The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), a British-based group that generally favors online safety measures for children, published research on Monday that found about 60% of Australian teenagers are evading their country’s landmark ban on social media accounts for children under 16.
MRF’s report was entitled “Australia’s Social Media Ban – Is It Working?” The report concluded it wasn’t, not really, although the ban has significantly impacted the online activity of Australian youth.
“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban. Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts,” the report noted.
MRF found that over half of the 12 to 15-year-olds who used the most perilous of the social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, were still able to access those services.
Seventy percent of children who responded to the survey, which was conducted in partnership with Australia’s largest online youth panel YouthInsight, said it was “easy” to avoid the social media ban. Fifty-one percent of respondents said the ban made no difference to their online safety, and 14% said they felt less safe after the ban was imposed.
“This may reflect a range of factors, including their displacement to smaller or more poorly moderated platforms, their experiences on sites not covered by the ban, or a perception that online platforms have pivoted from safety towards prioritizing access restrictions,” the report’s authors ventured.
The ban does seem to have reduced the amount of time children spend online overall, which will likely be taken as a positive development by child safety advocates.
MRF suggested some of the blame for the questionable effectiveness of the ban lies with social media companies, which do not appear to making very aggressive efforts to detect or deactivate accounts created by under-16 users, after headlines were made by a large number of account deactivations in the early months of the ban.
On the other hand, about 5% of the children who evaded the ban were using virtual private networks (VPNs), a tool that has been successfully employed around the world to mask user identities and evade digital censorship. VPNs are a very effective tool for masking user identity, which is why censorious governments are looking for ways to ban them.
MRF noted in passing that one of the earliest government efforts to ban children from online platforms was undertaken by South Korea, which prohibited online gaming for children from midnight to 6:00 a.m., beginning in 2011. The ban “initially resulted in a reduction of time spent online,” but those improvements faded over time, and in fact Internet use by children wound up increasing. The South Korean government eventually discontinued the ban.
MRF felt its report directly contradicted claims by the Australian government that its ban on social media for teens has been “very successful in its early days,” and this could have implications for other countries thinking about bans of their own, including the United Kingdom.
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