Australia’s House of Representatives passed a landmark bill that would ban children younger than 16 years old from using social media.
On Wednesday, Australia’s House of Representatives passed legislation that would make platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, and X liable for fines of up to $33 million (50 million Australian dollars) for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding social media accounts.
The Senate is likely to approve the bill on Thursday and finalize the world-first law governing kids’ internet habits.
If the bill becomes law this week, the social media platforms would have one year to work out how to implement the age restrictions before the penalties are enforced.
Australia plans to trial an age-verification system that may include biometrics or government identification to enforce a social media age cut-off, some of the toughest controls imposed by any country to date.
The proposals are the highest age limit set by any country, and would have no exemption for parental consent and no exemption for pre-existing accounts.
“This is a landmark reform. We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says in a statement.
This week, Meta and Google urged the Australian government to delay passing legislation that will ban under-16s from social media until a trial of age-assurance technology is completed. The tech giants say that more time is needed to assess its potential impact.
“In the absence of such results, neither industry nor Australians will understand the nature or scale of age assurance required by the bill, nor the impact of such measures on Australians,” Meta tells Reuters.
“In its present form, the bill is inconsistent and ineffective.”
Meanwhile, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, says that the bill lacked clarity and that it had “significant concerns” with the government’s plan to pass the bill without detailed consultation with experts, social media platforms, mental health organizations, and young people.
“Where novel policy is put forward, it’s important that legislation is drafted in a thorough and considered way, to ensure it is able to achieve its stated intention. This has not been the case with respect to this Bill,” TikTok says in a statement.
Australia’s new legislation comes as a month after 13 U.S. states sued TikTok over claims that the video app is designed to be addictive to kids and harms their mental health.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
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