Kerre Woodham: Australia draws a line in the sand with social media ban - Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

As you will have heard in the news, Australia has passed landmark rules to ban under-16s from social media. In a world first, social media firms will have to take all reasonable steps to prevent young teens from gaining access to sites like Facebook, Instagram, X - formally Twitter - and the like. The firms who own these sites will face fines of up to $50 million AUD if they fail to comply. The tech giants themselves have described the laws as vague, problematic and rushed, and that's probably quite true.

The current legislation offers almost no details on how the rules will be enforced. Seems they're leaving it up to the tech giants to ensure compliance. It will be at least 12 months before the details are worked out by regulators, and the ban comes into effect. Naysayers say it's going to be impossible to police; young people will always find a way around the rules if they want to find them.  And that is quite true. Just as I'm sure there are young New Zealanders who have managed to get around the cell phone bans in schools that the government introduced earlier this year.

But it's drawing a line in the sand. It's saying being on social media sites is harmful for young people, that the bad outweighs the good and that we as a society and a community are going to recognise that. We're not going to accept that just because everybody's on it, that it's going to be really difficult to police, that kids will always find a way around it. We're not going to accept that. We're not going to accept that the genie is out of the bottle and that there is nothing that can be done except endless hand wringing about the harm that's being caused.

People said it would be impossible to stop kids using cell phones at schools and that the children themselves, the young people, would never put up with it. Well, guess what? It's working for the vast majority of students. Even the principal’s who said look, this is just not going to work, the kids have them, they’ve had them for a while now, it's part of their lives, we're not going to be able to police it. We don't want to spend our time policing this rather than teaching - even they have been forced to admit that concentration has i