BBC London transcript:
“This ban is coming into place in order to try and make the internet a safer place for children, In the UK we’ve had as similar code with the online safety code since July of this year to try and make the internet a safe place of U18s. But the problem we have in the Uk is that the online safety act just doesn’t go far enough. Australia have taken the bold stop of mandating that anyone under the age of 16 is going to be banned from social media.
What are the mechanics? it’s all going to come down to age verification. Meta, for example, have notified all of their account users that are going to be impacted. They’ve made it clear they feel there’s a better way to go about this. But of course they would say that. Snapchat have frozen the accounts of those U16s, and Tiktok are taking similar measures.
The real way in which this is going to be policed comes down to age verification. But as well know, age verification is not failsafe. There have been stories reported of a 15 year old child whose age was verified between age 14 to 43 depending on what face they pulled. And even examples of children using Beyonce’s face to pass the age verification. So it is not safe at all.
This could then be a case of how creative the youth of Australia can be. When you ban something, there are two risks: first, people always try to find ways around out. Here in the UK we saw when mandatory age checks came in at the end of July for accessing porn sites, there was a surge in VPNs – which are not regulated under the Online Safety Act. The second thing is, are we actually making the internet a safer place for children if we’re going to simply ban them from it? What happens when they turn 16 if we’ve not tackled the content that’s out there and properly held platform and service providers to account.
I just worry as to whether this is quite a blunt tool that won’t drive the change we all want – which is to see the internet as a safer place for children.
Here in the UK we’ve said we’re going to watch and see what happens in Australia. But I think in a world where children live, work, communicate, play online, I’m not sure we’ll see a ban on social media coming in there for U16s.”
Click here to listen to the full interview (Mark’s clip is at 6:46am)
For further information, please contact Mark Jones, Partner in the Criminal Defence team or, alternatively, telephone on 020 7693 5875.
