Australia warns social media platforms against age verification for all ahead of a ban on children

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian authorities said Tuesday that social media platforms should not demand age verification for all account holders starting from December, when a ban on children under 16 having accounts goes into effect in the country.

The government released guidelines on how platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram should apply the world’s first ban on children using social media from Dec. 10. It says verifying the ages of all account holders would be unreasonable.

“We think it would be unreasonable if platforms reverified everyone’s age,” said Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who drafted the guidelines. Her use of the word “reverified” suggested the platforms usually already had sufficient data to verify a user was older than 16.

She said the platforms have “targeting technology” to focus on those under 16.

“They can target us with deadly precision when it comes to advertising. Certainly they can do this around the age of a child,” she added.

Australia’s Parliament enacted the ban last year, giving the platforms a year to work out its implementation. The platforms face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts.

Critics of the legislation fear that banning young children from social media will impact the privacy of all users who must establish they are older than 16.

Inman Grant said claims the ban would see every Australian account holder subjected to age verification as a “scare tactic.”

Communications Minister Anika Wells said the government seeks to keep platform users’ data as private as possible.

“These social media platforms know an awful lot about us” already, Wells said. “If you have been on, for example, Facebook since 2009, then they know you are over 16. There is no need to verify.”

Wells and Inman Grant will travel to the United States next week to discuss the guidelines with the platforms’ owners.

Inman Grant said the platforms would need to demonstrate to her agency that they were taking “reasonable steps” to exclude children younger than 16.

“We don’t expect that every under-16 account is magically going to disappear on Dec. 10,” Inman Grant said. “What we will be looking at is systemic failures to apply the technologies, policies and processes.”

Melbourne’s RMIT University expert on information sciences Lisa Given told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the government’s approach acknowledges that age verification technologies make errors.

“It’s going to be up to each of the platforms to determine how they’re going to comply and it will be interesting to see if they test the limits of the definition of ‘reasonable steps,’” Given said.