Lauren's Blog: Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban Is Doomed
https://lauren.vortex.com/2024/11/28/australias-under-16-social-media-ban-is-doomed
Ah yes. Poodle skirts and bobby socks. Jimmie Rodgers and the Everly
Brothers. Around the world, there seems to be a collective longing for a
rose-tinted, 20/20 hindsight, fantasy view of "the good old days" of the
1950s, before those damned computers starting infiltrating so much of
our lives. And social media bans have become the means by which
governments hope to force children off their phones and back to
sometimes rather violent competitive sports and other ultraviolet light
suffused outdoor activities.
It won't work. The latest example of this yearning for the past is in
Australia where, with very broad public support, the government just
pushed through (in about a week!) a ban on children under 16 using
social media. There are no exceptions for anyone with current accounts.
There are no exceptions to allow parents to permit their children to use
social media if the parents determine that's best for their own
children. The ban likely will include all of the major social media
platforms except (for now at least) YouTube, which is widely used in
schools.
Clearly, there have been enormously tragic incidents involving children
who were, for example, bullied or otherwise abused over social media.
But there are also many examples of the positive benefits of social
media helping children who were being abused by family members, for whom
access to assistance over social media was crucial. And many examples of
isolated children for whom social media has been an important benefit to
their mental health. And children who have created educational outreach
and other extremely positive projects via social media.
I'm not a sociologist. I'll leave it to the experts in that and related
fields to explain the complex and sometimes competing aspects of social
media and young persons.
But I am a technologist. And as such, my view is that Australia's ban
almost certainly won't work and will end up doing far more damage than
the status quo before the law, as it creates a culture of false hopes,
push back, and circumvention.
Like all social media age gating laws, the Australian law would require
ALL users of social media to be age verified. That's how you (in theory)
block the children. The law wisely does not penalize parents or children
who circumvent the law, instead depending on financial fines against the
social media firms. And at the very last minute, a provision was
apparently added that prohibits requiring use of government credentials
for identification. This was a positive change, because as I've
discussed many times, age-verification based on government credentials
for websites access would lead almost inevitably to broad tracking of
Internet usage by the government in much the style that users in China
are subjected to today.
So how would Australia do age verification for this law? The law is
planned to take effect a year from now, and an age verification trial is
supposed to take place before then. Most frequently discussed are
AI-based (oh boy, here we go ...) techniques to analyze users' faces,
online behavior patterns, types of content they access ... and so on.
It doesn't take much imagination to create a long list of ways that such
techniques not only have errors in both directions (passing users who
were too young, blocking users who were actually old enough) -- even in
the absence of circumvention techniques. E.g., how do you determine if a
child is 15 and a half years old or 16 years old from their face? Uh
huh. Hell, I've known people who were 30 and had faces that looked like
they were 15.
But even beyond the mumbo jumbo of supposed AI-based solutions, the list
of relatively straightforward circumvention techniques seems almost
endless. And anyone who thinks that children won't figure this stuff out
are in for a rude awakening.
One obvious problem for the law will be VPNs. Unless the Australian
government plans to detect/ban VPN usage -- which would have enormous
negative consequences -- simply creating accounts on these social media
platforms that appear to be coming from countries other than Australia
is an obvious circumvention methodology.
Attempting to ban children from social media won't work. It will make a
complicated situation even worse, and it technically is impractical
without creating a hellscape of government-verified identity Internet
usage tracking for all users of all ages -- and even then circumvention
techniques would still exist.
The desire to eliminate the negative consequences of social media is a
laudable one. And there's much that could be done by social media firms
to better prevent abuse of their platforms, especially when children are
targeted for such abuse.
But age-based bans are a "feel good" effort that will create new harms
and will fail. They should be firmly rejected.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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