Social Media Ban

With the Social Media Delay legislation starting on December 10, there will be a great deal of apprehension and uncertainty about how it will play out.

There is still a significant lack of clarity regarding how the Social Media networks will respond to the legislation and exactly how they will implement their obligations.

I will therefore attempt to keep you as up to date as I can and inform you of any major issues I am seeing. I start with my concerns about how Big Tech will address the age gate between 15 & 16 year olds.

Obviously artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be able to determine the difference between a 53 year old and a 14 year old, as this is quite a wide gate.

However, when it comes to determining the difference between much smaller gates (14 to 17), I have no doubt we are going to have a huge number of problems!

If you have a 15 year old on TikTok and they look quite mature, they may well go months before being removed by the network. They might not even be affected at all! If you have a 20 year old, who looks quite young, they may well be identified as U16 by a network and have their account suspended or deleted.

The networks are likely to act on suspected or confirmed juvenile accounts in a few ways;

• They may simply delete an account and all data without any option for review, in which the user will lose all content and history forever.

• They may suspend the account with a request for the user to prove their age. This will be in the way of facial recognition, a selfie image/video or other non-formal ID verification. Depending on the success, the account will either be re-activated or deleted. If deleted, the user will lose all data and content.

• In the case where initial proof of age cannot be confirmed via AI methods, the platform is likely to ask for formal identification, such as passport or birth certificate. If such ID is supplied and not trusted or not provided at all, the account might be deleted with all content and history lost.

• Other results could see the user account being deactivated for a period of time until the child can prove their age or until they have actually turned 16. After which the account may be reactivated with all data and history retained.

Over the past few weeks, I have been advising all of my school kids under the age of 16 to download their data from all the platforms as soon as they can. Many are worried about losing all of their content, so it is important they do this before December 10.

With some of the apps, data downloads can take hours or days. With the large number of Australian teens likely to start doing this over the coming weeks, download times are likely to blow out beyond that.

In addition to U16's downloading their data from the apps, I would strongly encourage anyone aged 16 to 24 to do the same!

So please message everyone in your family or peer groups with that advice, as there is a very real chance many of them will wake up on December 11, to find their accounts suspended.

The attached image has instructions on how to download data across most of the platforms which are required to comply with the legislation.

I have also created a Parent Social Media Delay Guide, which gives parents and guardians information on what to expect come December 10, and how they can assist their kids in dealing with the change.

https://drive.google.com/.../1gaxFHxp57Pcn1XVXipW.../view...