech is the death of the Australia I was raised in.
    What are we leaving to the next generation: a void of ideas, loss of individuality, self-censorship, quiet servitude?
    Unbelievable.

    And the government gave the public 24 hours to make submissions to this Bill amendment.
    Could it be anymore obvious democracy is now irrelevant?

  3. Andrew Smith

    RW szalami tactics to put pressure on the ALP; guess ALP advisors thought best to roll over?

    Also shows how remiss both our MSM and some indie contributors to miss similar transnational issues in the UK?

    ByLine Times: ‘Bearly Newsworthy: Banning Kids From Social Media Won’t Fix a Thing

    The Bear argues for tougher action to make social media safer for everyone, rather than imposing a draconian ban on children’

    https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/bearly-newsworthy-banning-kids-from

    Related to social media BueSky is going gangbusters vs X; with no bots, trolls or disappearing follows etc., neutral algorithm and far higher engagement.

    Some hesitancy by RW MSM (allegations of deals with SM proprietors), but locally Crikey and The Guardian are on BSky.

    When will ABC go BlueSky & reboot audience interaction after mass exodus from X past year?

  4. Clakka

    Who is more dangerous, Rupert and his like, or social media? Seems it would be a hard call to make, but it appears to neglect a more appropriate question ….. Who is more dangerous, political parties or MPs? The 2nd question goes to the predominance of piss-weak swill vested in their own petty self-interest vs being representatives of the people making up the electorate as a whole. And that piss-weakness is the enabler of those cited in the first question, and corporations generally, and in particular ‘Big Tech’, who now rule the world, jumping jurisdictions, dwarfing nation states, and their compromised legislature, and crushing universal equity.

    In this seething morass of cringing ineptitude, trying to impose mind and voice brakes on ordinary (voting) folk, and their children is absurd, draconian, and verging on ‘alternate’ criminal mind control – government sponsored infantilization.

    It has resonances over millennia of the hundreds of instances ‘book burnings’.

  5. Canguro

    re “piss-weak swill vested in their own petty self-interest”, I met one many years ago… he gave me his business card – he was a federal minister – and said I’d hear more from him in the future. I never heard from him again. My impression on the day was that he was a nobody trying to be a somebody. Politics is full of people like that… it’s a springboard to undeserved prominence for undeserving people.

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