Australia declares child social media ban victory as 4.7m accounts closed

Australia declares child social media ban victory as 4.7m accounts closed The figures are the first to show the scale of the landmark ban since it was enacted in December. Social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children in Australia since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said. “We stared down everybody who said it couldn’t be done, some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world and their supporters,” communications minister Anika Wells told reporters on Friday. Recommended Stories list of 4 items list 1 of 4 Meta starts blocking teens in Australia under social media ban list 2 of 4 Australian PM & 12-year-old activist welcome social media ban list 3 of 4 Could others follow Australia banning social media for under-16s? list 4 of 4 Families of Bondi victims demand probe into anti-Semitism in Australia “Now Australian parents can be confident that their kids can have their childhoods back.” The figures, reported to Australia’s government by 10 social media platforms, were the first to show the scale of the landmark ban since it was enacted in December over fears about the effects of harmful online environments on young people. The law has provoked fraught debates in Australia about technology use, privacy, child safety and mental health, and has prompted other countries to consider similar measures. Under Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33.2m) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are exempt. To verify age, platforms can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available, such has how long an account has been held. About 2.5 million Australians are aged between 8 and 15, said the country’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, and past estimates suggested 84 percent of eight to 12-year-olds held social media accounts. It was not known how many accounts were held across the 10 platforms but Inman Grant said the figure of 4.7 million “deactivated or restricted” was encouraging. “We’re preventing predatory social media companies from accessing our children,” Inman Grant said. The 10 biggest companies covered by the ban were compliant with it and had reported removal figures to Australia’s regulator on time, the commissioner said. She added that social media companies were expected to shift their efforts from enforcing the ban to preventing children from creating new accounts or otherwise circumventing the prohibition. Australian officials didn’t break the figures down by platform. But Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said this week that by the day after the ban came into effect, it had removed nearly 550,000 accounts belonging to users understood to be under 16. In the blog post divulging...

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