STATEMENT: Delaying social media adoption for Australian youth puts their well-being first

The Australian government’s landmark law that delays the age at which children can create social media accounts is a watershed moment for child safety and well-being for their citizens.

As of this past Wednesday, many of the most popular social media platforms Australian children use are now legally required to ensure account holders are at least 16 years old. This raises the bar from the industry practice of using 13 as the minimum age — which is incidentally also the current practice in Canada.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection gives its full support to the Australian eSafety Commissioner and government for strengthening protections for children.

This decisive policy direction taken by Australia reflects the complete exasperation lawmakers and parents experience knowing that platforms can create truly safe and age-appropriate environments, but instead continue to engage in half-measures, and resist and fight against reasonably mandated guardrails.

In this context, delaying the age of social media access for kids is a necessary step to protect them from escalating levels of online abuse and exploitation. There exists a near-endless volume of studies and reports that lay out the ways our children are harmed, exploited, and manipulated on, or even by, these platforms that ultimately exist to monetize the attention of our children.

Critics will point to the many hiccups and growing pains this new law will face as evidence that the policy is fundamentally flawed; but the objective is not perfection. Rather, it is to establish a new norm for current, but also future generations of children who have yet to even contemplate social media. The need for this is further underscored when we consider that Canada’s privacy commissioner recently found platforms operating in our country aren’t even enforcing their own terms of service which sets the minimum age at 13.

While Canada would do well to similarly assert its right to safeguard its own citizens in this way, the more pressing and immediate issue is the absence of laws that require online services ensure their products don’t harm kids to begin with. Comprehensive online safety regulations are the critical first step needed to pave the way forward — more than ever, we need the federal government to move swiftly on this.

Delaying social media adoption for our kids is not a silver bullet, nor is it a substitute for comprehensive online safety laws, but it does put their best interest first and not the wants of the technology industry jostling for market share.

Parents want this, and, in their moments of self-reflection, so do the kids.