Australia is heading towards the next election phase, and its Prime Minister has pledged a potential ban on underage social media access to minimize controversies.
The Australian Parliament may soon observe a new bill seeking a permanent ban on underage social media users below 14-16. Its running Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has announced that the government will impose a yet-to-be-defined ban on younger teenagers and underage children from accessing social media before elections.
This move may have been pushed ahead as the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has assured that if his coalition wins in the next elections, his party will certainly ban children below 16 years of age from all social media platforms within 100 days of coming into the government.
Referring to the use case of the UK’s recently passed legislation on age verification technology, Albanese is now relying heavily on similar technologies to ensure the new proposed bill works across Australia.
One challenge that Australia is facing right now is the availability of VPN services at nominal costs, which may help underage users bypass the new age restrictions. Social media platforms are being instructed to come up with solutions to facilitate age verification of underage accounts. Most of the private players and federal strategies have suggested Albanese to follow in the UK’s footsteps.
Doing this would allow for the below options to verify the age of social media users:
- Using banks to verify the age is above 18.
- Utilizing mobile providers to confirm if the user is an adult.
- Online real-time photo verification with registered Photo ID.
- Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to estimate age based on facial features.
Meta has suggested that the verification should be done at the device level, meaning Google and Apple take up the responsibility of restricting underage users at the download stage. In the case of Android devices, external APKs can easily bypass this restriction as it will limited to their application marketplaces.
A former chief justice of the high court has revealed that ensuring compliance by international companies like Meta would be extremely challenging. Legal backing is a must to ensure that regulations are met, and the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act does it efficiently enough for others to follow.
