Ban goes into effect on December 10. Affects children under 16. Comes with heavy fines for companies who fail to comply.https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2025/12/the-end-of-kids-on-social-media/685127/Article paywall can be bypassed by blocking javascript.
Australia is actually doing this. As of December 10, no one under 16 will be allowed to have an account on TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, or basically any other platform an average teen might care about. Other countries have attempted partial restrictions, but Australia’s Online Safety Amendment is the first real ban, and it comes with heavy fines for social-media companies that fail to comply. “Social media was a big social experiment,” says Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, who is in charge of enforcing the law. “In some ways, this is an antidote social experiment.”The inspiration came from Annabel West, who is married to Peter Malinauskas, South Australia’s premier (roughly the equivalent of a governor). Last year, she read The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, a best seller by Jonathan Haidt, arguing that among teens, a spike in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and eating disorders coincided with the wide distribution of cellphones. Australia has a history of sudden, sweeping social reforms. In 1996, shortly after the Port Arthur massacre, in Tasmania, the country introduced dramatic restrictions on firearms. Malinauskas drafted the social-media legislation for South Australia, and within a year, the Online Safety Amendment passed as national law.
The law somewhat vaguely requires social-media companies to take “reasonable steps” to stop kids under 16 from having or creating accounts on their platforms. The social-media companies initially responded predictably, Inman Grant told us, saying they couldn’t possibly comply and that they had no idea who was actually under 16. But Inman Grant, an American who worked for 20 years in Big Tech, rolls her eyes at most of their excuses and is determined to push them to do better.
Besides the obvious proponents, parents, families of these kids, and teachers.. I am reminded of an Atlantic article wherein the message was simply that screen time is futile. Screens are everywhere. I do appreciate the description 'social antidote experiment' and feel this is a step in the right direction... not much will change unless content creators and multi-billion dollar companies change their agenda. But I suppose, this movement coupled with high-school and elementary school media bans could be a small victory, albeit in baby steps.
I hope it works out, but this feels like a good faith decision that will fail catastrophically
Come on, people would just switch socials to somewhere obsecure
Rosin: Starting on December 10, which is just around the start of Australian summer break, a new law called the Online Safety Amendment takes effect. And when it does, no one under the age of 16 will be legally permitted to have an account on any of the most popular social-media platforms.That includes Facebook, Instagram, Kik, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube, so nearly all of them. Companies that violate the law will be fined in the tens of millions.This is not one of those vague “protect the kids” laws that everyone can pretty much ignore. Officials in Australia have been negotiating with social-media companies for the better part of a year, hearing out their excuses and pushing right through them.Australia is serious, and young Australians are just realizing what’s about to hit them.>Katherine: My name’s Katherine. I’m 15. I’m in year nine.Rosin: Katherine—we’re using her first name because she’s a minor—made her first social-media account when she was 10 or 11. Snapchat is her favorite.>Katherine: I wake up; I message my friends, ask what they’re doing today, making plans and stuff like that. Just keeping in contact with them.Rosin: And like a lot of Australian teens, Katherine is dreading this change.>Katherine: I don’t really care about the videos and stuff; I just wanna be able to communicate with my friends. And without that, I feel like I can’t, because I don’t really have anyone’s numbers, because it’s inconvenient. You know what I mean? I just feel like I’ll lose all my friendships.Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. The Online Safety Amendment is a pretty radical experiment. It is largely crafted and championed by adults, and its effects will be felt most acutely by kids.
Rosin: In 2023, the senate in France passed a similar law. It banned teens under 15 from using social media without a parent’s consent.But the French law has yet to be enforced. It ran into political, legal, and technical issues. A headline at the time referred to it as “the most profound social media ban that never happened.”The really tricky thing here with these bans seems to be how to actually enforce age verification. A lot of governments get tripped up on that step.But in Australia, they’ve found a truly dogged bureaucrat, someone who just isn’t moved by the many excuses that the social-media companies make.>Julie Inman Grant: This is part of the Big Tech playbook, where you had them saying, Oh, it’s too hard. Thirteen to 15 is a novel age. We can never do that. We don’t actually know. Oh, we don’t have any underaged users on our accounts.Rosin: That is Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner. And, yes, that’s an American accent. Inman Grant was hired partly because, for about two decades, she worked in various Big Tech companies—Microsoft, Twitter, Adobe—and, much of that time, she was working on safety policy.When the Online Safety Amendment was signed into law last year, it required social media companies to take “reasonable steps” to stop kids under 16 from having or creating accounts on their platforms. Companies found to be slacking on enforcement can be fined up to nearly 50 million Australian dollars, or about 32 million U.S. dollars.Simple enough on paper. But it’s Inman Grant’s job as the e-safety commissioner to actually figure out what counts as “reasonable steps” and then how to hold the companies accountable.
Starting in late November, tons of kids under 16 across Australia started getting notifications from some of their favorite social-media apps telling them that their account will either be deleted or suspended next week.Some people who might fall in a gray zone—like, it’s not obvious if they’re over 16 based on their search histories or other data—will be required to verify their age on December 10, whether that’s with a government ID or something like an AI-powered face scan.>Inman Grant: So what we’re asking the companies to do on December 10 is to deactivate or remove as many under-16 accounts as they can identify.>We’ve also put the burden on them. Of course, we know that children are going to try and use VPNs and get around things, but the burden’s on the platforms to prevent circumvention.Rosin: What she’s talking about here is kids circumventing the law by using a virtual private network, or VPN, to make the platforms think they’re accessing them from a country other than Australia. Several kids we heard from mentioned that they or their friends planned to use a VPN.But Inman Grant is not daunted by this plan. She says tech companies should be able to catch kids using VPNs too.>Inman Grant: Netflix does it very effectively, and we see other companies doing that as well, so they know how to do this.
It confounds and frustrated me that the people who have put these policies in place, even if they had good intentions, don't understand that this isn't going to stop kids from interacting with each other in similar ways, it's just going to push tjem to do it in ways that are less easy to track and monitor which is only going to make any issue they thought this would help with far, far worse. At least on snapchat and tiktok there were at least nominal checks that one of the teens in a group wasn't some 60 year old pervert worming his way in. That's completely out the window now, and probably the reason in the first place.
Im not worried because 4chan is full of people who already told OFCOM to frigg off because they don’t support censorship and won’t bow to someone who has no authority over them, which is UNFATHOMABLY BASED, so if she comes looking to pick a fight, WOMP WOMP, she’s already lost and so have her globalist buddies who are trying to introduce the KOSA act in the USA.
>>1462337Maybe this will motivate the kids to be more computer savvy. I've seen a lot of zoomers with less knowledge than millenials. Gen A needs to reverse that trend.
>>1462365Katherine says she just messages friends but anyone who's spent enough time with teens knows they are pathological liars.She probably gets drugs and arranges to get gang banged by anyone and everyone on social media.
>>1462339I can practically see the smugness oozing out of that statement. Yes, you fucking freak, it IS unreasonable to demand that these websites just ID every single person that uses them, that’s fucking insane. You either know that and you’re a fucking snake, or you don’t and you’re a fucking idiot.
>>1462370Your confidence is unfounded. There’s already age verification and censorship laws creeping across the country state-wise, and KOSA headed back to congress in the near future along with a whole package of similar bills.
>>1462393It's possible but it depends on the mentality of the generation. Zoomers in general aren't very rebellious. They just kind of do what they're told to do and follow trends other zoomers follow. I'm not sure alphoomers will be different. Maybe they will be since they will be growing up in harder times and will have to learn to be more self reliant.
Good. Let’s ban children from airplanes next.
If you don’t trust the people,you make them untrustworthy.
>>1462337Good. Deleting my social media was a choice I have not regretted.>>1462965Ban babies. I don't need to hear screaming for the entire flight.
This fails for the same shitty reasons ID Verification laws fail: They're laws on adults to catch minors who are violating the law anyway. They already know they're going against the ToS by signing up. They don't give a fucking shit. "YES I AM 18" is the first thing anyone who used the internet for the first time ever clicked. This shit is gayer and faker than even those attempts, it's just another way to get PII linked to your posting history so they can harvest your data for AI
>>1462975Yeah fuck people unironically. Imaging trusting some random pajeet who calls you from the IRS.
>>1462393>Maybe this will motivate the kids to be more computer savvyyepI'm Russian and from what I've noticed most 8 year olds not have VPNs because of recent RKN's Roblox ban
>>1463370 >notnow
Well, there goes my masturbation material.
They banned Youtube for under 16s?? Ridiculous, it's an amazing learning platform
>>1462337Banning kids from youtube, modern sanitized version of it, is weird to me.
>>1463802And seemingly they didn't ban Discord.Silly shit.
>>1464157anon they didn't ban 4chanimagine having no YouTube but still be able to shitpost on 4chan couldn't be me haha
The real reason this is happening here is because we have a highly concentrated and very powerful established media industry. The political class do whatever they say. They wanted big tech to be forced to pay them for news content, and they go it.Kids are spending all their time on social media and totally disengaged from MSM, so ban them.The proof is in the fact that YouTube is included. Literally the most benign place on the internet where you can watch what interests you, not what's served to you, and it's banned because it has a "comments section". LMAO what about MSM news websites?
It failed anyway.
