LAW & SOCIETY december 21, 2024 vol lIX no 51 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 10 Banning Children from Social Media Alok Prasanna Kumar Alok Prasanna Kumar (alok.prasanna@ vidhilegalpolicy.in) is a senior resident fellow at Vidhi Cente for Legal Policy, Bengaluru. Australia’s new legislation banning social media access to children below the age of 16 is the first legislative attempt in the world to do so. It comes after years of research on the harmful effects of social media on children’s mental health, development, and well-being. Implementation concerns notwithstanding, it is still a necessary and welcome move, worthy of consideration and emulation in other jurisdictions as well. T he Australian Parliament passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill, 2024 1 which effectively prohibits children below the age of 16 from accessing social media platforms. The short bill which is an amendment to the Online Safety Act, 2021 imposes an obligation on a social media platform offering its services to anyone in Australia to “take reasonable steps” to prevent children below the age of 16 from accessing social media. The bill also defines what sort of social media platforms are required to impose such age restrictions in Section 63C. It allows the government to exempt cer- tain kinds of social media platforms from this requirement. Even while complying with the require- ments of the bill, any covered social media platform is not permitted to collect information that would otherwise be prohibited under the rules of the bill. This includes demanding government identification or other forms of digital identification (ID) provided by other digital ID service providers. This is to ensure that the bill does not become an excuse for social media platforms to collect even more information than they already do. Much of the implementation of the bill is left to delegated legislation in the form of rules to be framed by the federal Government of Australia. Social media platforms that fail to comply with the requirements of the bill and the rules framed under it will be subject to civil penalties. While passed with wide support across the political spectrum in Australia (McGuirk 2024), the bill has faced criti- cism from certain quarters on grounds of potential violation of privacy, being too blunt, and being very difficult to implement. Advocates of the bill have, however, hailed it as an important meas- ure to rein in social media companies which have exploited children’s vulner- abilities for profit. They argue that it has led to worsening mental health crises among children affecting their attention span, increasing anxiety, and loneliness and preventing their healthy develop- ment. In the specific context of Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has expressed a desire to see more children out on the playgrounds rather than on their phones (Middleton 2024)—a reflec- tion perhaps of the threat social media addiction poses to Australia’s outdoors and sports culture. The potential harms of social media use on children are well-studied and documented (Bozzola et al 2022). Social media use by children has been linked to increased anxiety, depression, low self- esteem, and other mental health concerns. The longer children spend on their phones on social media, the worse it seems to have affected their mental health. Those who argue that this should mean more responsible use of social media place the burden on parents and children them- selves to regulate their use of social media. Such an approach ignores two things— the nature of internet consumption has long shifted from desktop devices (which are sometimes shared in the family) to personal mobile devices which are much harder to restrict, and the algorithms used by social media companies to keep their users hooked to the platforms (Narayanan 2023). The algorithms’ effects are not the by-products of social media platforms’ business models—they are fundamental to it. That said, there has been a spirited debate that has taken place in Australia and around the world on the impact of the bill, not least of all, on children. There is concern that the ban is too harsh a measure—that it cuts children off from accessing information and services that may be essential to getting access to mental health. There is also a worry that the mechanisms implemented to ensure that children are not on social media would involve the widespread use of privacy-harming tools for age verification.