World watches first teen social media ban kick off in Australia

[SYDNEY] Australia’s social media ban for youths took effect on Wednesday (Dec 10), a landmark move that’s drawn global attention at a time governments are increasingly enacting rules to shield minors from toxic content and cyberbullying.

The law, passed last year, mandates services such as ByteDance’s TikTok and Meta Platforms’ Instagram keep under-16s off their platforms or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (S$43 million). Australia becomes the world’s first democracy to undertake such a crackdown in response to growing concerns about social media’s harms.

It’s likely to be the first of many. Policymakers in Indonesia, Denmark, Brazil and other nations are also 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 say were rushed through and risk pushing children into more dangerous corners of the internet. Still, Reddit said this week it’s launching new safety features globally for all under-18s.

“I have always referred to this as the first domino,” Australia eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue summit last week. “We have reached a tipping point where something more forceful needed to be done.”

There are early signs that young users in Australia, faced with the ban, are adopting rival services.

Chinese-owned Rednote, an Instagram-like service also known as Xiaohongshu, saw weekly active users of its mobile app jump 37 per cent over the week of Dec 1 compared to the same period last year, 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 said.

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 Sunday compared to the daily average for the previous 28 days, according to global monitoring platform Top10VPN.

Some young people took to TikTok on Tuesday, 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.

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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 and Brasilia show they’re watching the rollout in Australia closely and planning moves of their own to shield young users.

Indonesia, for one, 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 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’,” the official told the Sydney forum. BLOOMBERG