Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?

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At this time, next week, teenagers in Australia will be living in a new reality.

I don't even know what I'm going to do. Like, I don't even know what the point of me having a phone is anymore then.

Starting on December 10th, which is just around the start of Australian summer break, a new law called the Online Safety Amendment takes effect.

And when it does, no one under the age of 16 will be legally permitted to have an account on any of the most popular social media platforms.

That includes Facebook, Instagram, Kik, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube. So nearly all of them.
Companies that violate the law will be fined in the tens of millions.

This is not one of those vague protect the kids laws that everyone can pretty much ignore.

Officials in Australia have been negotiating with social media companies for the better part of a year, hearing out their excuses and pushing right through them.

Australia is serious, and young Australians are just realizing what's about to hit them.

My name's Catherine. I'm 15.
I'm in year 9. Catherine, we're using her first name because she's a minor, made her first social media account when she was 10 or 11.
Snapchat is her favorite.

I wake up, I message my friends, ask what they're doing today, making plans and stuff like that, just keeping in contact with them.

And like a lot of Australian teens, Catherine is dreading this change. I don't really care about like the videos and stuff.
I just want to be able to communicate with my friends.

And without that, I feel like I can't because I don't really have anyone's numbers because it's like inconvenient. You know what I mean? I just feel like I'll lose like all my friendships.

This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen.
The online safety amendment is a pretty radical experiment. It is largely crafted and championed by adults, and its effects will be felt most acutely by kids.

And it is truly an experiment. Even the person charged with executing it says that it all moved pretty quickly.
They're not sure that 16 is the right age.

They're still nailing down some enforcement mechanisms.

But Given the research from all around the world about kids, social media, and depression, it was probably inevitable that some country would be brave enough to try this.

The inspiration for the policy came from the wife of Peter Malinoskis, who's South Australia's premier, which is like a governor.

His wife had just finished reading The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which is a bestseller by Jonathan Haidt, who, by the way, is an Atlantic contributing writer.

I'll never forget it. She put the book down and said to me, you better bloody do something about this.
And then we got to work.

The The work started with local legislation to enforce age restrictions on social media just in South Australia. And then the idea spread to other states and eventually the Australian Parliament.

I introduce the online safety amendment social media minimum age bill 2024.

Today, this morning, the Minister and I have an important announcement. And this one's for the mums and dads.
Social media is doing harm to our kids, and I'm calling time on it.

That last voice was Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The law had passed with robust bipartisan support.
But passing the law was just step one.

In 2023, the Senate in France passed a similar law. It banned teens under 15 from using social media without a parent's consent.
But the French law has yet to be enforced.

It ran into political, legal, and technical issues. A headline at the time referred to it as the most profound social media ban that never happened.

The really tricky thing here with these bans seems to be how to actually enforce age verification. A lot of governments get tripped up on that step.

But in Australia, they found a truly dogged bureaucrat. Someone who just isn't moved by the many excuses that the social media companies make.

This is part of the big tech playbook where you had them saying, oh, it's too hard. You know, 13 to 15 is a novel age.
We can never do that. We don't actually know.

Oh, we don't have any underaged users on our accounts. That is Julie Inman Grant, Australia's e-safety commissioner.
And yes, that's an American accent.

Inman-Grant was hired partly because for about two decades, she worked in various big tech companies, Microsoft, Twitter, Adobe. And much of that time, she was working on safety policy.

When the online safety amendment was signed into law last year, it required social media companies to take, quote, reasonable steps to stop kids under 16 from having or creating accounts on their platforms.

Companies found to be slacking on enforcement can be fined up to nearly 50 million Australian dollars or about 32 million US dollars.

Simple enough on paper, but it's Inman Grant's job as the eSafety Commissioner to actually figure out what counts as reasonable steps and then how to hold the companies accountable.

Companies know who you are, they know how old you are, and that's why they are so good at targeting advertising to you. They also know when a child is underage.

They use what we call self-declaration or age gating where they'll just ask a child their age. And of course,

they lie

to get on the platform. So what we've said in the first instance to the social media platforms is self-declaration, age gating is not enough.
You need to use a layered safety approach.

So some companies already use AI-based technologies to be able to assess whether their users are underage. So they might look at things like

13-year-olds speak to other 13-year-olds. They might use natural language processing to look at the emojis, the grammar, the acronyms, the way they speak tells them a lot about how old a child is.

If a child logs in before or after school, they're likely school-aged. So all of these signals are being picked up by tools that the companies have developed and been using for over a decade.

I asked Inman Grant to describe for me what the morning of December 10th would look like for kids under 16. Let's imagine a 15-year-old goes to open Snapchat on her phone.
What would she see?

It will depend on the platform and how accurate their age assurance technologies are. But I should just walk you through because it did take a lot of mental gymnastics.

This has never been done before.

Okay, let's simplify the gymnastics.

Starting in late November, tons of kids under 16 across Australia started getting notifications from some of their favorite social media apps telling them that their account will either be deleted or suspended next week.

Some people who might fall into a gray zone, like it's not obvious if they're over 16 based on their search histories or other data, will be required to verify their age on December 10th, whether that's with a government ID or something like an AI-powered face scan.

So, what we're asking the companies to do on December 10th is to deactivate or remove as many under 16 accounts as they can identify. We've also put the burden on them.

Of course, we know that children are going to try and use VPNs and get around things, but the burdens on the platforms to prevent circumvention.

What she's talking about here is kids circumventing the law by using a virtual private network or VPN to make the platforms think they're accessing them from a country other than Australia.

Several kids we heard from mentioned that they or their friends plan to use a VPN.

But Inman Grant is not daunted by this plan. She says tech companies should be able to catch kids using VPNs too.

Netflix does it very effectively, and we see other companies doing that as well. So they know how to do this.
We're also asking them to prevent what we call age-based circumvention.

So generative AI could be used to try and spoof an age assurance system, as could just wearing a mask or using graphics from a game.

So we've put in a lot of technical detail about how we expect young people will circumvent, and again, the burdens on the platforms to prevent that from happening.

And if a kid still manages to slip past all of these barriers, she's asked them to develop back channels for adult informants.

So we've also asked them to develop a user reporting form so that parents or educators can report that there's an under-16 on their platform that has been missed.

We've also asked them, because some may take a more overzealous approach where they overblock.

And so we've said you need to have an appeals process for those who you may have inadvertently blocked that are 16 and should legitimately be on there.

Inman Grant has been negotiating with the social media companies for the better part of the year.

And for now, she's left it up to them to decide how they want to go about deplatforming all the under-16s.

On December 10th, though, her powers kick in, and she plans to start asking a lot of questions, very specific questions like, hey, you've already told us that there are 400,000 under 16s on your platform.

So how many of those accounts have you deactivated? How many have you seen migrate to new fake accounts? How many have you seen start to use VPNs?

I think it'll be pretty evident in the first couple of weeks who is doing this well, who is not doing this well, and who's not doing it at all.

I won't give up all the tools of the trade, but we will be watching and looking at compliance.

And for those who are not doing it well, she will start imposing fines, although she didn't tell us exactly when those fines would kick in. Remember, this is an experiment.
No one has tried it before.

So on December 10th, what we should see is not that every social media account is going to magically disappear. We know that it will be imperfect.

What we're really hoping for is that there will be a significant normative change for parents so that being on social media all the time is not a battle.

And I think for young people, just to free them up to read more books, to engage face-to-face with their friends, to enjoy Australia's beautiful beaches, to get out on the footy field.

And it's worth noting this was a very quickly deliberated bill.

there wasn't really an evidence base about why 16 was chosen. So we'll be looking at was that the right age and how does this affect 13, 14, 15 year olds? Are they actually sleeping more?

Are they interacting face to face more? You know, are kids doing better in school?

So it's going to be a very broad-ranging longitudinal study to look at what are the benefits, what are the impacts, and what are some of the unintended consequences.

And I think that's the right thing to do. I mean, we've got governments all over the world that are watching.

Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, and Malaysia have said they're interested in some form of a ban.

To be able to develop an evidence base and to look at the implications and then to improve and hone the legislation and the regulation over time, I think is really necessary.

Social media was a big social experiment in some ways. This is an antidote social experiment.

By the way, some lawmakers in the U.S. have become aware of Inman Grant.

Recently, Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent her a letter calling her a, quote, zealot for leaning on X to take down certain violent content and asking her to testify in Congress.

Rating in tech is a touchy subject for lots of different people.

After the break. I like seeing people on like my TikTok say, Australia's not letting kids live their life.
I'm like, you guys are being so dramatic about this.

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I'm Rachel, I'm 13 and I'm in grade 7. Snapchat was my first like social media account.
I got it when I was like

a month after I turned 11. And then I got TikTok and Instagram when I was 12.

My name's Harrison. I'm 13 years old and I'm in year 7.

I met new people on Snapchat that they added me and like I knew they were at my school and I never talked to them before and then I've gotten closer to them and I talk to them. I am Annie.

I'm in year nine and I'm 14 years old.

Being able to like plan things like online is like easier like when you're like making a party or something and you've got like a group chat I feel like that's like a good thing it's like more convenient sometimes I would like literally search out like Sunday resets and then like I'll watch like the restocking videos and then sometimes I'll just like watch funny videos like it honestly just depends on the day I just like watch videos I'm Cheyenne and I'm 15 Everything on social media can be fake.

I mean, sometimes there are really good people and they post really good content and what they post is good. And then sometimes people, what they post are just kind of fake.

Kids have a lot to say about how they spend their time online. But asking them to imagine life without social media is like asking about life without cutlery.

You don't think about it too much until it's gone. It's a means to an end.
And the idea of not being able to access it at all is just strange. I feel like it'd be like

sort of distressing almost.

like not being able to have that type of like easy way of talking to people especially because I'm moving school so it's like all my school friends I'm gonna have to stay in contact with them will be a lot harder I'd be like lost almost like I wouldn't know what to do it's gonna be sad but it's also gonna be good for um it to happen because like I won't be as addicted and yeah

I feel like I'll feel like more productive because I'm not like staring at a screen for two hours so I could like go out and like hang out with my friends and and like do all that instead of like going on my phone for like hours.

I'm gonna be quite bored. Like if I'm just at home and I've nothing to do, usually I just like go on my phone and I can't do that.
It's gonna impact my daily life by like

making me go outside more and do things more productive. I just think it'll be better for me and like my eyes actually because like the blue light and stuff and just staring at things.

I just reckon it's pretty good.

It's going to be annoying because that two-month holiday that we have for summer, I'm not going to be able to use social media, you know, connect with people.

I think that will be quite annoying because I'm going to struggle to find entertainment because I'm going to be at home all day.

At least I can message people and call people still, but it's going to be very different.

One thing that became clear to me as I heard from Australian teens, talked to my own teenage kids, read about this policy, talked to experts, is that I and many other adults who weren't born into the phone age, we don't really have the right words or metaphors for the role that social media plays in young people's lives.

Like, Snapchat isn't just a disappearing photo app. It's how many young people meet up, connect, make plans.
It's the staging ground for their social lives.

TikTok is an endless fire hose of algorithmically curated videos.

And it's also a way to explore your identity. The reality is, if you're talking to young people, a lot of them will admit to spending too much time on their phone or on a screen.

Another reality is that social media is not just something that they watch and flick and scroll through. That is Dr.
Joe Orlando.

It's something that is kind of completely threaded through this generation of adolescents, social, cultural, educational, every every other element kind of world.

She's a researcher in digital well-being and the author of the book Generation Connected.

Orlando studies how young people use technology, which means she spends a lot of time talking with kids and teens, just listening to them talk about their online lives.

I study our relationship with technology and it's continuously changing, isn't it? The technology platforms change, the apps we use change, but the ways we use technology changes as well.

So I spend a lot of time just unpacking that. Orlando does not think the ban is the answer.
She thinks social media just is their world now.

So better to accept that and teach them to live in it in a healthier way, starting very young. See, a ban is a technical response.
So, you know, turn it off.

You know, that's just a technical response. But when you think about how all-encompassing culturally, psychologically social media is, just switching it off isn't going to work.

You know, we saw it's just part of the culture so if we actually want to protect young people online we need strategies that kind of address exactly the multifaceted thing that it is we have to think about culturally how do we shift this so the content on there or how they're responding to the content on there is safer we have to think psychologically from a brain development how do we do it and then from a tech design element so there are three big factors that are feeding into this switch simply switching off off social media for young people is one part of just the technology side of it.

But we're missing the social and cultural side and the brain development side here.

It seems difficult when you like a ban seems easier. You just say no and it just sends a message.
It does, doesn't it? It sends a message. But that's why there's so much pushback and complication.

And it's not just the young people who are pushing back.

A lot of parents are pushing back here too, because it just feels completely unrealistic that you take away this great big part of their culture, like completely remove it.

It kind of just doesn't make sense anymore. Maybe five years ago, but not now.

There has been a growing consensus that social media is on balance harmful for teenagers. What do you think about that research? Or what do you think is missing from that research?

Yeah, look, I think, you know, we know there is. There's absolutely anyone can just go on social media and we know there'll be things that we would rather our children didn't see.

But there's also a lot of like really good use that they're making of it. It's very integrated into their social world.
It's how they communicate.

There's a lot of young people who've got their own little businesses on social media. One person said to me yesterday, like, how can they do this? You know, my maths teacher is terrible.

The only way I'm learning maths properly is on social media, you know, tapping into teachers who might be on social media.

It's worth noting here that under the new law, kids under 16 will still be allowed to watch videos on YouTube and even scroll through TikTok.

The big difference is they won't be able to have an account. Inman Grant's thinking is that the algorithm and advertising will be less precise that way, although who knows yet how true that is.

You probably, though, still could watch a math video.

So I don't think the social media platforms are bad in themselves.

It's the algorithms, you know, that I think are the kind of the enemy here in a way, because they feed on, you know, know, extreme, shocking content. And we're seeing that increasingly.

So if we ban it and we allow children then to go on when they're 16, what has happened in that time, you know, while it's been banned? The algorithms will still be the same.

They still won't have learnt how to deal with social media properly. They won't have any social media literacy at all

because they are supposedly not using it. So I think this ban will simply just put all the negative sides of social media on pause.

Our young people will then go on when they're 16 completely fresh and green because we would have felt, well, they're old enough now to be able to handle it.

So I think in the ban, a lot of things aren't being attended to that need to be attended to. Yeah, I hear that.
But, you know,

there are a lot of potentially dangerous parts of adulthood that we as a society decide to delay or age restrict. Like

you can't smoke at a certain age, gambling, drinking, driving a car.

Sure, there are underage kids who find ways to do those things before it's legal, but I'm still glad that those age restrictions exist. Is that a fair comparison?

Yeah, look, I think kind of a comparison to a legal drinking age makes a lot of sense or gambling and that kind of thing.

But the thing about alcohol or cigarettes is that that's kind of almost like a separate part of a person's life.

It's not like they're holding a 24-7 or, you know, it's in their pocket and they're not allowed to use it.

The thing about technology or having a phone or having a screen is that, like I was saying, it's kind of already part of us.

You know, we've got two-year-olds who are using their parents' phone and it's completely threaded through a child's life from very early on.

All right. So what you're saying is an all-out ban is not the right approach, that this all-or-nothing tactic could do more harm than good.

But also, you do agree that there are aspects of these platforms like algorithms that are not good for teens.

So how would you start to think about untangling some of the good parts from the less good? Yeah, sure. I think what's really needed, first up, I can't believe we're not thinking about this.

I've certainly given my recommendation to the government.

I think social media literacy is a thing. You know, when I talk to young people, a lot of them don't even know what algorithms are.
They don't understand what an echo chamber is.

You know, I did a session in a high school the other day and I got them to look at their kind of feed and then I got them to swap their feed with someone else and they were genuinely surprised that the other person had something completely different.

Like that is a fundamental understanding of social media that we're caught in our own algorithm. We're caught in our own echo chamber.
So that's number one.

I definitely do social media literacy, not when they turned 13 or 16, but way back, way earlier than that. It should be just as important as maths and English is at school.
Really important.

And I think a second one would be parent education.

So a lot of the time parent education is around fear, cyber safety, but parents aren't getting a balanced understanding of the online platforms and how young people use them.

So those two things, I think those two empowering strategies are absolutely needed.

Now, it doesn't seem to me that these two strategies, more robust social media education and age restriction, are mutually exclusive.

But anyway, there is one more thing Orlando is worried about, which is the way the social media ban might force kids underground.

Like what happens if a kid secretly gets around the age verification and then runs into trouble online? The risk for them might actually enhance. You know, we know there's a lot of predators online.

We know there's a lot of kind of negative content on there.

But if something happens, because they're not allowed to use it, they're breaking the law, they haven't told their parents, I think the risk for them then could potentially really enhance.

Like, who do they turn to? Are they a lot more vulnerable because the support structures are then gone around them?

I've written about kids and social media over the years, and generally I've been on Orlando's side, or at least the side of adults don't fully understand these dynamics, so they should stop imposing nostalgia for their own childhood on kids today.

today. But the research over the last couple of years on kids, social media and depression, it's strong enough that someone should run this experiment.

Because in a few years, it really will be too late. So why not Australia?

Young teens, like the ones we spoke to for this episode, who are now 13 and 14, they will surely be disoriented and even feel lost, the word that Annie used.

But there is a chance that for kids younger than them, who are say seven, eight, and nine now, there will in fact be the norm shift that Australia is going for.

Inman Grant, who has teenage children herself, is trying to see if that's possible.

It's probably Generation Alpha that will probably experience the most positive generational change. They'll be allowed to have their childhoods.

And I'd say that's been the really surprising thing we've heard heard from young people, particularly people over 16.

Gosh, I wish this was in place when I was there. I wasted so much time.
I worried about the wrong things. I saw terrible things.
Kids were cruel.

All of these things, I think we will look back on this and I'm getting a lot of personal blowback, as you can imagine.

But I'd like to believe that we're on the right side of history here and at least we're giving it a go.

By the way, two 15 year olds challenged the ban last week in Australia's highest court, saying it disregards children's rights. One compared it to George Orwell's 1984.

But the Australian government so far is standing firm.

This episode was produced by Rosie Hughes with help from Jess Sintur, who interviewed a lot of the teens you heard from. It was edited by Jocelyn Frank and fact-checked by Sam Fentress.

Rob Smirciak engineered the episode and provided original music. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com slash listener.

I'm Hannah Rosen. Thank you for listening.

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