Communications Minister Anika Wells is meeting with tech giants this week ahead of the under-16s social media ban. Photo: Facebook.
Communications Minister Anika Wells and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant are meeting with tech giants this week to prepare them for their obligations once the under-16s social media ban kicks in.
The new laws’ start date is just two months away, but there remains confusion about how they will work and how companies will be required to comply.
The Minister and the Commissioner will meet with Meta, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok this week to emphasise that they must work proactively with the government to apply the Social Media Minimum Age Law.
A meeting with X is planned for November. The new laws take effect from 10 December.
In a Senate Estimates meeting on Monday morning, however, YouTube and Google’s government affairs manager Rachel Lord said YouTube wasn’t a social media platform and the ban will be hard to enforce.
“The legislation will not only be extremely difficult to enforce, but it also does not fulfil its promise of making kids safer online,” she said.
“YouTube has invested heavily in designing age-appropriate products and industry-leading content controls and tools that allow parents to make choices for their families. Forcing kids to use YouTube without an account removes the very parental controls and safety filters built to protect them across sport, music, creative learning and classrooms.
“YouTube is … a video streaming platform that Australians use as a content library and a learning resource.”
YouTube Kids isn’t affected by the ban as it doesn’t allow account creation or commenting.
Ms Lord would not directly answer questions from Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson about whether the tech giant was still planning a legal challenge to the news laws.
“To be clear, at this point in time, we are continuing to speak and engage constructively with the eSafety commissioner and the government on this issue,” she said.
Senator Henderson described it as a “betrayal” by the government of young people to include YouTube in the social media ban.
The government still doesn’t know what methods the tech companies will apply to enforce the ban, but the Minister said they all received a final copy of the rules they must comply with several weeks ago.
Regulatory guidance has been released, and platforms should implement processes to prevent under-16s from holding accounts on their platforms from 10 December.
“In two months, our world-leading social media minimum age laws will give children a reprieve from the persuasive pull of platforms, and those platforms must work closely with eSafety to ensure their systems comply with the law,” Ms Wells said.
“There’s a place for social media, but there’s not a place for predatory algorithms damaging children.”
The minister is stressing in her meetings with the social media companies the government’s expectations for the implementation of the law and what will not be tolerated.
Ms Wells said she will highlight the intention of the law, which is to give Australian kids three more years to build real-world connections and online resilience.
She said the government will work with platforms to assist with implementation, but there is no excuse for not being ready.
Social media platforms will not be required to verify the ages of all their users when the ban on children’s use comes into effect, but they will need to show they are doing everything necessary to remove the accounts of under-16s.
The government has adopted a “lighter approach” to how platforms verify the ages of their users and is trying to prevent them from collecting more data than necessary.
But the platforms will have to satisfy the eSafety watchdog that they have taken “reasonable steps” to keep children off their sites.
When releasing the regulations, Commissioner Julie Inman Grant suggested that the ban will likely not be immediately applied by most companies, as they will need to reconfigure technologies and introduce new processes.
But she wants to hear complaints from the public if they are aware of platforms that allow children under 16 to continue using them.
“If we detect that there is a really egregious oversight, or too much is being missed, then we will talk to the companies about the need to retune their technologies,” she said.
