(Bloomberg) -- Children in Australia under the age of 16 will be banned from social media as part of a push to protect young people’s mental health, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, with firms involved required to enforce the new regulations or face potential fines.
“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Albanese told reporters in Canberra on Thursday, pledging to introduce legislation later this month. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people. There’ll be no penalties for users.”
The long-anticipated age limits for social media are part of a suite of measures from Albanese’s center-left Labor government to crack down on technology giants, which the prime minister blames for a surge in misinformation and mental health problems.
Australia has a history of taking on large technology companies that run social media sites, including a push in 2021 to make Facebook and Google pay for news content. More recently, the government took Elon Musk’s X Corp. to court over a failure to remove a video of a terrorist attack in Sydney.
Labor is also weighing new legislation to force social media sites to crack down on misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.
The government said it had consulted with social media companies on the age limits “through a variety of means.” However, officials did not specify which services the changes would apply to, whether they had received assurances that a ban could be put into effect or what the potential size of the penalties for companies could be.
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Meta respects “any age limitations the government wants to introduce for social media use,” according to Antigone Davis, the company’s head of safety. Research has shown parents want to be involved in their teens’ online lives and want a say in deciding what’s appropriate for them, she said.
“What’s missing is a deeper discussion on how we implement protections, otherwise we risk making ourselves feel better, like we have taken action, but teens and parents will not find themselves in a better place,” Davis said in a statement.
A spokesperson for TikTok in Australia declined to comment. Google and X didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Albanese said he didn’t believe the laws would be fully effective, or fix the problem immediately, pointing to alcohol restrictions that have failed to prevent underage drinking.
(Updates with Meta’s response from seventh paragraph.)
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