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A little while ago I wrote an article on how the Australian Government is trying to convince itself that its social media ban for under-16s is actually working. Well, here’s another reality check for them.
It has been almost two months since Australia's world-first social media ban for under-16s came into effect, and for Adyan, 14, life has not changed too much.
“I thought the ban would be, like, way more strict, but it ended up being really, like, chill, like, nothing happened,” he said.
“It’s completely useless.”
[…] “Snapchat thought I was over 16, so my Snapchat account did not get banned and same on my TikTok, but Instagram, I needed to show my driver’s licence because it wasn’t letting me use my face.”
Adyan said that while his Instagram account was initially banned, this was only a small hurdle.
“It wasn’t letting me use my face, so I got my friend’s driver’s licence, and then I used it, and then it worked, so now I have all social media.”
The ABC spoke with teenagers across the country. Most of them had not been banned. Those who had found ways around it.
[…] Alby, 14, also never received a warning. Instead, he has seen the ban spawn a new wave of entrepreneurs.
“Now there’s sort of like a market for it of younger people under the age of 16 giving money to their friends or people they know that are older to do ID scans for them, or your parents doing it for you. So it’s really easy to get around.”
Where there’s a want, there’s a market.
[…] So, who’s actually been banned?
Before 10 December, more than 2.3 million Australians between eight and 15 used at least one social media platform.
According to data from the eSafety commissioner, within that cohort, there were more than 850,000 Snapchat users and more than 700,000 Instagram accounts.
Last month, the federal government said the social media ban was “working”, citing that more than 4.7 million under-16 accounts had been either deactivated or removed since the ban came into effect.
Love the quotes around “working”. Even the ABC knows the government is full of it.
Meta said it has removed 173,000 users from Facebook and 330,000 from Instagram, while Snapchat said it has locked or disabled more than 415,000 accounts.
This equates to roughly 44 per cent of under-16 users blocked from Instagram, while 48 per cent of under-16 users have had their Snapchat accounts deactivated.
It is unclear, however, whether this accounts for teenagers who have reactivated their accounts or created new ones.
It is likely that this is an overestimation as well.
This is pretty hilarious. You could do a whole Monty Python script. Question is: who would we get to play Albo?
