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I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. Australia's social media ban comes into effect this week when all under sixteens there will be restricted from major platforms. We're talking TikTok, snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, kick, Twitch, threads and x and more. The EU passed a similar resolution this month, and the UK has introduced age restrictions
on certain content. But can you really outlaw part of the world Wide Web for a generation that has grown up online? And more importantly should we? Today on the front Page, University of Canterbury's senior Law professor, Doctor Cassandra Mudgway is with us to take us through what this means and whether New Zealand should follow suit. First off, Cassandra tell me about Australia's social media ban, how will it work? And I suppose the big question is will it work?
So the law in Australia now requires platforms to take reasonable steps to ensure that their users are over the age of sixteen years. That's important. So it's not an absolute guarantee that under sixteens won't be using platforms. It's reasonable steps only, but that law will apply to social media services and platforms that host user content, so think Facebook, Instagram, x TikTok, Snapchat, and Reddit, and the streaming service Twitch
is also included in that law. The law does not apply at least not for the moment, to messaging services, so think Facebook, messager and WhatsApp or some gaming services with those communications capabilities like roadblocks. If you have a child, you probably have heard of that before. So platforms are required to have at least one way or more than
one way to check their user's age. So the most obvious, the most accurate way of doing that is age verification, which is uploading government ideas, but the law in Australia requires services to have at least one other way. So the one that's most talked about that you're going to hear a lot about is the facial age estimation tool. So that's when they take a photo of your face and an AI tool guess is how old you are.
So the accuracy of those tools are questioned and critiqued, so not as accurate, but the most common measure for existing users, if you're online right now, will likely be passive, so platform will just guess your age based on how long you've been on the app and what content you
engage with. The Other part of the law, of course, is we've got the Safety Commissioner that's Australia's online safety regulator, so they're going to be in charge of compliance there and they can find platforms millions of dollars so very large, significant monetary fines for non compliance if they don't take any steps.
For example, so the ban stops under sixteens from making their own account, but it still lets them scroll through the likes of tech took and YouTube shorts and Instagram stories and things like that without making an account. Does this protect them from seeing harmful content?
If they can still access seeing this content then no. I mean, because they've made that differentiation between the platforms
ver seeing messages. It means that children won't be exposed to recommender systems, so systems that respond to their engagement and feeds, and so they won't be funneled down feedback works or pipe lines that we hear about in relation to harmful content, so more extreme content, soogynistic content or content that has like eating disorder type messaging, So it will protect them from that sort of stuff, but it won't protect them from other kinds of harm that is
more typical through messaging services in particular, so cyberbullying, deep fakes, image based sexual abuse, that kind of thing.
So when we think of teenagers, these guys aren't your typical teenagers. So like I, for example, got social media when I was late high school, early UNI. Right, these kids of digital natives, they've grown up on social media, they've grown up on the Internet, and presumably they know how to get around these safeguards. There's a lot of skepticism out there about this not actually working.
Yeah, and they're the wide widespread concern there. So teenagers could, for a example, use their appearance accounts, they could borrow IDs, they could use age spoofing tools. You can register on platforms that don't comply, they're not under the ban and the Australian government has been pretty upfront about this. They're aware of this, which is why the duty on platforms is to take reasonable steps. It can't guarantee that some
under sixteens aren't using those platforms. So I think that we should expect a mix of non compliance, workaround behavior and platforms chasing those edge cases where we've got teams sort of circumventing, and the other realistic outcome we are likely to see is migration of youth to other smaller, more fringe platforms or apps which won't come under the band but are also probably less moderators, sort of riskier apps where we can't protect them or it's more difficult
to protect them, so essentially it might push young people towards those less safe spaces. We actually saw this in the UK, although a very extreme example involving adult users, but the UK has similar age verification requirements for any websites that host pornographic content, and once that came in porn Hard, one of the big pornography websites, they lost a massive amount of traffic within a day. But then all of these more fringe, riskier pornography websites had a
huge increase in traffic. So we can see it happening in real time.
It's just the act of banning. Like I'm going to put Snapchat in the spotlight for this segment because that's mainly a messaging app. There is a scrolling feature on Snapchat, but it's very minuscule in like what people use it for, and it's the way we could move to WhatsApp, and we could move to waste messages, which many people still already do. But the reason why this band of Snapchat it's the way we've kind of grown up with communication.
It's that sort of informal, casual way of a quick visual update with a photo or posting a story on your Snapchat. It's just the way that my generation of like adapt.
If you're adapted to find new ways around social media, you could adapt to what'sapp right.
There's definitely ways to adapt. But if there's not a problem right now, why change it.
Yeah, I've seen that Australian teens are already flocking to platforms. And forgive me if I misinterpret this is because this my producer has written this down. She has teenage children, so she's obviously gone on the hunt for these they're called cover Star, Lemonade and Yop. I mean, these kids are going to go and there's the opportunity for other businesses like like away from Matter and away from the big leader Google, et cetera, to really start up these fringe kind of that.
And that's the thing, isn't it.
Because there's going to be less safeguards. You're not going to see the CEO of Laminate at a at a governmental hearing in Washington, but you're going to see Mark Zuckerberg sit there and have to answer questions and stuff.
Hey, yeah, absolutely, And that is the big concern that
we have. We've got that chase into different parts of the Internet in a way that current regulations cannot reach because the regulations that Australia does have, and they have wider regulations around online safety often target large platforms or services that have millions of users, and they're less likely to target smaller and smaller apps because of those competing concerns around capitalism and the market and making sure that smaller sort of companies have room to grow, and they
might not have the re sources in place. They just might not have the resources in place to ensure the moderation that you would need to keep young people safe a particular vulnerable group.
In terms of how this has worked in the UK, obviously you've got the age verification there for certain websites. They haven't gone the full hog though with the social media, and then I think the EU has also said that it will also ban social media for under sixteens. Do you reckon what's in Australia and New Zealand, politicians are looking overseas and thinking, let's see who does it right, because obviously the days of the checking the im eighteen box are over. And you know I used to always
and this is putting myself out there. I'm born in the nineties. I would always go nineteen eighty eight, so I'm a few years older. So those days are obviously gone. Do you reckon? We're just sitting back and seeing what actually works overseas and has there been anything in the UK that perhaps hasn't worked.
So that's interesting because there's a lot going on all at once. So I think Australia was the first country to announce that they wanted to age gate social media at least lift that age gate up to sixteen, and other countries have looked at that, and our following suit in New Zealand we have a member's bill from a National MP pulled out of the ballot box that might be coming in front of Parliament before the election, which
seeks to do the same thing following Australia's example. So Australia has really kicked off a kind of movement here. The interesting thing about the EU is that they have voted for a minimum age sixteen sort of standard in a resolution, but they are still working out other things. So member states are still debating whether they allow for consent of parents, so parental consent around their thirteen to fifteen year olds using social media, so it's likely to
look a little bit different. Thing about those countries as well. The big difference with the UK and the EU even and compared to Australia is that those regions have adopted sophisticated digital safety regulations. Both have taken a safety by design approach, creating sort of legal duties of care on those companies to undergo, for example, risk assessments across their services regarding online harm and actively working to mitigate those risks.
So there's more architecture there that the ban or a ban would go on top of. It's not just a standalone ban. And even in Australia that is the same. Australia has an E Safety Commissioner for example, so that's the regulator that has enforcement powers. So if you have a deep fate that happens online, you want it removed. E safety can require those those companies to remove it.
And if we compare that to US Zealand, we don't have these these structures in place, we don't have a regulator like that, so there's no standalone band happening in those other countries. So yes, we are sitting back and watching, but we are, by the looks of things, might be heading towards adopting a band without having adopted all of these other measures.
Yeah, maybe we should, you know, learn how to walk before we run.
Well, that's essentially exactly what I have been arguing for out of my research. It's very clear we should be building safer digital environments and thinking about, you know, what does a safer digital environment look like an art or in our context, and how do we use law and regulation to make that a reality before thinking about age bands, Because if you have a standalone age band without any of these other things, that risk that real risk that our kids will just end up in sort of these
riskier spaces. It's even worse because we don't have that architecture in place to enforce wider safety standards.
There is a very much undiscussed privilege with the idea of banning social media because for when you've got a country like ours with us mental health specifically system that's so broken, and even our education system not that great, and you take away free access and free tools, that's very detrimental.
So it seems to me that putting these bands and the legal frameworks in place, that's a pretty time consuming, it's expensive, and it's a pretty serious measure. So why are we doing all of that? I mean, it must be harder to just regulate the big social media giants if we're going down the legal route.
Well, I think it's one year, So I mean you're going to have to put funding aside for regulation, especially if you set up a regulator, You're going to have to set up like committees around what you're going to regulate and how, and then you've got compliance and all of these things. And I think it's money worth spending. And I mean the other side of that, of course, is and something that we should be watching Australia for first before we jump into the mix, is what other
companies going to do. We have seen for example x formerly Twitter has been rather litigious in both Australia and the UK, and you know, taking the governments too caught or taking the regulators too caught against certain regulations, and so I would expect that to take place as well, So I think it's a waiting game in relation to those.
Yeah, it is concerning though, the rabbit holes that the these apps do take you down. I was just telling my colleagues the other day actually that I liked a couple of healthy eating videos on tick. This was TikTok, and a couple of days later and a few scrolls later, I was getting I don't know what the term is for it, but very clearly anorexia content. A lot of body checking, a lot of you know, showing off someone's physique from the side them looking very dangerously skinny, and
them being in a hospital room. And the comments on those videos were actually really alarming. They was They said things like body goals and I You're so lucky and the things like that, and I kind of sat there. I took screenshots of it because I was so shocked that that just popped up on my feed after liking a couple of healthy eating videos. And you just sit there and think, what are these kids ate those commenters? How old are they and what are these kids getting
served up? If they do like a few of these videos? What kind of routes do you go down? I mean it's terrifying.
Yeah, absolutely, and you get the sense of especially as a parent, you would get a sense of your hopelessness, like how do you control that? And the reality is is that we don't have in place, for example, transparency requirements on these companies to be like, well, how are
your algorithms working? Are they safe for children? But also other vulnerable groups like women and rainbow communities and maldi And we don't actually understand how harmful content spreads because we're not allowed behind that curtain, and so requiring companies to actually reveal that would be a step in that direction rather than shielding. You know, if you put in a band, you shield like a group of people from that, but everyone else is engaging in it, and those ideas
spread regardless. And so there must be something else that we can do to look behind the curtain and then see those how the algorithm works, why is it pushing this kind of content? And what kind of moderation can we put in place to make sure that we're protected from these kinds of harmful material.
You do wonder as well, if there was a legal requirement for us to look behind the curtain and for these companies to be transparent about how their algorithms work, whether the sheer fear from their side of us actually discovering how they work changes things. Could changing the law? Could that even be a possibility.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean we can regulate whatever services operate in New Zealand, so it is within our framework to do that. And when you've got legal risks in place and scrutiny, it changes companies' sort of prior priorities, right, and especially if you attach to that non compliance penalties that are significant enough that's going to bring them into like oh okay, well now I have to talk about this.
And regulation can seem like a scary thing. We think regulation will stop innovation, maybe stop competition in a market, But what it can do is actually provide a lot of certainty for your users who want to engage in safer spaces. If it is safer in meta apps, people are going to go back to Facebook if it is safer. So there are incentives for companies to do that. But those incentives need to be in place, and they clearly need to be legal incentives because we've had twenty years
of nothing and this is where we are. We're at a space where yeah, you scroll on those those apps and you come across harmful content really quickly, and we don't want that as a society. I think we've decided that, and so this is one way we can do that.
Yeah, absolutely, and perhaps I mean I saw the other day actually as well, I didn't know that the brand Lush isn't on social media and it's chosen to do that. So that if they have an ethics coordinator and they've chosen not to be on social media, what if more companies did that.
Yeah, I mean, there is definitely one way you can hold companies to accounts just by not giving them your engagement. And it is the attention economy. The more engagement they have, the more money they generate. And if moreover, if you choose not to advertise through the apps, that is also quite powerful because that's obviously where they get their money from. Connected to that, of course, is political sort of connection with social media. So you know, government around the world.
If the governments around the world decide actually we're not going to use meta anymore, that would also be a huge change. And of course that's difficult because a lot of our information around politics, I mean, that is the issue around around culture society. Politics all comes through those social media apps, and I feel like even if you have companies saying no, I don't want to engage with you,
there's still that foothold. So I think it comes back to political will around what you want your people to engage with.
And it also comes full circle as well, saying well, why aren't kids outside playing with each other until the street lights come on? Kind of thing. But it's like, we do have to move on as a society from that thinking because these kids, they've grown up in the digital aid, They've grown up with a smartphone in their hand and the tablet and things like that. You can't just you know, what's been given can't be taken away
as easily. So we probably have to move on from the grazed knees and the I don't know, catching tab and things I don't know what we did.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like it or not. Our social and cultural life happens online. It happens offline too, but it happens online for our young people, and in terms of their rights, they have a right to participate in public, cultural and social life, and that happens online, and it is particularly important for certain groups of young people so Rainbow Youth, for example, their sense of connection and community might be only online, it might not be found locally.
So these are important threads in their life that I think that we do need to accept and work with.
Thanks for joining us, Cassandra.
Thank you for having me.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at nzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Jane Ye and Rich Martin, who is also our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.