Australia become first country to ban social media for everyone under 16

Australia has become the first country in the world to put a blanket ban on social media for everyone under 16.

And to be fair, it’ll save them having to trawl through their own profiles deleting cringy posts when they’re older.

The Australian parliament passed a law this week that will aim to put a stop to children having access to social media.

Children in Australia will no longer be allowed to use social media (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

But why? It’s all about protecting young people’s mental health.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, explained that there is a ‘clear, causal link between the rise of social media and the harm [to] the mental health of young Australians’.

The Senate voted to pass the bill by 34 votes to 19.

The new bill will mean that anyone under the age of 16 will be banned from social media platforms.

If companies don’t comply, they’ll face fines of up to $32 million.

According to the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, platforms such as Snapchat, X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook will all be included in this ban.

YouTube however isn’t on the list, according to the minister, because of its ‘significant’ educational purposes.

The ban was announced by the Australian prime minister (Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

So, how exactly do they plan on putting a stop to children making accounts? After all, they could theoretically lie about their age when signing up.

Well, details of the bill are set to be ironed out at a later stage and it won’t come into force for another 12 months yet.

There has been some push back on the bill, with Amnesty International saying that a ‘ban that isolates young people will not meet the government’s objective of improving young people’s lives’.

Even Elon Musk weighed in on his own social media platform X, formerly Twitter, reposting a tweet which read: “Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.”

Writing a piece for Guardian Australia, MP Andrew Wilkie shared his own views and explained why he had changed his mind from supporting the ban to opposing it, saying: “The voices of children and young people have been conspicuously missing from most of the debate and commentary.”

The Australian government has argued that the ban is necessary in order to protect the mental health of children in the country.

Introducing the bill last week, Albanese added: “This is a global problem and we want young Australians essentially to have a childhood. We want parents to have peace of mind.”