Young people have been going to the dogs ever since oh, 1912. The proposed social media ban for under 16 year olds (14 years is another age restriction being mooted) is but the latest attempt to shield kids (a) from worldly temptation and (b) from the harms that can befall them on the road to using Reddit, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok as maturely and responsibly as their elders and betters do, right? One problem for the young is that their adult role models are not exactly paragons of online restraint.
No doubt, “Lets protect the kids” is a potent rallying cry. Too bad its easier said than done, and the ingenuity with which some kids will circumvent such a ban – by say, accessing a VPN – may be the least of the problems.
Making everyone compliant
Surprisingly little comment has been made so far about the data privacy implications that such a social media ban would pose for everyone. The focus of the intended legislation may be young people. Yet if age verification is going to be a pre-requisite before (a)opening a social media account or (b) every time a site is being accessed, how is this going to avoid creating a massive and highly valuable transfer of personal data from individual citizens to the very same social media platforms hosting the dubious content in question?
Also, as Amnesty Australia has pointed out:
Age verification technologies are in their infancy, and relying on companies with a history of abusing people’s right to privacy to use these untested technologies risks the abuse of people’s right to privacy.
This aspect will be especially concerning if the chosen verification method involves some form of biometrics. Take a not uncommon example. As we’re often told, online pornography teaches and promotes harmful attitudes towards sex. Everyone can agree that such material should not be the means by which young people derive their knowledge of sex, and their expectations of it. Even so, how many adults who currently access a porn site would be willing to hand over detailed identifiers of who they are, and what they like to watch – for the greater social good of protecting the young and the impressionable?
This verification issue highlights a related enforcement problem. Many of the problem sites are located offshore. How on earth can a government convince them to go to the trouble and expense of setting up and managing an age compliance regime and – moreover – how does the government propose to penalise them if they fail to play ball?
Putting such valid concerns to one side for the moment, it is also surprisingly hard to legally define the social media sites likely to be captured by an under 16 ban. As the Australian news website Crikey explains:
The [Australian] government has already announced a number of major platforms that it considers in scope, including TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, but the legislation underpinning the bans lays out a definition that would seem to include other platforms.. an age-restricted social media platform is defined as one that has the sole or significant purpose of enabling social interaction between its users, allowing them to interact and post on the platform.
Unfortunately, such a definition, Crikey added, would equally apply to a site like Wikipedia. Obviously, Wikipedia and its wiki subsidiaries are not the intended targets of the legislation, but they would be caught by the legal definition. The costs of compliance for a non-profit like Wikipedia would also be prohibitive. Any site that allows people to post and interact could face the same regulatory burden.
None of this negates the harms that can be inflicted on young people as they interact online. The world is full of dangers. Yet even if we could devise a workable way of insulating adolescents until the age of 16….then proceeding to toss them in at the deep end to fend for themselves doesn’t seem like a healthy pathway to online maturity. We have to learn how to navigate online, and 16 seems far too late an age to begin.
One final thing: a blanket ban until the age of 16 also cuts young people off from online connection during the years of early adolescence when finding a connection with others can be – in some instances – a lifeline, quite literally. True, social media can be an arena that promotes bullying and an isolation from the “ real” world. Young people can encounter hostility and peer pressure online, as much (or more) as they do in the schoolyard.
Yet it is just as true that being online can promote affirmation, inclusion and a sense of shared identity as well, and feelings of social belonging that are conducive to mental health. There will be young adolescents likely to benefit from a social media ban. There will also be others who will not, and the consequences of isolation for them may be just as severe, or worse. Online is where young people can find their tribe, for worse – but also for the better.
At this point, talk of creating a viable under 16 barrier to social media looks more like an abject version of performative politics. It seems to be all about the gesture, in that it offers a way for politicians to claim they care about the kids, even though their economic and welfare policies are often saying the exact opposite.
Punching down
If we truly do care about the mental health and wellbeing of vulnerable young people, the decision to means test every 18 and 19 year old young receiving state assistance (in every household earning $65,000 or over) is a bizarre way of showing it. The entry point is being set far too low.
As the Greens welfare spokesperson Ricardo Menendez March has already pointed out, any household earning only $65,000 is already under intense pressure from spiralling rents and the cost of food. To reduce state support for their older teenagers and push more costs onto hard pressed families is the height of irresponsibility by the state.
It is also another example of Social Development Minister Louise Upton seeming to operate in a socio-economic vacuum. Upston is proposing to implement a reduction of state support to jobless teens. Elsewhere, she is already imposing harsher sanctions on people who show insufficient zeal and endurance in chasing non-existent job opportunities.
Such crackdowns might be marginally defensible in a booming economy, where employment is readily available. But cracking down in the midst of a lingering recession that is currently marked by rising unemployment – both of which are the by-product of the government’s own deliberate handling of the economy – is evidence of a “let them eat cake” level of insensitivity.
In effect, Upston is using means testing to foster a ‘user pays” welfare safety net. (Simeon Brown is doing much the same via his efforts to privatise public health.) The government is spinning this welfare approach as “toughlove,” and as a way of promoting greater individual responsibility. It is nothing of the sort. Punching down on the teenagers and parents struggling to make ends meets has nothing to do with love.
Sufficient jobs do not exist. Thousands of families cannot afford the costs involved in feeding, housing, educating and training their 18 and 19 year olds. Therefore, the decision to means test the parents in households with insufficient means is an exercise in cruelty. If this government wants to preach the virtues of social responsibility, the maybe Upston and her colleagues could start by being socially responsible themselves.
Wising up
The moment when Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” makes itself known in in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Magnolia, has to be one of the most potent uses of a pre-recorded popular song in film history. Over the 26 years since the release of Magnolia, “Wise Up” has also probably done as much as any formal rehabilitation programme
to convince people addicted to drugs and alcohol to wise up, give up and get clean…
Its not what you thought /when you first began it
You got what you want /you can hardly stand it though
But now you know
Its not going to stop
Its not going to stop
Its not going to stop
‘Til you wise up