Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is the social media ban for children under 16 in Australia?
Five months ago, Australia brought in a world-first social media ban for children aged under 16. The original goal was to protect kids from potential harms of social media like online bullying and mental health concerns.
Chapter 3: What were the original goals of the social media ban?
And aside from Australian parents keen to see how this is all going to work, there are also a lot of other countries who are thinking about something similar, keeping an eye on what's going on here. So with new studies coming out, giving us a better picture of if this ban is working or not, we thought we'd check in on how it's going. With Shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories.
I'm Andrew Williams. And I'm Bryce Calvert. Bryce, thank you very much for joining us. I can't imagine there are people who don't know who you are at this point, but on the off chance we have a brand new listener to this episode, you run Squeeze Kids and News Hounds, very heavily involved in educating kids about not only the news but disinformation, misinformation and whatnot.
Chapter 4: How has the social media ban affected conversations in households?
So we tend to recruit you in for these updates. Yep.
Chapter 5: What platforms are included in the social media ban?
And the social media ban, I know, has also been a big focus for you at Squeeze Kids. So it might be good to start by just letting us know broadly how you've seen it at your end. Have you seen any kind of notable effect?
Phew.
Well, Andrew, I think probably it's best described as having had a very mixed outcome so far. It's probably the most diplomatic way I can put it. A great big success in terms of focusing the nation's attention towards the scale of the problem, but perhaps limited success in terms of actually solving the problem.
which is to say there's been a noticeable uptick in the conversations that are happening in households around the country about what kids are seeing when they're online. And I think that's probably universally recognised as being a good thing.
But in terms of how many fewer kids are on social media platforms today than there were before the ban was introduced in December, well, I think that's probably been negligible.
And that's what a lot of the studies that are coming out now are about, which we'll talk about in a second. But before we do that, probably worth reminding ourselves at this point, which platforms are actually banned. So there are 10 of them.
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Chapter 6: What evidence shows the ban's effectiveness so far?
You've got the three big meta platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. There's also the sort of video sharing platforms like TikTok and YouTube, streaming platforms like Twitch and Kik. And then the last three are Snapchat, Reddit, and X, or what used to be known as Twitter. So those are the big 10.
Yep, they're the ones. And the other thing to remember, of course, is when it comes to figuring out how this ban is working is how it actually logistically works. And the government here has asked the platforms themselves to ensure that no one under 16 is allowed on them.
And exactly how they're doing that is kind of difficult to work out because it's up to each individual social media company or tech company to themselves to sort that out and take their own approach into how they do that.
Chapter 7: How are kids circumventing the social media ban?
Now, there are a number of ways they could do it, and it's sort of mix and match depending on the company that you're talking about.
Yeah, it is very much choose your own adventure. That includes facial analysis. The age verification technologies you've heard a lot about to work out whether or not a user is old enough.
And that often uses AI and other tech to try and nut out a user's age from their other behavior online or looking for confirmation of their age from friends or relatives or tracking their online habits to paint a picture of their age.
Yeah, so it's sort of, I guess, you might use the word holistic oftentimes. Rather than straight ID, they're using how the user acts online or how long they've been on other platforms or what their face looks like to try and work out whether they're allowed to be on the platforms or not.
And the tech platforms do have some cold hard cash riding on getting this right because if they don't comply with the laws, and this is really a key bit that we'll talk about a lot during this podcast, the government says they will be fined $49.5 million if they don't comply.
Now, no one has been fined yet, five months in, but the eSafety Commissioner, which is the sort of figure tasked with kind of running this and making sure that it all works and kind of taking carriage of it,
says that it's investigating whether some of them are doing enough to keep kids under 16 off the platforms and a decision is expected on whether those companies will be fined midway through this year, so in the next month or two.
Yeah, now that's going to be very interesting to watch. Of course, when the ban began, millions of accounts were removed from the apps and the government made a bit of a song and dance back in January about how many kids they had removed or how many accounts they had closed down. But in the month since, we've had a clearer picture of exactly how many kids are still using social media.
A YouGov poll of 1,500 teens this week found that, get this, 85% have said that they're still on social media and 22% have said that they have actually increased their use of social media. But there's some good news too coming out of this poll. 85% of parents are apparently having conversations with their kids about social media.
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Chapter 8: What are the reactions from kids about the social media ban?
Yeah. So as you said before, some indication that it's starting conversations around this and drawing attention to the scale of the problem coming out of that poll but also by the same token some indication that it's not actually making any kind of tangible difference to how kids are using social media.
So a bit of a difficult one for the government to work out pros and cons there but there's also been some sort of added depth to this as well. There was just this weekend there was a report on the ABC that said that students are using fake accounts to post gossip and malicious content. They're just circumventing this ban by not posting
under their own name, and that is a common thread not only with, you know, posting gossip but just using the platforms at all. A hundred percent. A lot of people are just changing how they use it.
Yeah, and look, if my kids' online habits are any indication, I'm not sure the creation of fake accounts is an especially new phenomenon. But the eSafety Commissioner says that it is starting to work on ways to make the creation of fake accounts more difficult. Now, how they do that, who can say? Meanwhile, an earlier report from the Commission said
from a couple of months back says that there are more than two-thirds of Aussie kids under 16 that are still on social media platforms, which is not quite the wholesale reduction in numbers that it might have been hoping for. And the YouGov poll indicates that that number has likely only grown.
Yes, and Communications Minister Annika Wells really put the tech platforms under the pump, really blamed the tech platforms for doing that, saying that they're not doing enough to keep those kids their platforms. So that will come back to the enforcement question that we'll keep discussing over the course of this podcast.
And another reason that's interesting is because we mentioned before that other countries are looking to follow Australia's lead on this. So these initial findings about how it's working, how it's being enforced, have global significance far beyond just Australia. So to that end, it's being studied overseas. Some researchers in Chicago have been
looking into this and seeing how it works over the first five months, the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, and they came to a few conclusions. They didn't survey as many people as the YouGov poll. They asked 750 Australian teenagers how they were dealing with the ban.
Yeah, and that was interesting because it found that, and we're quoting here, most banned teens believe their peers are still using banned platforms, most describe circumvention as easy, and most non-compliers point to social forces. namely friends still being on the platforms and fear of missing out the dreaded FOMO as the reason why they continue to use social media.
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