On November 28, the Australian Parliament passed a law to ban the use of social media by teens and children under 16 years of age. The Social Media Minimum Age bill has probably set a global precedent in requiring platform providers to restrict access to minors, citing mental health impact concerns.
It is not surprising that support has been high among Australians, with a recent survey by YouGov showing 77 percent of Australians are in favor of such a ban, up from 61 percent in August. Parents feel unable and powerless to control social media use of their children, and that the big tech platforms are uninterested in providing any help to put in any limits or control. Wouldn’t it be perfect if the government can step in and solve the problem, once and for all!
However, the new law seems to leave many questions unanswered, starting with a basic one: what constitutes social media? Apparently, TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat will be deemed as such, but YouTube will not, because it contains “educational content.” It is also unclear how the social media platforms will be able to perform such “ID checks,” as the government has made it clear that it will not implement a “digital ID” for all citizens for this purpose. A lot of discussions have focused on the use of facial recognition for age verification, in spite of known issues with inaccuracy and racial bias, and other privacy concerns.
Various tests are supposed to follow, only after the passage of the bill, and the platforms will then have a year to figure out what to do.
What’s happening now bears an eerie resemblance to Australia’s attempt to mandate internet filtering, in what would have been the largest of such censorship scheme by a Western democracy, between 2008 and 2012. Don’t remember Australia’s mandatory ISP-level filtering anymore? Let’s take a tour back in time.
In January 2008, Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (now the country’s ambassador to the U.S.) announced the Plan for Cyber-Safety, fulfilling his pre-election pledge. Rudd had won the November 2007 election over Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s NetAlert initiative, which provided filtering software to parents to install in their home computers. Adoption was low, the scheme was dropped, and in the election, the Labor government simply proposed to better the Liberals by making content filtering mandatory at the internet service provider (ISP) level.
At the time, the government set out its target to pass the legislation in 2010, and, similar to their current social media ban proposal, gave the industry a year to implement and activate the filtering technology.
At least, back then the Rudd government had the sense to test before it legislated. A lab test was carried out by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the country’s communications and media regulator, on the effects of ISP-level content filtering on network performance and filtering accuracy. The result was overwhelmingly bad — with up to 13 percent of banned pages slipping through and up to 7.8 percent of false positives, while network speed was reduced between 21 percent and 86 percent. The filtering also failed to do anything about peer-to-peer file-sharing, which, back then, already accounted for 60 percent of Australian internet traffic.
We have not even talked yet about the opposition from civil society and free speech advocates, who equated the Australian scheme to “surveillance” and censorship, akin to China. Even putting aside those real concerns, the most basic problem remains: Could the scheme even work, technically and operationally?
Finally, in 2012, the government backed off from the mandatory filtering. Canberra stepped down by coming to agreement with the ISPs to only mandate the blocking of websites on Interpol’s “worst of the worst” list. Australia argued this met “community expectations,” and fulfilled “the Government’s commitment to preventing Australian internet users from accessing child abuse material online.” It probably saved the Australian government from the unavoidable embarrassment of having its grand filtering scheme to be shown as completely useless with the next waves of technology: the smartphone, apps, and social media.
Today, just as back in 2008, voter support for controlling the internet seems to be high, maybe even higher now than it was back then. But if the technology that is supposed to perform the age verification is shown to be inaccurate and often fails, or it becomes too intrusive, as everyone of all ages will have to go through such “ID checks,” or if a privacy breach incident occurs, or when some of the country’s talented and smart youngsters figure out ways to get around the scheme, public support can erode very quickly, just like before. And new technologies and new ways to communicate will emerge to make sure anything Australia can think of now will become insufficient.
So, if the government doesn’t at least test objectively and prove itself well before it enforces, – or uses the test result to step down, as it did 12 years ago – when the policy does finally falter, it will have no one to blame but itself.