How Australian teens are planning to get around their social media ban

The world’s first attempt to ban all children under 16 from social media is about to come into force in Australia – but teenagers are already fighting back.

Announced last November by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, this ban should come into force on December 10. On that day, any underage subscribers to services such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat will have their account deleted.

If social media companies fail to remove teenagers from their platforms, they face fines of up to A$49.5 million (£25 million). Neither parents nor children can be punished.

The law is being closely watched by the rest of the world and a similar ban is being considered by the European Commission. So far, much of the debate around the measure has focused on how it will be enforced and what type of age verification technologies will be put in place, as well as possible harmful impacts on teens who rely on social media to connect with their peers.

But as the online big day approaches, teens have already begun preparing to thwart efforts to restrict their digital lives. The most publicized example is that of an 11^th hour donated by two 15-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, both from New South Wales, to build a case in the country’s highest court to seek the overturning of the social media ban.

“If I’m honest, kids have been planning to get around the ban for months and months, but the media is only hearing about it now because of the countdown,” says Jones.

“I know kids who hide old family devices in their school lockers. They transferred their accounts to their parents or older siblings a long time ago and checked out with an adult ID, and their parents have no idea,” he says. “We know the algorithms, so the kids follow groups of older people, like gardening or walking groups of over 50s, and we comment in professional language so we don’t get called out.”

Jones and Neyland originally sought an injunction to delay the ban, but instead decided to push for their opposition to the ban to be tried as a special constitutional law matter.

The two men scored a major victory on December 4, when the Australian High Court ruled that it would hear their case as early as February. The main argument made by the teenage plaintiffs is that the ban constitutes an unfair burden on their implied freedom of political communication. They also claim in their request that this policy will sacrifice “a considerable sphere of freedom of expression and engagement for 13 to 15 year olds in social media interactions.”

Libertarian advocates the Digital Freedom Project, led by New South Wales politician John Ruddick, are back in the mix. “I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old and they’ve been telling me for months that everyone in the playground is talking about it,” he says. “They’re all on social media. They all benefit from social media.”

Ruddick says his kids talk about how to get around the ban, including using virtual private networks (VPNs), new social media apps and ways to thwart age-verification technology.

Catherine Page Jeffery of the University of Sydney, Australia, says it is only as the ban’s deadline approaches that it “becomes real” for teenagers. “My impression is that until now, young people haven’t really believed that this is actually happening,” she says.

She says her own children are already discussing workarounds with their friends. Her youngest daughter has already downloaded another alternative social media platform called Yope. This site is not yet on the government list, but, like several others, including Coverstar and Lemon8, it has been warned by the government to self-assess so as not to fall foul of the ban.

Lisa Given, of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, says that as children disperse to the far corners of the internet on new and obscure social media platforms, parents will lose visibility of their children’s online lives. She also expects a significant proportion of parents to help their children pass age checks by offering their own faces.

Susan McLean, a leading Australian cybersecurity expert, says it’s going to be a “total game of whack-a-mole” as new sites appear, children migrate to them and the government then adds them to the list of banned sites. She says that rather than depriving teenagers of social media, governments should force big companies to fix algorithms that serve inappropriate content to children.

“The government is so stupid in its thinking,” she said. “You can’t ban your way to safety unless you ban every app or platform that allows children to communicate.”

McLean says that a few weeks ago, a teenage student told her, “If the reason for this ban is to keep bad adults away from kids, then why are bad adults allowed to stay on the platform and I have to leave?”

Noah Jones, the teenage plaintiff in the High Court case, puts it even more bluntly. “There’s no newspaper big enough for me to know what I can see in 10 minutes on Instagram,” he says. “My friends say the pedophiles got away with it and we were banned.”