Doubt has been cast over the efficacy of plans to keep people under 16 off inappropriate websites, with advice provided to the Australian government showing that “no countries have implemented an age verification mandate without issue”.
Governments across Australia have embraced a push to raise age minimums on social media platforms to 16 to protect young people from the negative impacts of excessive time online.
Platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok currently require users to be 13 to create an account, but sign-up systems can often be circumvented. Raising the age is likely to be unpopular among teens, and difficult to do.
Previously unreported advice to the government and briefing notes prepared for the eSafety commissioner last year suggest that age assurance technology has not been successfully implemented anywhere in the world.
So, can Australia make it work?
What is being suggested?
The NSW premier, Chris Minns, believes 16 would be the right age limit for social media, while the Queensland premier, Steven Miles, has this week floated 14. The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, announced this month his state would look into social media bans for people aged under 14 and parental permission for under-16s.
Despite calling for a change to the laws, Minns said he was unsure if that was “enforceable at the state level” and would prefer if the whole country acted together.
The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, also wants Australia to take a national response to social media, which she said is making antisemitism, racism and gender-based violence worse.
In the media, Nova radio presenter Michael Wipfli and Rob Galluzzo, the chief executive of the production company Finch, are running a campaign to raise the minimum age at which children can register for social media accounts to 16. News Corporation newspapers are running a separate campaign and petition to raise the minimum age to 16.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has endorsed the idea and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said the Coalition strongly supports age verification for social media.
How would it work?
Upon registration, social media sites generally require people to provide a birthdate and will not allow people aged under 13 to register. The campaign aims to have the minimum age lifted to 16 and above.
But this system can easily be bypassed by entering an incorrect birth year. Companies such as Meta employ other methodologies to weed out younger users, including analysing behavioural patterns consistent with similar younger users such as what pages they follow and what is said on their pages around their birthday.
Instagram also has age verification in Australia, which allows a user to verify themselves as over 18 by uploading an ID, using a video facial age estimator or having another over-18 account vouch for them.
Albanese has also pointed to the government’s proposed age assurance trial, which was allocated $6.5m in funding in last week’s budget.
The trial is particularly aimed at preventing those under 18 from accessing websites hosting adult content, but there is little detail about the trial – including how it will work, which sites will be included, whether social media will be part of it or when it will begin.
What is age assurance technology?
Albanese announced the pilot “will identify available age assurance products to protect children from online harm, and test their efficacy, including in relation to privacy and security”.
“The outcomes will inform the existing work of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner under the Online Safety Act – including through the development of industry codes or standards – to reduce children’s exposure to age-inappropriate material.”
The UK’s example is the one most proponents suggest Australia should follow. The UK scheme is still in its early stages and the trial only applies to adult sites, not social media.
It has outlined five ways companies can make sure people are the age they say they are, but some of these would not work for people aged under 16:
Allowing banks to confirm a user is over 18.
Allowing mobile providers to confirm a user is an adult.
Credit card checks. People in the UK need to be over 18 to have a credit card and the website can check with the issuer that the card is valid.
Asking users to upload a photo to the site that is then matched with photo ID.
Use of facial age estimation technology.
In the roadmap for age verification, released by the eSafety commissioner last year, the commissioner recommended what it called a “double-blind tokenised approach”.
That is a device-based token where a third party provider transfers information between sites and age assurance providers to protect user privacy. The token is proof of someone’s age that is held on a device, which can be presented as proof of age without handing over personal information.
Does it work?
While the media campaign on this issue in the past week has claimed Australia is falling behind other nations, government advice suggests that while there has been legislation passed elsewhere implementation has been difficult.
Documents uncovered by Guardian Australia include a survey of the international landscape of age assurance technology prepared by the communications department in August last year and released under FoI.
It says: “No countries have implemented an age verification mandate without issue.”
According to the documents:
The UK became the first country to mandate age verification for pornography websites in 2017, but those laws were abandoned in 2019 due to “delays, technical difficulties and community concern for privacy”. (The UK’s Online Safety Act, which passed in October 2023, requires adult websites to enforce age limits using one of the methods outlined above, but it does not apply to social media.)
France legislated age verification requirements for online pornography, giving the French digital regulator the power to block sites that don’t comply. Those laws are currently subject to legal challenge from porn sites on constitutional grounds.
“Germany has legislated age verification by prohibiting the distribution of pornography via media or teleservices if it is accessible to children”, but “it has also faced difficulty in compliance and enforcement, with attempts to block noncompliant websites currently before the courts”.
In the US, the report notes the states of Utah and Louisiana, where age verification was brought in, experienced an almost 1,000% and threefold respective increase in the use of virtual private network (VPN) technology to bypass the restrictions.
Estimates briefing documents prepared for the eSafety commissioner late last year – also released under FoI – also state “no country in the world has solved this problem”.
The commissioner’s notes said that any system in Australia would need to be “effective and enforceable”, and would be required to cover more than just the sites deemed unsuitable for minors, including search engines.
Albanese has acknowledged these limitations, saying on Tuesday the government wants “to make sure that any measures that are put in place are effective, because one of the concerns which is there is that age protocols may be circumvented by users at the moment”.
Should it be done?
Albanese has explained his support for the new restrictions is about giving teenagers extra time to grow without being subjected to social pressures that can be exacerbated online.
“What we want is our youngest Australians spending more time outside playing sport, engaging with each other in a normal way and less time online,” Albanese said on Tuesday. “And one way to do that is through restrictions on social media.” He said the often-vicious commentary on social media could harm adults and have an even worse impact on children.
The independent senator for the Australian Capital Territory, David Pocock, said in a post on Instagram that “children are losing their childhoods because they have’t yet developed the self control to resist these highly addictive products”, adding that teachers and parents were raising their concerns with him and calling for action from government.
But Dr Belinda Barnet, a senior lecturer in media at Swinburne University, is concerned a policy change could lead to Australians handing over sensitive documents to platforms to prove their age.
“We need a third-party solution mainly because it’s a really bad idea to give identity documents to any of the platforms,” she said. “They’re just the wrong custodians for that sensitive information.” There are also privacy concerns if people are no longer able to use social media anonymously, Barnet said.
Samantha Floreani, head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, also holds concerns about the risk to privacy.
“Most social media sites already require a user to be over 13 to register an account – although this obviously does not function very well,” she said. “In order to enforce it more strongly, platforms would need to implement more strict age verification processes, which would likely raise serious privacy risks.”
Floreani said children and young people need to be able to take part in modern life, which is happening online, and warns against creating additional harm while attempting to reduce it.
“Attempting to prevent young people up to the age of 16 from accessing social media entirely is not an appropriate or proportionate solution to issues related to online harm and is likely to run into serious implementation and workability issues,” she said. “Plenty of young people rely upon social media to express themselves, form communities and find support, and banning them may have significant negative consequences.”
