Summarised by Centrist
Australia’s new under-16 social media ban is shaping up to be more than a simple age restriction.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant said her office would conduct a long-term evaluation drawing on medication records, ABS data, and behavioural trends in teenagers.
Her team wants to see whether teenagers “sleep more, spend more time in face-to-face social activities, play more sport, read more, rely less on medication, or reduce overall phone use.”
Communications Minister Anika Wells acknowledged that teenagers will experience withdrawal from apps engineered to be addictive.
“The co-creator of the infinite scroll feature described his design as behavioural cocaine,” she said.
YouTube has taken the unusual step of publicly warning the government that the law may backfire.
Under the rules, young people must use the platform signed-out, meaning they lose parental controls, subscriptions and any safety filters linked to their accounts. “It removes the very parental controls and safety filters built to protect them,” YouTube said. “It will not make kids safer on our platform.”
The company said the legislation “fundamentally misunderstands” how teenagers use YouTube, noting that it is widely used for tutorials, learning, and long-form educational content.
With fines of up to AUD $50 million (NZD $57 million), Australia is betting that strict enforcement and government-run tracking will improve wellbeing.
