Australia should not ban under-16s from internet sites
YouTube in particular, and sometimes X, are among the very best ways to learn about the world. To the extent that the law is effectively enforced, targeting YouTube will have a terrible effect on youth science, and the ability of young scientists and founders to get their projects off the ground will take a huge and possibly fatal hit. If you are only allowed to learn from the internet at age 16, you are probably not ready for marvelous achievements at age 18 or perhaps not even at 20. The country may become more mediocre.
The more serious concern is that this represents a major expansion of government control over tech services and also speech. Over time the government has to decide which are the approved tech companies and services and which are not. That becomes a politicized decision, as any chosen lines will be arbitrary, especially as online services evolve in their functionality. For instance, if excess video usage is what is problematic, it is possible for videos to be embedded more seamlessly into some future version of WhatsApp, an exempt service. Or Australian youth, even under the new law, will be able to access video on a laptop, simply by viewing it and not signing into their accounts…
I predict that either this law stops being effectively enforced, or the controls on companies and users have to become much, much tighter and more oppressive. In a large poll of Australian 9 to 16-year-olds, only 6 percent of them thought the new ban was going to work.
That is true for yet another reason. With gaming and messaging exempt from the ban, we can expect old-style “social media” to move into those areas. It already was the case that Fortnite and other gaming services served as social media networks, and that trend will be accelerated. Discord, for instance, is exempt from the ban, a glaring hole, and in a fast-changing market there probably will be some significant loopholes most of the time. For the ban to continue to work, it will have to spread. It is hard to think of an area of internet services that could not, in principle, serve social media–like functions, or produce the harms being attributed to online life. Regulation of artificial intelligence services is perhaps the next logical albeit misguided move here.
Who is in charge of the family anyway? If I have decided that my 15-year-old should be free to follow Magnus Carlsen on X and YouTube, should we have the boot of the state tell me this is forbidden? This is a big move in the direction of what Socrates advocated in The Republic, namely that the state takes priority over the family in deciding which stories can be told to the youth.
Over time, I expect this ban, again assuming it is kept and enforced, to become one of the biggest free speech restrictions on the internet. It is the incentive of government agencies to boost their budgets, spread their mandates, and enforce their dictates. What starts with a nation’s youth rarely ends there.
You might think that Australia’s regulatory guardians can be trusted to uphold free speech ideals, but has that been the case to date? Under Australian law, it is permissible to restrict free speech for reasons of public order, national security, and protection from harm. That includes limits on “hate speech,” prompting Elon Musk to exaggerate and call the country fascist. Nonetheless the country does not have anything comparable to America’s First Amendment free speech protections.
So why should we empower Australian regulators and restrict free speech further?
It is very defensible to worry that your kid is on his or her phone too much. Furthermore, school bans or limits on smartphone usage are likely to bring some measurable but small gains.
But if you think a massive expansion of state authority over online content is the answer, you ought to know that the associated gains from that decision will at best be modest. You will not be saving civilization or our youth; rather you will be joining the ever-growing parade against free speech.
Recommended, and in this recent piece Ben Yeoh surveys the research-based literature on social media and teen harm.