Australia’s social media ban leaves a 15-year-old worried about losing touch with friends

MELBOURNE, Australia — Riley Allen, a 15-year-old schoolboy living on an Outback sheep ranch, is unsure how he will keep in touch with his far-flung circle of friends once Australia’s first global ban on social media comes into effect on Wednesday.

Riley’s family lives 5 kilometers from Wudinna, a community of just over 1,000 people 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 connect with each other,” Riley said.

“I don’t know how we’re going to stay in touch over the holidays,” he said, referring to the southern hemisphere summer vacation 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 starting Wednesday. Platforms face fines of up to A$49.5 million ($32.9 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove accounts.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, was the first tech giant to respond, starting to exclude suspected young children last week.

Riley has accounts on most age-restricted platforms and some have asked him to verify that he is at least 16 years old. But on Monday, he had not been ousted by any.

Riley’s mother, Sonia Allen, a schoolteacher, said she would not help her son circumvent the ban, but she suspects other parents would.

“I wouldn’t do it. I know there are other people who would do it. If the rule is there, the rule is there. But I know what kids are like, and I’ve been a kid before, and they’ll bend it if they can,” she said.

Although the law does not grant parents any discretion to allow their children to have social media accounts, Allen said parents have a role in regulating their children’s social media use.

A year ago, she banned Riley from social media for several weeks.

“In the past with Riley, we had to take steps to limit his usage because we found him on social media at midnight and he wasn’t doing his homework and things like that. We ended up taking it 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 understands the goals of the ban, but there are other ways to achieve them. He suggested a 10 p.m. social media curfew for young children to prevent them from losing sleep.

Riley has an ally in Sydney, Australia’s largest city: 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 person involved in the case brought by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project is schoolgirl Macy Neyland.

They claim the law unduly deprives 2.6 million young Australians of a right to freedom of political communication implicit in the Australian constitution.

The Australian government is committed to tackling this challenge on behalf of what it says is an overwhelming majority of parents who are demanding government action against the harms of social media.

Many restricted children have told media outlets that they welcome being excluded from platforms with design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens while also offering content that could harm their health and well-being.

Parents group Heaps Up Alliance, which has lobbied for an age limit on social media, supports the theory behind the blanket ban that “when everyone is excluded, no one is excluded”.

Before Parliament passed the ban last year, more than 140 Australian and international academics with expertise in areas related to technology and child protection signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese opposing an age limit on social media, seeing it as “too blunt an instrument to effectively manage risk.”

Noah said the ban would lead young Australians to move from age-restricted platforms to more dangerous and less regulated options.

“I am 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. “We’ve grown up with this our whole lives, and now it’s being taken away from us all of a sudden. We wouldn’t even know what else to do.”

His mother, Renee Jones, is also involved in the lawsuit as her son’s litigation guardian, because as a child he could not make legal decisions on his own.

She considers herself a relatively strict mother on social media and has never allowed Noah or her two older brothers to take devices into their room. But she supports Noah’s position.

“My parents never imagined that my children would be so lucky to have this library of knowledge,” Jones said.

“But I really see Noah as a young person who recognizes the dangers of social media. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops,” she added.

Digital Freedom Project chairman John Ruddick, who is also a Minor Libertarian Party lawmaker, said he had initially intended to seek a court injunction in a bid to prevent the ban from taking effect on Wednesday. But his lawyers advised against it.

An instructional hearing will take place at the end of February to set a hearing date for the constitutional challenge which will be heard by all seven judges.

Ruddick said the deal was not funded by any tech giant, but they would be “extremely welcome” to make a financial contribution.

Ruddick expected children to circumvent the ban by, among other things, using virtual private networks to make them appear abroad.

“They’re going to get around this and then end up on underground social networks and, even worse, without parental supervision,” Ruddick said.

“It’s much better that this is done out in the open and that parents play a very, very active role (…) in monitoring what they do on social networks,” he added.