Lisa Given: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology professor on Australia committing to national social media age limits

New legislation will stop Australia's youth from accessing social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and TikTok.

The Australian Government will introduce legislation by the end of the year to create a minimum age for accessing social media.

Professor Lisa Given from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology wonders if a wide-scale ban is even possible.

"The question is, are there workarounds on that? There's certainly ways that children could get around that type of mechanism, using a VPN for example - or even just accessing content through other people's accounts."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over in Australia, kids will soon be banned from social
media apps like TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook.
The government's going to decide an age limit then they're
going to introduce legislation for the band before the end
of the year. And Chris lux And our Prime Minister
says he's thinking about doing a similar thing here now
Lisa Given as a professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute
of Technology and with us now, hey Lisa, Hello, they

(00:21):
haven't specified what age they're going to go for. What
do you reckon?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ah, they haven't. They've sort of set arrange fourteen to sixteen.
Most other jurisdictions exploring this have head on fourteen. But
we'll see what they say.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
And how do you think it's going to Where will
the enforcement be. Will it be at the point of
the social media site, so Facebook for letting the kids
sign up at all, or would it be at the
app store where the parents would have to give permission
for the download of the app.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
It could be either one. We actually don't know that
quite yet. I suspect it will be at the point
of applying to say get an account. There may be
something pop up where parents might have to say upload
or at least a test to a child's age of
that minimum requirement.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Is that the smartest way of doing it, Well, this
is challenging.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I mean, that's certainly a way to do it, and
you can then exclude people if they don't provide appropriate
evidence of age. The question is are there workarounds on that.
There's certainly ways that children could get around that type
of mechanism, using a VPN for example, or even just
accessing content through other people account man.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
And I'll tell you what, Lisa, If there's one thing
you know about kids is that they know more about
technology than their parents, right, so that will get around us.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
They know what they're doing. And I think that's really
the critical thing is is a ban even possible? The
other question is is this what we need? We don't
actually have definitive evidence around the harms to children with
social media, and so the experts are quite divided on
this one.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
So let's say you find out who is whoever the
Facebook police are, find out that Johnny, whose age twelve
is on Facebook, who gets in trouble Johnny or Facebook
or Johnny's parents.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Effectively, it's going to be the social media companies. So
what the government is talking about is legislation that would
enable could be fines, different kinds of sanctions, could even
be court proceedings.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Is it going to work? What do you reckon, Lisa,
If you had to give us your professional opinion.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, and my professional view is that this isn't going
to work. I think it's too simple a potential solution
for the complexity of the problem. This is really a
social problem. It's really about how do we keep our
children safe from harm. There are many other technical solutions,
for example, battling the algorithms on social media, and this
one leaves too many holes. There's almost no way to

(02:42):
ensure that every single child would be off of social
media under this legislation.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Does the responsibility really lie with parents to equip kids
for this world that we now live in?

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Absolutely? I think it is about parents. It's also about teachers,
other people in the community that can help kids and
their families to navigate social media. I'd love to see
more resources going into those kinds of supports around digital literacy,
as well as regulation for social media companies to stop
the harmful content at the source.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
What would you teach if there was a parent listening
right now, who had a button. I know, let's say
thirteen year old who wants to go on the face,
what would you say to the parents is the most
important thing to teach that child?

Speaker 2 (03:23):
The most important thing is actually teaching them openness and
willingness to engage in dialogue about what they're seeing. So
I'd be wanting to sit with that child, help them
to set up an account, put some reasonable boundaries, perhaps
around what time of day you're going to do this,
and then have conversations about the content they're seeing online.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
So, for example, if you've got a week go and
this is a problem particularly for girls, but it does
affect boys as well. But if you've got a girl
on Instagram and she's looking at the photographs of perfect
supermodels and their perfect lives and their perfect bodies and
starts to feel a bit bummed out about it, the
best thing is to go and talk to your parents
about as your parents can tell you, that's not really
what life is like. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Absolutely, the problem itself does not go away with this
kind of ban. This is a social problem we have
around body image and the things that young women are
seeing online. But they're also going to see that in
real world. They see it on television and lots of
other places.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Lisa, it's good to talk to you. I really appreciate
your expertise on that, Lisa given professor at the Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology. I mean that Lisa's banged on
as you can ban the kids if you want to,
but you're not actually you actually got to just equip them.
It's like, because whether the fourteen or sixteen or eighteen,
they're still gonna have to go and come across the
stuff on the internet. It's a bit like trying to
ban toddlers from walking on the footpath. The smartest thing

(04:35):
to do is to teach them road skills, isn't it,
So they can actually manage the roads. You can't ban
them from roads forever. For more from Hither to Duplassy
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