Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced plans to ban social media for all Australians under the age of 16. Social media companies would be responsible for imposing restriction technologies to ban new teenage users. But similar proposals, including those in the US, have shown that such prescriptive bans do not protect young teenagers and often violate their privacy.

Opposition to a potential ban was already growing before Albanese announced the proposal. last month, 140 Australian international academics signed year open letter opposing age restrictions in social networks. Among the group’s concerns was the potential to affect “children’s opportunity to benefit from interacting with the digital environment” and that “there are not yet effective techniques for ensuring age or verifying parental consent”.

The letter also noted that ineffective measures to prevent teenagers from accessing social media could cause greater harm to users who bypass age verification measurements. Without incentives to provide safety protections for minors, young users who gain access would be at greater risk online without child-specific privacy settings, parental controls and other content blocking features. Social media platforms may be reluctant to retain these features if they signal to enforcement authorities that they still expect a large portion of their user base to be minors.

The types of protection that would prevent this come with their own concerns. Tighter restrictions, including surrendering government ID or facial biometric age estimationwhich the Australian government is exploring, raises significant privacy concerns.

Australia’s proposed enforcement framework will only penalize social media companies for underage users. This will encourage stricter vetting methods and more data collection, which puts people at risk. As reported by New America states that “operators that verify users’ age through government-issued or credit card identification information put data at risk if secure processes are not in place for the use, collection, processing, storage or deletion” of personally identifiable information.

At the beginning of this year, a facial recognition data breach occurred in Australia involving a company that used kiosks during the COVID-19 pandemic to check temperatures. More than 1 million records have reportedly been leaked.

Aside from violating users’ privacy, blocking social media to protect children’s mental health can ironically block ways to find help. Jackie Hallan, director of youth mental health service ReachOut, said Associated Press that “73% of young people accessing mental health in Australia have done so through social media”.

like lEGISLATION in Florida, Arkansas, Ohio, and Utah faced many First Amendment roadblocks. of Florida House bill 3 (HB 3), for example, prohibits users under the age of 14 from using social media and requires parental permission for users between the ages of 14 and 15. sued the state of Florida, arguing that HB 3 violates the First Amendment and ignores parental rights.

However, Australia’s proposed ban is much stricter than HB 3; has a higher age restriction and parental consent it cannot bypass the government ban. Albanese said there will be some exclusions and exemptions for access to educational services, but otherwise parents lose control over whether or not their children are allowed on social media.

said Antigone Davis, head of safety at Meta A? that “what’s missing is a deeper discussion about how we implement protections, otherwise we risk making ourselves feel better, like we’ve taken action, but teenagers and parents won’t find themselves in a better place.”

If adopted, social media companies will have a year to decide what kind of restriction technology to implement. The legislation is due to be introduced in Parliament by November 18, the final two weeks of Australia’s legislative session.

The Australian government is ignoring teen privacy, parental rights and social media company boards warning there is no effective way to keep teen users safe. A better solution would be to let parents be parents and children be children, instead of the nanny state insisting it knows better.