Here's Why The New Socials Laws For u16s Will Affect All of Us

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
iHeart Podcasts, year more Kiss Podcasts, playlists and listen live
on the free iHeart appe Robin and Kidd Now with
Coorios the podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Now. We've been hearing about this for months. From December tenth,
many social media platforms will not be allowed to let
people under sixteen have accounts in Australia, and it seems
like that deadline has been expediated because it's from that day,
and so places like Meta, you know, the big one
with Facebook and Instagram are saying, well, we need to

(00:48):
get started now.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Well, the reason being it's not a criminal band for kids.
It's a legal requirement for the platforms themselves to block
or deactivate under sixteen's accounts, so they have to have
done that by the tenth of December. But the one
person that can tell us all about this, of course
is tech wizard Trev Along Hay Trev.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Hey, mate, have you heard about anyone actually receiving notification
so far? Because apparently it's happening from today from.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Matter Yeah, Meta announced this that it would happen from today.
I've got two kids under sixteen who are on social media,
fourteen and fifteen. They haven't yet seen the notification, and
I am waiting with bated breath because I want to
see the process. Because you've got to remember, this is
not about what age your child or you listed on
your account. This is about whether Meta believes you are

(01:36):
under sixteen?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
So how do they work think? Where do they work
that out? What are they going? How do they work
out how old someone is?

Speaker 3 (01:42):
They look at what you do. They look at who
you talk to, how you talk, the videos, you interact with,
who you follow. And while plenty of adults say to me, yeah,
well I watch you know, anime and memes all the time. Listen,
you're not watching the same thing as fourteen year olds.
Trust me, it's very different. Their depth of they've got
millions and millions of users. Remember, they can profile us

(02:03):
in the most amazing ways, even without us telling anything
about ourselves.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (02:08):
Now I could be completely speaking absolute gibberish here. So
you know those accounts where the parent can make one
for the younger one, but it's through the parents account,
but the young the child has access to that platform.
Say so YouTube kids or whatever, it is like those

(02:29):
and it's under and I put under nine years old?
Is that canceled? So I made the account for my
child and they can only see under nine things under
nine years old or eight or whatever. Does that mean
that those sort of things are canceled where it's a child.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
YouTube Kids is okay, So YouTube Kids is not part
of the band. YouTube itself is. Instagram and TikTok, for example,
have excellent parental controls. My kids, who are young teens
are on TikTok with my account linked as their parents,
but that doesn't change the fact that they're under sixteen
and they have accounts, and under the legislation, they cannot

(03:05):
stay on the platform. So YouTube Kids is really the
only place I can think of that going to be
okay if they know you're under sixteen.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Now, you're a tech savvy dad, Trev, and your kids
obviously would be tech savvy. Do you think they're just
going to be able to find a way around it.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
I've said to my daughter, I can't wait to see
her do the fake because this is all going to
happen with facefal scan. So Metas said that if you're
under sixteen, it'll say to you've got two weeks to
verify how old you are and what it'll do as
a face scan, and it's very much like when you
set up the face ID on your phone for the
first time, you look up and look down, you're leperol.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
I've said to my daughter, this is going to be
great because I want you to do it, and it'll
say you're fourteen or fifteen. She's fifteen, and then I
want you to go go oh no, I want to
try again. Go upstairs, sit in front of your makeup
mirror that you sit in front of for hours every day,
and you do your best. You do your best, and
I beg any money. She can look sixteen because she's
eaden in my eyes, and I think that that app

(03:58):
might just struggle to work out that she's under sixteen.
Which is the biggest problem with this legislation. It's very
hard to tell the difference between fifteen and sixteen year old,
and that has been forced upon the platforms to kick
kids off who might be perfectly over sixteen but just
look a little younger.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Okay, So what happens to existing accounts and what are
the penalties if they don't adhere to this? Because it
is onusus on the actual platforms.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Correct, and you made a great point earlier. This is
nothing on the parents, the kids can't be fined, the
parents can't be sent to jail. There's nothing there. It's
only the platforms TikTok, Instagram, et cetera that can be
fined fifteen million dollars per instance. So if there are
three kids, if there are three kids found to have accounts,
that's one hundred and fifty million dollar fine. You can
see why they need to take it seriously. But you know,

(04:46):
in the end, there's that ramification is really the only
the only thing stopping the platform from letting these kids
on the actual accounts. It's hard to say yet, but
what Facebook or Meta has said overnight is we're going
to give you two weeks to download your data or
delete your account. So since they're saying you can kind
of preserve all your information, and they've also said we're

(05:08):
happy to get your contacting from so that when you
turn sixteen we can we can have your account back.
So basically, please please tell.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
A tree numbers so that we can.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
We can call you when you're ready

Speaker 2 (05:18):
And it's time to come back.