MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Riley Allen, a 15-year-old schoolboy living on an Outback sheep farm, doesn’t know how he’ll keep in touch with his far-flung circle of friends once Australia’s world-first social media ban goes into effect Wednesday.
Riley’s family lives 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Wudinna, a community of just over 1,000 in the state of South Australia. But some of his school friends live 70 kilometers (43 miles) away.
“I don’t think the impact will be very positive for us. We don’t have much here to come into contact with each other,” Riley said.
“I’m not sure how we’re going to keep in touch between holidays,” he said, referring to the southern hemisphere’s summer break that begins Thursday.
Riley and others under the age of 16 will be banned by law from having accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch as of Wednesday. The platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($32.9 million) if they do not take reasonable steps to remove the accounts.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, was the first tech giant to react, starting to exclude suspected children from last week.
Riley has accounts on most age-restricted platforms and has been asked by some to verify that he is at least 16 years old. But on Monday, he was not eliminated by any.
Mom won’t help 15-year-old son get around social media ban
The mother of Riley’s teacher, Sonia Allen, said she wouldn’t help her son get around the ban, but she suspects other parents will.
“I wouldn’t do it. I know there are other people who would. If the rule is there, the rule is there. But I know how kids are and I was a kid before and they’ll get around it if they can,” she said.
While the law does not allow parents any discretion in allowing their children to have social media accounts, Allen said parents have a role in regulating their children’s use of social media.
A year ago, she banned Riley from social media for a few weeks.
“In the past with Riley, we’ve had to take steps to limit his use because we’d find him on social media in the middle of the night and he wouldn’t do his homework and things like that. We ended up taking them away from him for a few months,” Allen said. “From there, he learned to use it more responsibly.”
Riley, who turns 16 in April, said he understood the goals of the ban, but there are other ways to achieve them. He suggested an enforced 10pm social media ban for young children to prevent them from losing sleep.
The teenagers are challenging the ban in Australia’s highest court
Riley has an ally in Australia’s biggest city, Sydney: schoolboy Noah Jones, who turns 16 in August.
Noah is one of two 15-year-old plaintiffs in a constitutional challenge to the law in the High Court. The other in the case brought by Sydney rights group Digital Freedom Project is schoolgirl Macy Neyland.
They argue the law inappropriately robs 2.6 million young Australians of the right to freedom of political expression enshrined in Australia’s constitution.
The Australian government is vowing to defeat the challenge on behalf of what they say is an overwhelming majority of parents demanding government action against the harms of social media.
Many children with disabilities have told the media that they welcome their exclusion from platforms with design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens while also offering content that can harm their health and well-being.
The parent group Heaps Up Alliance, which lobbied for the social media age restriction, supports the theory behind the blanket ban that “when everyone misses out, nobody loses”.
Before Parliament passed the ban last year, more than 140 Australian and international academics with expertise in technology and child welfare fields signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese opposing the social media age limit as “too clear a tool to effectively address the risks”.
Noah said the ban would see young Australians switch from age-restricted platforms to more dangerous, less regulated options.
“I’m against this social media ban because as young Australians we will be completely silenced and cut off from our country and the rest of the world,” Noah said. “Our whole lives we’ve grown up with this and now it’s suddenly taken away from us. We wouldn’t even know what else we could do.”
His mother, Renee Jones, is also involved in the court case as her son’s legal guardian because he cannot make legal decisions for himself as a child.
She considers herself a relatively strict social media parent and has never allowed Noah or his two older brothers to bring devices into their bedroom. But she supports Noah’s position.
“My parents would never have dreamed that my children could be so fortunate to have this library of knowledge,” Jones said.
“But I credit Noah with being a young man who recognizes the dangers of social media. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops,” she added.
One plaintiff says money from tech giants would be welcome
Digital Freedom Project President John Ruddick, who is also a state lawmaker for the minor Libertarian Party, said he initially intended to seek an injunction in an attempt to prevent the ban from taking effect on Wednesday. But his lawyers advised against it.
An instruction hearing will take place at the end of February to set a hearing date for the constitutional challenge, which will be heard by the seven-judge panel.
Ruddick said the case was not funded by any tech giants, but that they would be “extremely welcome” to make a financial contribution.
Ruddick expected the children to circumvent the ban by means including using virtual private networks to make them appear to be offshore.
“They’ll bypass it, so they’ll then be on an underground social network and, to make matters worse, no parental supervision,” Ruddick said.
“It’s much better for it to be out in the open and for parents to play a very, very active role … in monitoring what they’re doing on social media,” he added.