The government has praised data showing that more than 4.7 million accounts under the age of 16 were deactivated, deleted or restricted within days of social media restrictions coming into effect, with one minister calling this a “huge achievement”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it is “encouraging that social media companies are making meaningful efforts to comply with the laws and keep children off their platforms.”
“Change doesn’t happen overnight. But these early signs show that it is important that we have taken action to implement this change,” he said in a statement to the media on Thursday, which also included the provisional figures provided to the eSafety Commissioner.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the number of social media accounts under 16s had been deactivated after the laws came into force on December 10 was a “huge achievement”.
“We said from the beginning that we didn’t expect perfection right away, but early numbers show that this law is making a real, meaningful difference,” she said in the statement.
“We know there is still more work to do and the eSafety Commissioner is looking closely at this data to determine what it shows in terms of compliance of individual platforms.”
‘We need more data’
University of Sydney researcher Timothy Koskie told SBS News that 4.7 million was an “extremely high number” but warned that “some of these accounts will be multi-platform for individuals”.
He said that given the number of platforms covered by the ban, and the number of “particularly socially media-savvy children”, it was impossible to say how many under-16s have actually stopped using social media.
“We can see accounts being closed and that was one of the planned things they were going to do,” said Koskie, a postdoctoral fellow at the university’s School of Media and Communications.
“On the main point of protecting young people from the risks of social media, it might be a bit of a bridge to say that shutting down the accounts means protecting the youth because, for example, we don’t necessarily know that the accounts were not opened under a different name or that the protections were not circumvented by the parents,” he said.
“We need more data to know how that will play out.”
Lizzie O’Shea, president of Digital Rights Watch, echoed these concerns, saying that the “number of accounts removed is not the measure of the ban’s success or failure.”
“This is measured by the impact on young people’s wellbeing. By that measure, the ban continues to fail. Teenagers are flocking to mental health crisis services because they agree they have been cut off from their support networks,” she told SBS News.
“The social media ban has not made life better for Australian teenagers. For many of them, especially the most vulnerable, it has caused serious harm.”
Digital Rights Watch opposed the introduction of the social media age limit and instead called for greater regulation of social media companies.
The government said the eSafety Commissioner’s office would continue to closely monitor social media platforms to ensure they are meeting their obligations.
According to Thursday’s statement, the eSafety website has recorded more than a million visits since the launch of the age limit education campaign on social media, which the government said showed Australians were engaging with the ban and looking for clear, reliable information about the changes.
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