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“We’ve gotCOPPAIDIDEU Your browser does not support the element. your back,” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told parents on November 29th, a day after pushing through some of the world’s strictest limits on screentime. One year from now, under-16s will be banned from using social media, in a move intended to protect them from harm. Teenagers groaned. Parents discreetly high-fived. Policymakers around the world took notes.Most social-media platforms are notionally off-limits for under-13s, a cut-off that was widely adopted after America passed , a law to protect children’s online privacy, in 1998. But the rules are widely ignored and feebly enforced. Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, reports that 22% of the country’s social-media users aged between eight and 17 have an account with an adult’s date of birth. TikTok (minimum age: 13) is used by half of British eight- to 11-year-olds.Parents and politicians long turned a blind eye. But amid concern that social media harms mental health, governments are getting tougher. European countries including France, Germany and Italy require younger teens to get parents’ permission before signing up. Various American states have passed laws limiting teens’ access to social media, though many have hit legal obstacles. , cheered on by its domestic press, is the first country to enact a blanket ban.The first problem it must solve is enforcement. Younger teenagers lack the driving licences and credit cards that often serve as proof of age, so many companies use machine learning to estimate age via selfie. Five years ago such models were accurate to within about three years, says Tony Allen of the Age Check Certification Scheme, an auditor that is working with the Australian government. Today they can guess to within about a year, he says, better than most humans.That still means errors at the margin, especially for people with dark skin, who tend to be underrepresented in training data. Yoti, which checks ages for Meta on products including Facebook Dating, reports an average error of about a year for light-skinned 13- to 17-year-olds, and a year and a half for dark-skinned teens.Technical challenges aside, how broad should crackdowns on social media be? The category spans everything from video to messaging. Australia has suggested that TikTok will fall under its ban but that YouTube will be exempt, for its “significant” educational content. Video games are also off the hook, though they have become increasingly social as children use platforms like Roblox to chat as well as play.Another question is who should carry out the checks. Australia is placing the burden on the social-media platforms: “You create the risk, you’ve got to deal with it,” says Mr Allen. Meta and others say the checks should instead be done by operating systems or app stores, making it Apple’s and Google’s problem. That would allow users to have their phone vouch for their age anonymously, rather than hand over mugshots or s to every social network, gambling app or porn site they visit. For now, governments seem wary of making Apple and Google create global registries of their billions of users.Age limits will hit some social platforms harder than others. The cost of performing checks will be more burdensome for startups than incumbents (Yoti quotes between three and 31 cents per check, depending on volume). And whereas only about 5% of Facebook’s users in America are under 18, at Snapchat the figure is 19% (see chart). Young users at least are not especially valuable to advertisers: ads aimed at under-16s probably make up a “low single-digit percentage” of spending, estimates Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, an ad consultancy. Meta has not shown advertisements to under-18s in the for more than a year, amid a legal dispute; its bottom line has hardly been dented.No one yet knows the extent to which keeping teens off social media will reduce their interest as adults. But apps like TikTok, which is already threatened with an outright ban in America, could be disadvantaged if they are banned for teenagers while direct rivals such as YouTube are let off. The big winners from a social-media crackdown may be alternative types of screentime, such as gaming—at least so long as the enthusiasm for banning children’s online pursuits goes no further.
