Melbourne, Australia — Technology giant Meta on Thursday began sending thousands of young Australians a two-week warning to downland their digital histories and delete their accounts from Facebook, Instagram and Threads before a world-first social media ban on accounts of children younger than 16 takes effect.
The Australian government announced two weeks ago that the three Meta platforms plus Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube must take reasonable steps to exclude Australian account holders younger than 16, beginning Dec. 10.
California-based Meta on Thursday became the first of the targeted tech companies to outline how it will comply with the law. Meta contacted thousands of young account holders via SMS and email to warn that suspected children will start to be denied access to the platforms from Dec. 4.
“We will start notifying impacted teens today to give them the opportunity to save their contacts and memories,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta said young users could also use the notice period to update their contact information “so we can get in touch and help them regain access once they turn 16.”
Meta has estimated there are 350,000 Australians aged 13-to-15 on Instagram and 150,000 in that age bracket on Facebook. Australia’s population is 28 million.
Account holders 16-years-old and older who were mistakenly given notice that they would be excluded can contact Yoti Age Verification and verify their age by providing government-issued identity documents or a “video selfie,” Meta said.
Terry Flew, co-director of Sydney University’s Center for AI, Trust and Governance, said such facial-recognition technology had a failure rate of at least 5%.
“In the absence of a government-mandated ID system, we’re always looking at second-best solutions around these things,” Flew told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The government has warned platforms that demanding that all account holders prove they are older than 15 would be an unreasonable response to the new age restrictions. The government maintains the platforms already had sufficient data about many account holders to ascertain they were not young children.
Social media companies will face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars (about $33 million) if they are found to be failing to prevent people under 16 from creating accounts on their platforms.
Meta’s vice president and global head of safety, Antigone Davis, said she would prefer that app stores including Apple App Store and Google Play collect the age information when a user signs up and verifies they are at least 16 year old for app operators such as Facebook and Instagram.
“We believe a better approach is required: a standard, more accurate, and privacy-preserving system, such as OS/app store-level age verification,” Davis said in a statement.
“This combined with our investments in ongoing efforts to assure age … offers a more comprehensive protection for young people online,” she added.
Dany Elachi, founder of the parents’ group Heaps Up Alliance that lobbied for the social media age restriction, said parents should start helping their children plan on how they will spend the hours currently absorbed by social media.
He was critical of the government’s only announcing on the complete list of platforms that will become age-restricted on Nov. 5.
“There are aspects of the legislation that we’re not entirely supportive of, but the principle that children under the age of 16 are better off in the real world, that’s something we advocated for and are in favor of,” Elachi said. “When everybody misses out, nobody misses out. That’s the theory. Certainly we expect that it would play out that way. We hope parents are going to be very positive about this and try to help their children see all the potential possibilities that are now open to them.”
There was significant resistance to the legislation last year, however, including from some children’s advocacy groups.
The CEO of the Save the Children charity Mat Tinkler said in a statement a year ago, when the ban was approved by Australian lawmakers, that while he welcomed the government’s efforts to protect children from harm online, the solution should be regulating social media companies, rather than a blanket ban.
He said the government should “instead use the momentum of this moment to hold the social media giants to account, to demand that they embed safety into their platforms rather than adding it as an afterthought, and to work closely with experts and children and young people themselves to make online spaces safer, as opposed to off-limits.”
The Australian Human Rights Commission, an independent government body, also expressed “serious reservations” over the law before it was approved, saying last year that there were “less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights. One example of an alternative response would be to place a legal duty of care on social media companies.”