Australia shows the way on curbs on social media

Australia has introduced a bill which will penalise social media platforms – X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok – with a fine of 50 million Australian dollars (US$32.5 million – if they fail to stop children from holding accounts. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said of the proposed law that it “places the onus on social media platforms, not parents or children, to ensure protections are in place.”

Rowland told parliament, “For too many young Australians, social media can be harmful. Almost two-thirds of 14 to 17-year-old Australians have viewed extremely harmful content online, including drug abuse, suicide or self-harm.”

Spain and France have proposed laws which drew the cut-off age. Spain has raised the bar from 14 to 16, and France has put the bar for those below 15. Florida in the United States keeps the ban for those below 14. It shows that social media addiction for youngsters has assumed epidemic proportions, and there is rising concern all over the world as to how to curb it.

The fear expressed by Katie Maskiell of UNICEF Australia is that a stricter law could force the youngsters to find ways of breaking the bar and they could turn to more dangerous methods. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged that this was a possibility but he felt that the proposed law would be a landmark legislation.

Maskiell felt that more is needed to be done than making stringent laws. There are also doubts whether it is technically feasible to impose the ban barring the youth from accessing the social media platforms. The social media outlets will have a year’s time to work out the firewalls needs to stop youngsters getting on to the social media.

Social media has become a big issue, and it is not confined to innocent children accessing it. It has also raised concerns about the reliability of the information that is purveyed on it. In September this year, Rowland had moved a bill that social media platforms allowing misinformation and disinformation which is “reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive and reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm” will be liable to a fine of up to five percent of the global revenue of the platform.

Elon Musk, owner of X, has termed the Australian government fascist for this, and the Australians have hit back at him. Rowland defended the move saying, “Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy. Doing nothing and allowing this problem to fester is not an option.”

The social media owners like Musk are sure to cry foul but as Rowland has rightly pointed out that what appears on the social media, when it happens to carry wrong information, is a threat to social harmony and even economic stability. Perhaps the social media platforms have to form a committee or an association of their own and adopt a social and more code, so that governments would not have to interfere.

It is an old debate that there is a difference between liberty and licence. It can be argued that the existing libel laws should take care of the excesses of the social media platforms. But as in the case of youth on social media accessing material that could be toxic for their minds, there is need for strict restrictions. It is a responsibility that the owners of the social media platforms should assume themselves.

When ChatGPT came into the market, the Internet companies themselves came forward to warn that AI could cause problems and there is need for regulation. There is need for regulation of social media. The question is whether the social media platforms would find ways to create norms for themselves, or will they have to imposed from outside.