Australia’s disproportionate response to online harms

Enacted today, Australia’s ban of selected social media platforms for under 16-year-olds is the most sweeping attempt carried out by a democratic state to address online harms facing young people. While we acknowledge the need to ensure young people are protected from inappropriate content and are supported in how they engage with information and content shared online, this approach raises a number of significant issues.

Any such ban on platforms curtails the user’s ability to navigate the open web and access public-interest information. As a result, it is a disproportionate threat to free expression as outlined in Australian and international law. It could also hinder young peoples’ ability to navigate these online spaces when they do come of age. This was outlined by James Ball after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act’s child protection provisions in July 2025: “If we try to keep young people away from it, they will be woefully underskilled, undersocialised, and unprepared for the world they’ll first encounter as 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds,” he wrote.

The realities of social media mean that the very platforms that give access to inappropriate content also give access to a wider range of content that undoubtedly benefits society. Whether that is public-interest reporting, testimony from those living in authoritarian regimes where state control over conventional media outlets leaves online platforms as the sole route available to access international audiences, or a space for marginalised users to find communities outside their direct environment, social media bans do not attempt to differentiate between the good and the bad. They simply cut young people off from all content hosted or shared on that platform, without giving them the tools or support they need to be able to differentiate, interrogate or navigate this complex but important information ecosystem.

For too long, free expression has been presented as an opposition or explicit threat to young people, with few meaningful conversations about how young people can be supported to access their rights. But young people have free expression rights, alongside a wide range of other human rights. These rights are not only available to them once they turn 16. For instance, Article 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that “[t]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” As in broader international law, this is not an absolute right and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child also acknowledges the need of “special safeguards” for children. However, social media bans for every young person with no way for them to consent to or challenge the law does little to give the child a choice as to the media they can use. In fact, the choice is made on their behalf.

Specific provisions in the Australian law also raise a number of significant questions that, while too early to track in terms of implementation, should be considered. Australia’s social media ban only covers a specific number of platforms, leaving several outside the law’s scope. This is inconsistent. For example, Facebook and Instagram are included, but Messenger and WhatsApp (other platforms owned by Meta) are not. While this will increase the complexity for big platforms to differentiate its access requirements across the different services it provides, it also establishes spaces where young people can turn to to avoid age checks. This could encourage bad faith actors to target their actions towards these unregulated areas in a more concerted and impactful manner. Users who are now unable to access the platforms on which they have established communities will be susceptible to such exploitation, with few avenues of recourse or support.

Any policy of this type requires the significant deployment of untested for-profit tools to ensure young people cannot access the platforms included in the law. With many of these tools, users are required to upload sensitive documents such as a passport or bank card to platforms, or consent to face scanning, run by untested and opaque third-party providers. In many cases, users will not be able to choose different methods or vendors and so will be forced to trust these providers with their sensitive data. This is not without risk. Last month, “68,000 Australian Discord users had their personal information compromised” through a tool the platform used as part of its age assurance checks. The compromised data included “government ID images, names, usernames, email addresses, and some limited billing information”.

Requiring users, including young people over the age of 16 in the case of Australia, to blindly trust such platforms, with limited forms of choice or accountability may require them to choose free expression rights over the rights of privacy. But you cannot have one without the other. Without a private space to call their own or the ability to actively choose what data they share, users may curtail their involvement in online discourse, thus undermining their rights to free expression beyond the objectives of this law. As outlined by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the social media ban “normalises broad-based age checks – whether through ID verification or invisible profiling – and creates vast new datasets about how we live and interact, all just to prove we’re old enough to be on social media.” In an age of rampant digital surveillance carried out by private opaque platforms, whose decisions are informed by profit not rights, we should be cautious as to what data we require to be shared. The development of AI age inference tools raises further fears, especially considering academic studies have monitored “higher false positive rate … for certain groups compared to others” and “that minors from East and West Africa were misclassified as older than they were compared to minors of the same age from the other regions”.

We are concerned that outright bans, like the type enacted in Australia, are presented as a silver bullet to protect young people against inappropriate content. This risks closing the door to a more nuanced and proportionate response that centres young people and incorporates a society-wide approach including anti-monopoly and algorithmic transparency measures, improved educational support, information literacy initiatives, sustainable media funding, the development of young person-specific and young person-created media content, or a more participatory strategy across government and society.

As other countries and bodies, including the European Parliament and the UK, are monitoring Australia’s laws, with many policy-makers calling for the policy to be emulated, we urge extreme caution. One day is wholly insufficient to gauge the impact on young people and we must avoid knee-jerk measures for such an important and complex issue. Bans are seldom the answer to the challenging issues of our time. We owe it to young people to approach this issue with the care, complexity, nuance and depth it requires.