South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has looked at what eSafety are doing — including getting into stupid fights with Musk — and decided to make a big show of telling social media platforms to do what they’re doing anyway. This is already a won battle.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the U.S. sets 13 as the age below which parental consent is required for the collection of personal information from children. Because of this, 13 is already the default minimum age for the social media platforms.
The primary ask here is to expand existing additional age gating used for France, Germany, South Korea, etc. Not the imposition of something new — like takedown orders.
What he’s done is strategically smart: Go for the social media platforms first, which are low hanging fruit. Habituate people to a target behaviour they might otherwise resist. There’s then room to expand it. Shame it’s a terrible idea.
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What is badly needed is resources to help parents learn how to use the parent controls available on all modern devices. Making these decisions can be difficult and confusing, and parents deserve information about why this is useful and desirable, and they deserve support.
Digital and media literacy is strongly tied to social capital, and not everyone just has it; providing equity here through the kind of education that Children and Media Australia do really matters.
We’ve had more than 20 years now of the “screen time” moral panic, in which self-interested grifters profit from telling parents that all that matters is time not content.
People need education and support to learn how to manage their children’s digital exposure.
Abandoning parents again to easily circumvented state age gating is no real improvement on just telling them that all that matters is limiting time; neither helps them understand how to make difficult decisions about the content exposure, or how to talk to their kids about what they do see.