Australia’s young people are way too smart for Australia’s politicians. See the recent implementation of Australia’s “Social Media Minimum Age Act.”
The Aussie law is meant to protect youths from the alleged harms of social media. The law’s conceit won’t age well.
Easily missed by Australia’s political class is that the innocuous sounding legislation aims to protect young people born after 2010. Which foretells the Social Media Minimum Age Act’s substantial futility.
Those born after 2010 quite logically have no sense of life without technology, including the myriad fruits of the internet. Having been immersed in it to varying degrees almost from Day One, they know it much better than their elders.
We see the above all around us through the perpetually exasperated looks on the faces of the young while watching their elders interact with technology. Having known a time and a way of life bereft of the internet and its myriad offshoots, they’re not as quick to adapt to it and grow with it. Translated, "man bites dog" on the matter of technology is older people instructing those younger than they, not the opposite.
Which helps explain why the Social Media Minimum Age Act won’t work. Implicit in the legislation is that mere words will subsume the desires and excitement of young people about technology, and the various social media expressions of it. Lots of luck there. The law itself is a reaction to immense interest within Australia’s youth cohort in connection via social media, and a law will not contain that passion.
From there, please stop and contemplate invariably older legislators presuming to separate young people from the technology they love, and know intimately. Does anyone seriously think those who can’t (those writing laws) can somehow outmaneuver those who can? Hopefully the question answers itself.
Young people know technology, and its various ins and outs far too intimately to be kept from what they enjoy by mere words that can’t be reasonably enforced as is. Seriously, how to police what politicians already implicitly acknowledge takes place behind closed doors through their constant laments that social media keeps young people inside and in their rooms? Tick tock, tick tock…
Supporters of Australia’s rather idealistic lawmakers will point to how social media accounts for those younger than 16 have already been discontinued, but computers, pads, and smartphones decidedly haven’t been discontinued. And as has already been reported, young Aussies are already working around the barriers to social media access, including sometimes with the help of their parents. Let’s hope it’s mostly with the help of parents. Please read on.
Before the Social Media Minimum Age Act, Apple, Google, Meta and others had at least given parents a fighting chance to control the online experience by arming them with all manner of ways to police the accounts set up by their kids. This empowered parents to manage screen time, what screens could be seen at certain times of the day, what apps could and could not be added, and myriad other ways of controlling the youth online experience. No longer, it seems.
With pre-16 accounts discontinued, what can parents police? Some will maintain their vigilance as part of keeping their kids online, but surely some won’t. Which means the 5 million teen accounts discontinued by Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act won’t discontinue teen use of the internet and social media, it will just push that use into the shadows.
