Australia to under-16s: drop the smartphone

Plus that LinkedIn post? It's probably AI.

Australia is trying to ban its kids from using social media. Joeys too, I bet.

So they did it: the Australian parliament passed a bill that will ban under-16s from having an account on social media.

Well, no wait. Not exactly “ban” or “account” or “social media”.

the legislation defines an “age-restricted social media platform” as including services where:

• the “sole purpose, or a significant purpose” is to enable “online social interaction” between people

• people can “link to, or interact with” others on the service

• people can “post material”, or

• it falls under other conditions as set out in the legislation.

The legislation does note that some services are “excluded”, but does not name specific platforms. For example, while services providing “online social interaction” would be included in the ban, this would not include “online business interaction”.

Not to mention that this won’t come into force for a year. Which means it’s a ban on under-15s, really, since there’s a year’s worth of teenagers who will be wiping their brows. But there’s also the question of those who right now who are able to sign up to social networks, and will do so (because presently the lower age limit is 13). So there will be two years’ worth of signups whose accounts will abruptly be illicit in a year’s time.

How did Australia get here? Why on earth does it think this is going to work? Are there any other examples?

Let’s start with the last one.

Apart from gazillions of parents around the world who have desperately told their children to “how many times have I told you to put down that phone!”, the idea of “get those damn kids off the intertubes” has been tried, very prominently, in South Korea.

Welcome to the “Youth Protection Revision Act”, introduced into law there in November 2011. It “forbade children under the age of sixteen to play online video games between the hours of 00:00 and 06:00.” Its genesis was in 2004, with civic groups complaining that kids were spending too much time online, and missing sleep. (Parents: this is familiar, isn’t it.) There were attempts in 2005, 2008 and finally in 2010 they got it across the legal line.

The shutdown law went into effect on 20 November 2011. It was applied to every online game in service in South Korea. Teenagers under seventeen years of age were not allowed to play online video games between the hours of 00:00 and 06:00. The law affected some online social games and every online game service that required a resident registration number.

Let’s see, what did we expect would happen? All the children would throw down their controllers at midnight and sigh and rest their heads on their pillows? Or..

The law has led those under sixteen to commit identity theft—underage South Koreans stole resident registration numbers in an effort to elude the law. The shutdown law targets online games, but does not affect console games and mobile games. However, due to the difficulty in enacting the law in some cases, they decided to entirely ban all games of some companies, such as Xbox Live or PSN. Legal challenges against the law were filed by a group of Korean game manufacturers and a cultural organization. After 2 September 2014, parents could request that their children be exempted from the law.

So there were exceptions almost from the start, and the kids figured out ways around it. There were so many holes that it was doomed from the start. The law was repealed in 2021, more ignored than observed. Interestingly, the law did survive a court challenge, which ruled that it was indeed an interference with the children’s freedoms but that being addicted to video games was bad for health.

But don’t worry! Japan had a try too, with Kagawa Prefecture in April 2020 passing an ordinance which

calls for families to set rules on playing hours for children and recommends limiting video game playing to 60 minutes per day on school days for those under 18 years of age and 90 minutes on non-school days.

The ordinance also advises limiting online game playing to until 9 p.m. for junior high school students aged between 12 and 15 and younger children and until 10 p.m. for older children. Guardians are urged to make efforts to make sure their children observe the rules, though the ordinance has no penalty provisions.

The ordinance survived a court challenge:

the plaintiffs argued that there is no scientific rationality in the purpose or spirit of the ordinance because the government has told parliament that it was unaware of any scientific basis for the purported effectiveness of imposing time limits to prevent gaming addiction.

The prefectural government disputed the plaintiffs' claims, noting that the World Health Organization has recognised "gaming disorder" as a syndrome.

And this brings us to the Australians. The argument being made is that this legislation is imposing a “duty of care” on the tech platforms, which (they say) is the same as the UK and EU are doing. Well, yes, but you folks in the Antipodes seem to have a different view of quite what that means.

You might expect that as the person who wrote a book about implicitly bad effects from using social networks would be in favour of banning their use for younger users. In fact, I’ve pointed to the harms that social networks (notably Instagram) have done to younger users a number of times here. The classic example is Molly Russell, the British girl whose death by suicide at the age of 14 in November 2017 after she’d been exposed to disturbing content on Instagram mobilised a serious movement to ask what, precisely, social networks were doing to their youngest users.

In that sense, yes, social networks have serious downsides, and they can affect some users in the worst possible ways. They can also be exploited by all sorts of malicious actors to get children to do the worst possible things.

At the same time, lots of children get real benefit from using social media. The data suggests that there’s a bathtub-shaped connection between time spent online and unhappiness: those who spend no time on it are unhappy; those who spend a reasonable amount of time on it were various amounts of happy; those who spend a lot of time on it are unhappy. The question is whether the time spent leads to the unhappiness, or it’s because they’re unhappy that they spend so long online. But we do know that there’s that group down at the bottom, with zero online time, who tell people that they’re unhappy.

Yet Australia is planning to shift a ton of its kids from all those sectors down into the “unhappy” group. This seems to go against common sense, given that we have the research showing how kids feel about using social networks (mostly: good, actually) and the experience from South Korea showing that kids will figure out a way around it given the challenge. If you’re the one kid in the class who hasn’t figured out how to get onto TikTok in 2026, you’re not going to feel happy, unless you’re very self-possessed. We can expect rocketing use of VPNs and all sorts of other dodges by Australia’s youth. If the Australian government actually had a secret plan to raise a generation of hackers and internet-super-capable adults, this would be exactly the way to do it. (But of course if that’s their secret plan, they’ll never tell us. Damn!)

The other point, made by a group of experts and organisations who wrote to the government opposing the bill, is that this doesn’t put a duty of care onto the tech platforms, because they don’t have to take any care that their content is appropriate for those under 16. They just have to keep them off their systems through age verification. (How? TBD, like almost everything.) It’s unclear whether YouTube has to obey this too. Though if it doesn’t then the law isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

But look, it’s going to be fun watching the Australian government trying to figure all this out. And all the South Korean 20-somethings are going to be watching with interest.

---

Glimpses of the AI tsunami

(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)

• ChatGPT (mis)represents publisher content, says the CJR. We’re not surprised, are we? Turns out it got some element of the answer wrong in more than 150 of 200 queries.

• That viral LinkedIn post was probably AI-generated. Even more reason not to go there.

• AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from (or even preferred over) human-written poetry. Damned humans.

---

• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.

You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.

• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.