We’ve turned kids into outlaws. It won’t work, but we can still make social media safer for them

There is a growing consensus among parents that social media platforms are places they don’t want their teen children to be. Rather than try to change the platforms themselves, the solution that has emerged is to shut kids out of social media altogether.

On Friday, the federal parliament passed a bill that sets a minimum age of 16 for access to social media sites and requires platforms to take reasonable steps to check the age of users.

Evicted from social media, but many children will find darker corners of the internet. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Like many, I find the plan to ban kids problematic. Undoubtedly well intentioned, it gives rise to risks, including some for children. Young people like going online and many use social media to build community, exercise autonomy and find information. Kids will, of course, look for ways to get around a ban, and when they do, they will find themselves in even more depraved places, as platforms will have been liberated from the need to make social media safe for kids.

The algorithms have learnt that the content that keeps users’ attention is often the worst kind of content.

The risks of a ban extend to adults, too; after all, to ensure children aren’t on the platforms, the age of every internet user will need to be checked in some way. As the country’s privacy commissioner, and as the authority responsible for overseeing the privacy protections in the new bill, I’m concerned about the widespread privacy implications of the social media ban.

At the same time, I can’t help but ask why we have accepted that social media platforms have to be places of darkness, violence and outrage. These are, after all, not immutable objects, but technological tools, designed by humans for humans. It is within our power to change that design. There is a great deal more we could be doing to make social media a better place to be for kids, for everyone. Key to this equation is strengthening privacy protections online.

Social media platforms are freely available because they leverage data-driven business models, in which platforms collect individuals’ personal information to sell to companies for targeted advertising opportunities. The more time users spend on the platform, the more opportunities for targeted ads and the more data platforms have about the users to sell to advertisers.

The algorithms used by the platforms are tweaked to optimise for eyeballs on the screen. This may be an acceptable bargain in theory, but in practice the algorithms have learnt that the content that keeps users’ attention is often the worst kind of content.

This may be the current state of the social media data economy, but it need not be the ultimate one. I firmly believe that stronger privacy laws, robustly enforced, could help us shape the online environment into a better place for children.

When the government got its social media ban through, it also passed the first tranche of long-awaited reforms to the Privacy Act, which begin to take us down the path towards a strengthened privacy framework online. Among other things, the bill empowers my office to develop a children’s online privacy code, specifying the requirements of the Privacy Act for social media platforms and other tools likely to be used by children. Unlike the social media ban, this code could help us actively shape the design choices of online services and platforms to ensure they are a place where kids are not only safe, but able to thrive, connect, learn and grow.

A raft of other reforms to the Privacy Act hasn’t yet been brought before parliament but could take us further down that path – making digital spaces more private, less extractive and more enjoyable for both adults and children. A requirement that companies handle personal data in a way that is fair and reasonable, obtain genuine consent rather than rely on tick boxes, and provide alternatives to targeted advertising could all help us begin to reverse the gradual degradation of the internet into a place of scams, dark patterns and endless demands for personal information.

With Privacy Act reforms, the “enshittification” of the internet doesn’t have to be a one-way trajectory.

The government’s social media ban has been described as ambitious, but I believe we can be even more ambitious. Rather than accepting that social media is so bad that it needs to be banned for the most vulnerable, we could actively try to make it a better place. Changes, even small and incremental, could positively shape the online environment. Strong privacy law and application of that law in the online domain is part of that puzzle.

Carly Kind is Australia’s privacy commissioner.