Why are Australian teens being kicked off social media?
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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this episode contains references to suicide. Today, are teens in Australia about to get kicked off social media?

Parents across the world know this predicament. Social media networks can be a huge part of teenage life, a place to speak to friends and join communities. But it's also a place where harmful content can repeatedly impact young people. So how can we keep our teens safe on these platforms? With me today is the BBC cyber correspondent Jo Tidey and our Australia correspondent joining us from Sydney, Katie Watson. Hi to you both. Hi Lucy, hi Jane. Hi.

Jo, I think because I have teenagers that social media is a bit like a runaway train in a land I've never been to. And I just really want the train to pull over and give me a bit of a break. It is a constant topic of conversation in my house. Is that because the kids want to be on there all the time? They're saying, give me my phone late at night and that kind of thing? The kids want to be on there all the time. That is where they're talking to their friends. That's where they're making plans, making arrangements, everything from a sports practice to meeting up.

you know, to socialising. It's all happening on social media. It's no surprise though, is it? Because these platforms have become the biggest companies in the world because of how successful they are. They know how to keep us on the platform. They've got very, very specific and very sophisticated algorithms that know that if you dwell on a picture, oh, you might like that kind of content. Let's give you more of that. They know that, for example, when you get a like, it feels good.

So it's no surprise, is it, that young people, even more so than us, are addicted to social media. And what about your kids, Katie? They're a bit smaller, but has it made you think about what you're going to do about social media as they grow up? I think I'm in the privileged situation of watching everybody with slightly older kids. My eldest is eight.

and so I can see everybody else who've got you know early teens panicking and I can take a view or certainly start debating and discussing it with my partner I think no none of them are on social media they sometimes look at what I do but I've got to make decisions and I've got to have that kind of authority of what my plan is and at the moment I'm still formulating that one

Have you formulated a strategy with yours, Joe? They're small too. Yeah, my eldest is 10 today. I've got two others who are younger, so I'm in the same position really. I'm waiting to have those conversations. Luckily, they're not happening yet. My boy is obsessed with football and likes to be outside.

loves gaming. I have to restrict the gaming, but phones, social media, I'm not there yet. So any advice from you would be great. Okay. I've got lots of it, but let's have a look at what Australia is proposing. This is about protecting young people, not punishing or isolating them. This bill seeks to set a new normative value in society.

that accessing social media is not the defining feature of growing up in Australia. I commend the bill to the House. That's Australia's Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland. She says the ban is going to cover platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram. Not that many teens are actually on Facebook, I have to say. But it's about protecting young people from the harms of social media.

Katie, tell us a little bit more about what the Australian government is saying and what they're planning. Yeah, so I mean, this has made huge waves in Australia because of the age 16. You know, that was seen as a high age, a big discussion about whether, you know, that was even going to be fairer

What the main thing is, is that parents aren't going to be penalised. Neither are any teens who slip through the net and get social media accounts. But effectively, there'll be no exceptions, not even if parents agree and say that they want their kids, they're OK with their kids having a social media account. They can't do that.

But the onus will be on the companies and the platforms to come up with ways of making sure that those under 16s are kept safe. And this is the thing, at the moment it is a legal framework. So it's not clear exactly how it's going to be implemented and it will still have

a year from the legislation passing to coming up with a solution on how it's going to work. So it's a big process and there's lots and lots of question marks about how it's going to work in practice. I mean, how it's going to work was the big question I had when I heard about it, because keeping your kid off social media, if they really want to be on there,

aside from actually taking the device away from them, could prove almost impossible. Has the government got some suggestions about how you actually are going to stop kids from logging on? Well, I think that's the thing. So there's discussions about age verification. How would that work? Will that mean everybody has to upload their ID, whether or not they're under 16? I mean, I think there's so many question marks. And the other thing is, is that messaging services, gaming sites, none of those are going to be restricted.

some sites, for example, that you would access for health or education purposes, they won't be restricted. But the other question is, which sites, which platforms in an industry that is moving so fast. And I spoke to, you know, one young influencer who was just like, it's just a bunch of old people who are making up rules for young people who, who know far more about it. It's just angry old people like, ah, ban social media. But now this is becoming a threat. And

And I didn't feel consulted. My mum, did you feel consulted? Absolutely not. This is affecting me, not the people making this law. And were the views diverse from these teenagers that you spoke to? Did you get some who thought it was a good idea? Yeah, we did. We were outside of school. There were a bunch of kind of 15-year-olds, 14-year-olds who some were saying, well, you know, it's kind of, it's probably quite good not being on your phone all the time. It would be helpful for not using your phone all the time, but it's not.

really good for communities. Some people need to have communities online. Honestly, I think it's a good thing.

I think that kids generally just have a bit too much access to the internet and there's a lot of really terrible influences online. Jo, we're going to be talking a lot about teenagers as consumers of social media, but teenagers are also wonderful creators of content when it comes to some of these platforms as well and that's had a big impact.

Yeah, I think the social networks want the kids on their platforms because often, as you say, it's vibrant, it's creative. Some of the best memes and GIFs and online trends have come from very young people on these platforms. And some of the most fun that you can have on the internet is on these networks. For example, TikTok, you know, some of the stuff that we saw on TikTok in the last couple of years. The joke is that it takes three or four weeks for that to eventually end up on Instagram because it does start on these platforms where kids populate online.

And social networks know that and they want their creators to be young and have a long future of building content that people are going to be interested in. And what's interesting as well is that if you look at what's happening in what some, including Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, will argue is the next stage in our technological entertainment industry,

the metaverse, so VR headsets, they've actually lowered the age. They've now lowered it to 10 in America and Canada. And if you go on those platforms, you know, I feel very, very old now going into some of these rooms and these experiences and horizon worlds. It's all kids there. So you can see the kind of the strain that the social networks and these companies are under. If they somehow get rid of the children, how are they going to get them into the social networks that are going to help them create the next generation of content creators?

I think, though, if you speak to parents around the world, most would acknowledge that they're worried that their teenagers are spending too much time on these social media platforms. And that's concerning, particularly as we start to learn more about the impact that that is having on them. And I know, Jo, we spoke to you on a previous episode about the emergence of social media and Facebook was a force during your university days.

You have now spent a lot of time looking at the very dark sides of the web. What are some of the things that actually do concern you when you look at what some teams are consuming?

There's no denying that algorithms push people towards extremes. We now know that. We've had 20 years of social networks and there's been so much research that's been done on it. So for example, if you look at a macho type account, maybe you're going to be given more of that. Maybe it's going to lead you down a path of, I don't know, misogyny or incel culture in some ways, and particularly with young boys, we see that kind of thing. Likewise with women, if you look at

body image type imagery or videos or content that will push you eventually down to potential issues of how you feel about how you look and potentially eating disorders, that kind of thing. And we've had some absolutely awful and tragic examples of that. When you think of Molly Russell in the UK, a little girl who killed herself because she had seen some of this content and it had rewired her brain in some ways, how her dad describes it.

One of the things we discovered when looking at her social media accounts was a lot of content that simply suggested to hide your problems, you should put on a smile and tell people you're fine. And if Molly hadn't have done that, maybe we would have had a conversation.

that will have led us to be able to lead her towards the support that she deserved, that she should have had. There's still work to be done. The corporate culture at those platforms must change if safety is to come about. We know those issues are there, but then there's lots of other things that we're still not sure about. So, for example...

Is there such thing as social media addiction? Is there such thing as gaming addiction? There's a lot of this discussion, a lot of these words are being bandied around right now about children being addicted. I said it earlier, didn't I? Just off the cuff. But there's no real evidence to say that those are actual real addictions. There's a gaming addiction therapy centre in the UK that was opened and that was very controversial because scientists say, well, actually, is it an addiction?

And there are other places, other research that says that actually social networks are really good for children because it brings them together. We mentioned earlier, Katie said about particularly if you're, for example, LGBT, queer or trans, you know, you need that kind of community. You need to find your people. Social networks are superb for that.

Joe, there's also been a huge amount of interest here and the BBC's done a lot of investigative work around the sextortion scam. Yeah, so that's another major danger that we know is out there and social networks are not doing enough. They cannot do enough to stop it happening. You've got teenagers, particularly young boys, in the sextortion crimes that we are seeing that I've reported on where...

You get contacted on social media by someone who you think is a young, attractive girl about the same age as you, and then you strike up a romantic relationship, and then it turns out they are ex-daughters. They blackmail you and bribe you with pictures that you have sent to them. And we've had absolutely horrendous cases, for example, of Jordan DeMay in the US who killed himself, a 17-year-old boy. So the dangers of social media are there. Some of them we know about and...

there seems to be not enough happening to solve them. And some are still kind of debated about whether or not they're good or bad for you. And so do we know, or has research been done, about what regular social media use does? Well, the research says that if everything else in your life is stable and good...

then social media is good because it's another way to socialise, open up your world horizons, that kind of thing. But when you add that into a situation where perhaps you haven't got a stable home life or you're being bullied at school or something like that, then it can just compound problems and make things worse. There's no hard and fast rules that I've seen in research that says if you spend more than two hours a day as a teenager on social networks, you're going to have mental health problems. There's nothing that concrete out there.

But the thing about all of this is you only have to ask a parent when you look at your kid absorbed in their phone for hours and hours a day, perhaps starting to feel bad about how they look or things like that, and you feel like anecdotally it cannot be a good thing. Or that it's preventing them from doing other things. Yeah. The amount of time I hear parents say, get outside, get a ball, go and play, get off your phone, get off your phone. You hear it time and time again. Is there an argument that teenage years...

should also be when teens are learning to navigate online spaces safely. So if they get to 16 and they're in Australia and they've got no experience of this, that's a bit dangerous.

That's one of the arguments that we're hearing on this is that if you're suddenly launched into the internet at the age of 16 and you haven't got much experience, would you know how to spot, for example, AI imagery? We spoke about this recently, you know, the prevalence now of models that are artificially intelligence created. Would you be aware of that kind of thing? Because it's something that you haven't had experience of. There was some research done by a university in the UK about Chinese, not just social media bands, but the bands of...

of smartphones and devices at a certain sort of time of night. And they are saying that it's a good thing to take the devices away and then they can go out and they can play in this less sedentary lifestyle, that kind of thing. And they said that a 10% reduction in screen time means 10 more minutes of playing outside or something. Are these some of the arguments, Katie, that you're hearing particularly from parents in Australia?

Yeah, so it's interesting because when the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, announced it back in September, he said, we want people back on the footy fields, you know, out and doing things, you know, like a kind of typical childhood. I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts.

I spoke to one expert who said, but that's such a kind of attitude that everybody's good at sport. I mean, on a personal level, my son hates football. He's not into social media either, but like there's this assumption that childhood is the same as it was when you were young. And so that doesn't mean that you might not, you know, go out and enjoy a good walk. And we all know that's really good for health as well. But this idea that it's better to be in sports than it is to be online, that's

is a huge assumption that everybody's sporty and liking that. And we all know that there are plenty of kids in their youth who hated being part of sports and team sports like that as well. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of that. If you spoke anecdotally to parents, especially parents of kind of similar age to my children,

The view is, oh, well, at least it kicks a can down the road so that when our kids go, I want to have a social media account, we can go, oh, you can't now because the government doesn't let you. And also, it's not that some people are allowed to because their parents let them and others don't. Legally, nobody's allowed to. So there's a kind of initial, ah, well, great, that's one extra tool. But then when you dig down, and certainly I've spoken to plenty of experts and I haven't found one tech expert who thinks it's a good thing.

So we've looked at the ban, how people have reacted and what it's like to be a teen on social media. Next, how are other countries tackling the issue? And what could these measures mean for young people's online safety in the future?

And never miss an episode.

You're listening to The Global Story from the BBC World Service. There's a fresh episode available as a podcast each weekday. Just search for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts. There is, of course, a whole other side to this debate. If and when young people should be given a smartphone. Earlier this year, we made an episode about the Irish town debating whether to take away teens' phones. There's a link to that episode in our show notes.

I'm speaking to the BBC's cyber correspondent, Jo Tidy, and our correspondent in Sydney, Katie Watson. So we've established that there's a problem. The Australian government is trying to provide a solution. This was the view of one online safety educator. The big reason that I am pro-ban is because we're having conversation about it.

And other governments are going, oh, what are they doing? And how can we all do this together? And if the collective total of world governments look at this as a positive move and maybe they'll do it and that pressure goes back towards those companies or changes in legislation in the US, that's also going to be a really positive thing. So that's Cara Pendergast. She heads up an online safety education company in Australia. She speaks to thousands of students every week.

But Joe, tell us a bit more about what the challenges are going to be in banning under-16s in this way. How practically difficult is it going to be? Well, one thing I think we should sort of bear in mind here is that you have to be 13 to be on these social networks, but that doesn't stop under-13s going on right now. So the issue is whether or not you put in a 16 age limit, how is that enforced? Because at the moment, of course, you go onto a TikTok or an Instagram and you just...

say, oh, I'm 18 or 19, when you're not, very clearly. And there's no checks or balances there. It's just literally you put your date of birth in and they say, you know, there you go. There's a BBC News story from Ofcom, the office communications here in the UK, that said that a survey they've done says that one in five children are lying about their age to get on social networks.

So if you bring in a 16 or in France, they've been trying, really, really trying to get a 15 age limit going on there. You have to then have the kind of the law in place. And as Katie said, the onus in Australia will be that the technology companies have to be the ones that check. So how are they going to do that? Well, they could use, for example, facial recognition systems where you scan your face and it has a rough guess at your age, which may or may not be accurate.

What's really interesting in this is that actually the ones that I've used are really accurate. I was mucking around on TikTok a few months ago and there's a filter that you can use to guess your age and it got me exact and it got my wife exact. But what's funny is they're not using that. I don't think I want to use that. LAUGHTER

But if we're playing around with this tech as a filter that's made by some independent company that might make some money from it, why isn't TikTok already implementing that? And we do see that, for example, in China with their ban that they've had on gaming and online use late at night.

It does make a difference, but it's not being used elsewhere. So when you bring in a ban on 16s or under, you have to then have something like that in place. And also these teenagers are so savvy when it comes to tech. Surely they're just going to get a VPN and get around it. Yeah, we have seen that, particularly in France with the ban there. You can just get a VPN and say you can pretend you're logging in from a different country where there is no ban so you can get around the issues.

But then I think the thing to bear in mind here as well, though, that if you add friction, so let's say you bring in the band, but you can circumvent it with VPN. That is another step. That is another step that children will have to take to get around it. So that will knock out a certain number of people. It's whether or not you want 100% success rate for keeping kids off these platforms.

And we do have one other example, Joe, from South Korea back in 2011. It was a while ago, obviously. But what happened there when they tried to enforce some kind of shutdown law? Yeah, they decided that they wanted to stop children from playing computer games. That's online PC games from 10 o'clock

at night till 6am. So if you try to log on your PC and play an online game, for example, I don't know, Roblox or Minecraft or something, then it would say you can't do that. And they brought the ban in, it didn't work very well, it wasn't very effective, children were still finding ways around it, and the science wasn't there. They said that it was to stop gaming addiction. But gaming addiction is a very, very controversial topic. There are some scientists that say it's not really a proper addiction, it doesn't really exist.

So they pulled it away. They repealed the law a few years ago. Katie, what else are people who are criticising this ban saying? What are their other concerns? I think the main concern is that this is a very blunt tool to be used to protect children, that there needs to be much more discussion. And certainly we heard from Keira Pendergast earlier that

her view was that this is parenting at the speed of light and it's not just children that need to be educated but parents need to be educated because they're the ones who need to get their heads around the media that's changing and understand what the children are up against. I mean overall everybody seemed to kind of agree with the more education the better and going into schools and having these conversations as part of everyday you know conversations rather than the banning

Katie, do any parents think it's just massive overreach from the government? They want to decide what's best for their children. And if they want their kids to have a social media account, that should be their decision. Absolutely. And I think there's the level of kind of really, is this really what the government should be doing? And can we not kind of police it as such?

And I think that's probably what's going to happen, right? I mean, it's probably a similar thing to alcohol. And yes, you put a legal age on it, 18, and then there'll be households who decide, well, I want to introduce him to alcohol a bit earlier. Sure, it's illegal. It's the way that some families work, maybe. But that's a risk that they're going to have to take. I guess people might decide to take the law into their own house. Certainly with things like, you know, smoking and vaping, there's really big tough bans on that. And people seem to be taking the law into their own house. And people do that, don't they?

One of the arguments I was going to mention from some of the kind of parental groups or privacy people that I've read who've been speaking out on this, they use this analogy of safe swimming areas. So, for example, there are dangers in the sea, but you make shallow areas for kids or you make roped off areas so that you make it safe. So the argument against this spam would be, well, hang on a minute.

instead of blocking children from going on to dangerous places, make those dangerous places less dangerous. And of course, that is even more onus on the technology companies to do that. But we have seen that. If you look at Douyin in China, for example, which is the Chinese equivalent of TikTok,

which is owned by the same company, ByteDance. They own both TikTok around the entire world and then Douyin in China. Douyin is exactly the same as TikTok, but it is very, very different in terms of the content that is displayed to young people on that app. It's all about science. It's all about math. It's all about interesting experiments and educational things and

You compare that to the international. There must be teens dancing as well. There'll be a bit of that as well. But it's a very different experience. And I think some people in the camp of this is wrong, don't ban kids, make technology companies do more, would look at Douyin as an example of that being possible. Well, let's have a look at how the tech companies are responding because Elon Musk wrote that this Australia ban was backdoor control of the internet. How are the other platforms, Instagram, TikTok?

Snapchat? How are they reacting? They're all dead against it, as you can imagine. The main argument from them is that we need more time. We need to talk about this properly because I think Katie mentioned earlier, it is a bit of a rush. What's happening in Australia is going through quite fast. And the technology companies, rightly or wrongly, are saying, pause, slow down. Let's look at the science. Let's look at the research. Let's look at the evidence.

that there are harms out there for children. And also, let's look at whether or not the verification systems will actually work. How is it actually going to work? And we have seen some really dramatic examples of that. For example, Minecraft, when that South Korea ban came in, instead of doing age verification for children under the age of 16, they just

made it an R-rated game, which is obviously ridiculous and it caused lots of hilarity having Minecraft as an R-rated game, but it meant that it stopped them having to worry about

about verification systems, which impacts the rest of the customers as well. And I think it's Texas in the US, there was a ban on children accessing Pornhub. So Pornhub just banned everybody in that state for a while from going on the website. So you have these kind of knee-jerk reactions from tech companies. And blunt instruments. Yeah, blunt instruments. That's right, yeah. Is there also a danger that these bans will take away the general incentive to work towards making the platforms safer?

Yeah, that's another really good argument is that if you don't have children floating around, then maybe we just let that video hang out a bit longer or who cares about that content because children aren't going to see it anyway. We are seeing some interesting developments of having technology companies have

youth related apps. So you can have a kind of, you've seen, for example, on YouTube, you've got main YouTube and then you've got kids YouTube, which is meant to be, and is to be fair, a more moderated and protected version. So it's that making the swimming pool safer for children. That's the kind of argument there. And we might see that rolled out more widely where you have a kid's Instagram, a kid's version of TikTok and the others.

Is there any issue around privacy here? What the ban could mean for people's privacy? Yeah, I suppose that's what Elon Musk and others are pointing to is that if

If you're trying to keep children off the social network apps, the only way to do that is to prove you're an adult, which means that every single adult in the country has to hand over either their face in facial recognition to a third party company or to a tech company, or you have to hand over your national ID or driver's license, something like that, which means you're giving a whole nother company something they didn't have before. So Katie, headlines all over the world, lots of people are talking about it, parents particularly.

Do people in Australia think this is going to succeed? I think a lot of people are questioning whether it will really succeed, even though those for and against are thinking like they just don't really understand how they could possibly, it could possibly work.

So, no, I think a lot of people are wanting to wait and see exactly how this will play out. And to pick up on Joe's point, so the tech companies, the onus is on them to comply, but they will face penalties of as much as 50 million Australian dollars. So that's about 26 million Australian.

So if they don't comply, that's the top penalty they can get. But there will be some exemptions. So if they're able to create low risk services, so more kid friendly services, then that might kind of help their case. But again, all of this is still the detail is yet to be defined. But certainly there's a kind of motivation there to try and make these platforms more kid friendly.

Well, the whole world is watching Australia on this one. Katie, thank you so much. Jo, good to have you with us here. Thanks. Thanks a lot. If you want to get in touch, email us at theglobalstoryatbbc.com or you can send us a message or a voice note on WhatsApp. Our number is plus44 330 123 9480. All of those details are also in our show notes. Wherever you're listening in the world, this has been The Global Story. Thanks for having us in your headphones. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Hello, Jackie Leonard here from the Global News Podcast. Did you know there is an easy way to get new episodes automatically? Whether it's the Global News Podcast, or indeed any of your other favourite BBC World Service podcasts, just find the show on your podcast app, and then just click follow or subscribe. And if you switch on notifications, you'll get a reminder too. It's that easy. Follow or subscribe, and never miss an episode.