Australian Law Would Bar Children From Using Social Media 澳洲立法 禁止孩童用社群媒體

114.8.2(六)Samedi 2 août 2025

Australia has long been one of the most proactive countries in the world in trying to police the internet. It has clashed with Elon Musk over violent videos and child exploitation on social platform X, forced Google and Facebook to pay for news, and tried to filter out large swaths of online content.

Its latest aim may be the most herculean yet. By December, the country wants to remove more than 1 million young teens from social media, under a groundbreaking law that sets a minimum age of 16 to use the platforms.

But with fewer than six months before the new regulation goes into effect, much about its implementation remains unclear or undecided.

YouTube, which young teens in Australia report using more than any other service, may or may not be covered by the law. Authorities have yet to lay out the parameters of what social media companies need to do to comply, and what would constitute a violation, which could lead to fines of $30 million or more. The government has studied how to verify users’ ages but has not released the full results of an extensive trial.

“We may be building the plane a little bit as we’re flying it,” Julie Inman Grant, the commissioner of online safety who is tasked with enforcing the law, said last month.

The law could have far-reaching influence if Australia can succeed in getting substantial numbers of teens off social media. Several governments around the world and in various U.S. states are in the process of or planning to impose their own rules on social media for young people, as alarm over the platforms’ mental health effects and addictive nature has reached a fever pitch.

Passed late last year, the Australian law was billed as one of the first nationwide endeavors aimed at getting children off social media.

Inman Grant said her office began consultations last week with tech companies to set expectations on what “reasonable steps” they need to take to comply with the law.

The companies will have to demonstrate that they are doing enough to identify underage users and remove their accounts. They will also have to provide ways that parents or teachers can flag accounts belonging to people under 16; show that they are countering attempts at circumvention, such as through a VPN; and prove that they are tracking the efficiency of their methods, she said. (Victoria Kim)