Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: We need the teen social media ban, because the companies won't enforce it

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

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4d ago 2:04

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I've got an update for you on the social media ban for kids situation - over in Australia, the social media companies have now admitted they can kick underage kids off their platforms, and they've admitted that they will start enforcing the ban when the ban in Australia comes into effect on December 10th.

Now, this is not a surprise to me that they can actually do it, because I never believed the nonsense when they said: “Oh, it's impossible to age verify, we couldn't possibly.” Because guess what? They can.

Reddit over in the UK does this - it age verifies and stops people seeing content. It's completely possible to do. And it's pretty obvious that they already have a rough idea of how old the kids are, because that's why they feed teenage content to teenage people.

What I think we should take from this, though, is that we should never believe the social media companies when they say they can't stop kids using their products.

What I think you should do is kind of take the approach of treating them a little bit like the tobacco companies of old - completely untrustworthy, want to peddle their product, do not want to stop peddling their product.

In fact, I think, to be honest, that there is a useful parallel here with the way that we treat ciggies and how we should be treating social media companies.

We ban kids under the age of 18 from buying ciggies, we ban them from buying booze because we know it's bad for them.

When they're older, they can use it. Hopefully, they use it wisely, but not when their little brains and their little bodies are still developing. And I think the same is true of social media.

And yes, like the ciggies and the booze, the kids are gonna find a way to get around it and get their hands on it. On a New Year's Eve when they're 16, they're gonna get completely drunk. But hopefully it'll be a rare occasion, not an every weekend type of thing.

And in the case of banning the booze and the ciggies, we could have left that up to the parents. We could have said: “Nah, it's okay, you decide if your kids want to smoke and drink under the age of 18.”

And parents should play a role, right? But I think we all decided as a group that this was worth banning, and I think we need to do the same thing with social media.

And I think we need to do it mainly for the social media companies, because they are not prepared to do it themselves until they're forced to - just like in Australia.

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