The Albanese government is forging ahead with its plans for an age restriction on social media despite Meta announcing new restrictions for teens on Instagram, with the communications minister arguing children’s use of social media is unbalanced.
On Wednesday Instagram announced changes to teen accounts, including giving parents the ability to set daily time limits for using the app, block teens from using Instagram at certain times and to see accounts their child is exchanging messages with and the content categories they are viewing.
Teens under the age of 16 will need parental permission before any of the settings can be changed. Meta said the move had been planned for months, but the announcement came a week after the federal government announced plans to introduce legislation to parliament, by the end of the year, to raise the age children can access social media up to an as-yet-undefined age – likely between 14 and 16.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said the government welcomed the announcement, but “it does not negate the government’s intention to introduce legislation this year to mandate a minimum age for access to social media.”
“It’s also incumbent on the platforms … to utilise every tool at their disposal to ensure that they can identify what Australians are seeing and whether it’s appropriate for those particular cohorts of Australians,” she said.
“If you go to Instagram’s site even today, they will tell you that they are using artificial intelligence to determine the ages of their users because they have 13 as [the] minimum age.
“The key issue here is that it’s not getting enforced. And one of the reasons why it’s not getting enforced is that there isn’t a consistent set of age assurance standards across Australia.”
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said last week the key motivator for the policy to raise the age that teenagers can access social media was for them to have more “real experiences”.
“Well what we want to [do] is to get our kids off their devices and on to the footy fields or the netball courts, to get them interacting with real people, having real experiences,” he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise program. “And we know that social media is doing social harm.”
But Meta’s director of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Guardian Australia that teenagers would view social media as also providing “real” experiences for them.
“For the teen who plays soccer and is on the soccer team and is trying to perfect a particular kick or a particular pass, they’re going to use social media to figure that out, and in a way that we might not have done, and in some ways that’s the real value,” she said.
“I think they move much more fluidly through these apps and their online and offline world. I don’t think they make that separation.”
When questioned about Meta’s response, Rowland acknowledged that online experiences are vital for some young people but argued the balance was not right.
“Some young people, this is one of the only forms of communication that they have. They, in their words, are able to find their tribe,” she said. “It ensures that some kids, particularly children who may be neurodivergent, actually have experiences that mean that they’re not isolated. So I do wish to acknowledge that social media does have many benefits, including for young people who might otherwise be or feel excluded from society.”
“I think the key here is around balance, and as many parents will tell you, it has become too imbalanced when it comes to children, their exposure to the digital platforms and the harms that they may cause.”
The shadow communications minister, David Coleman, said Meta’s announcement showed the company was attempting to avoid “a real system of age verification”.
“If a 10-year-old signs up to Instagram in the future, the system is exactly the same as it is today and they can just say they are 20,” he said. “Meta will do everything it can to avoid a real system of age verification, because it will lead to them losing huge numbers of underage users over time.”
A spokesperson for Meta said “it’s a shame that the shadow minister hasn’t read the details of our announcement.”
“Moving forward, we’re requiring teens to verify their age in new ways. For example, if they attempt to create a new account with an adult birthday, we will require them to verify their age in order to use the account,” the spokesperson said.
“We’re building technology to proactively find these teens and place them in the same protections offered by Teen Account settings. While we’re working diligently to ensure our AI models are accurate, we may make mistakes along the way, so we want to take a proportionate approach to the settings we apply.”
