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.
The authors warned:
This data suggests that, at least in the medium term, an Australia-style ban is unlikely to deliver the improvements in safety that parents and children deserve and demand. At worst, the Australian ban risks giving parents a false sense of safety, with children still able to freely use social media platforms, but with tech firms let off the hook in terms of their safety-by-design and safeguarding responsibilities.
The Molly Rose Foundation is named after a London teenager who killed herself after social media contributed to her pervasive feelings of depression and despair. Forensic analysts found a huge amount of social media content pertaining to depression, self-harm, and suicide on her devices. After hearings that included command appearances by social media executives, the North London coroner issued a landmark finding that her death resulted from “the negative effects of online content.”
MRF said it was not just the availability of such content, but the way social media algorithms forced a gusher of it through Molly’s computer once she expressed an interest in depression and suicide, that turned her online experience lethal.
Nevertheless, as the conclusions of its report made clear, MRF has been skeptical of blanket social media bans for teenagers like Australia’s, which has inspired a fast-growing number of administrations and legislatures around the world to consider similar measures.
The two key elements of this skepticism are the dubious effectiveness of bans that can be easily evaded by tech-savvy children, and concerns that social media companies will abandon their other regulatory responsibilities once they have been instructed to deny access to children.
“Parents and children deserve better than a flawed ban that delivers a false sense of safety that quickly unravels,” MRF chief executive Andy Burrows told Sky News on Monday.
“Proponents of a ban argue that it offers an immediate and decisive firebreak, but the early evidence from Australia shows it only lets tech firms off the hook and fails to give children the step change in online safety and wellbeing they need,” Burrows said.
Sky News compared MRF’s findings to a YouGov survey from March that found 61% of Australian parents saw “positive behavioral changes” in their teen children after the ban was imposed, including “more in-person social interactions, improved parent-child relationships and children being more present and engaged during interactions.”
On other hand, YouGov found “two in five parents observed between two and four negative impacts, including increased digital inequality, a shift to alternative or less regulated platforms and a reduction in social connection.”
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