TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and X are mad. In response to the legislation’s passage, Meta said the process was “rushed” and failed to consider the voices of young people, the measures the tech industry already takes to protect them, and existing evidence about the effects of their social media use.
Australian children are not a significant user base to any of these companies. According to Unicef, 5.7 million people under 18 were living in Australia in 2023. Facebook reported 3 billion monthly users in May 2023. India is home to some 370 million Facebook users. Even if every child in Australia left social media – unlikely – user numbers would not meaningfully decline.
The worry for tech companies is the precedent set by the new law. The tech companies also strenuously opposed measures in both Australia and Canada that required them to pay for news content. The problem was not the amount of money demanded but what might follow; if every country in the world required payment for news, the financial burden saddling Facebook and others would be enormous, as would the responsibility of determining what constitutes news. If every country in the world boots its young people from social media, social media companies would face an uncertain future. Their pipelines of incoming users would dry up.
The Australian law shows that any country could really do it. We have seen one country’s laws tilt the global governance of social networks before: the United States imposed a minimum age of 13 for social media users with a law governing children’s privacy passed in 2000, which has become the standard around the world by dint of the social networks’ privacy policies.
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By Blake Montgomery / Courtesy of The Guardian
