What exactly does Anthony Albanese mean by "social media"?

And what does he have against ballet?

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

—H. L. Mencken

There are so many infuriating things about the Albanese Government’s announcement that they intend to legislate age-limit access for social media that it is hard to know where to start. Once again, team Labor are being spooked into badly thought-through laws rather than having the courage to take a beat and address a serious issue in a serious way.

The effect of social media on kids is a complex issue, but one thing we do know is that experts in the field, backed by good research, are suggesting that a ban is a poor response. Instead of digesting that advice, the PM is trying to justify himself with nonsense like this:

Sigh.

The idea that what happens online and that the relationships we form there aren’t real, is one of the most tiresome things people say on this subject. As many of us know, sincere and meaningful engagement online is possible, can be sustained over long periods of time, and can often lead to friendships forming that can be pursued online or off. I’m friends with people I have known since I was in kindergarten, long-term friendships formed in the old-fashioned way. But I also have a more recent group of friends made over the last thirty-odd years who I’ve met online—my workplace, after all—and some of whom I now hang out with in person. Others I only know online but these are real friends and we have real experiences, whatever the prime minister thinks.

The point is, it isn’t healthy to pretend that online is not “real”. To do so undermines what can be an avenue to genuine friendship and interaction, and after all, if what happens online isn’t “real”, why bother restricting access in the first place?

But this is emblematic of the shallow way in which the government is thinking about this issue and the quote above from the PM goes hand-in-hand with another of his pronouncements.

“I want kids to have a childhood. I want them off their devices and only the footy field and onto the Netball courts. I want them to have real experiences with real people.”

The knee-jerk evocation of sport as the go-to viable example of having “real experiences with real people” is nauseating. It is excluding. It overlooks the fact that sport itself can be the site of threat and torment for many kids, the very things they want to escape by going online and finding communities of the like-minded. As writer and journalist, Patrick Lenton noted:

Again, the situation is more complex than Albanese allows with his cloying paean to sport and “real people” and it is naive to think his proposed ban isn’t going to create as many issues as it solves. No-one is saying that social media should be exempt from providing a safe environment for kids, but to truly achieve that, governments need a much more realistic and honest understanding of how all this works.

Why not mention ballet or musical theatre? Or cooking? Or political rallies? That’s a good way to get outside and meet “real” people.

Why not join the Scouts or become an altar boy? No, wait.

The other thing that isn’t getting much attention in all this is how mainstream media organisations are manipulating the government. As Cam Wilson¹ from Crikey has noted:

This week, Albanese said that his government will legislate a minimum age on social media…Opposition Leader Peter Dutton pledged to do the same thing within the first 100 days of his government. This comes following a campaign by News Corp and Nova’s Michael “Wippa” Wipfli to restrict children under 16 from using social media, as well several state premiers promising to do the same. 

So, News Corp and Nova Radio are driving the current moral panic and the conflict of interest is palpable. Legacy media has a commercial interest in restricting people’s use of social media and other online platforms, and the government is bending over frontwards to accommodate one side at the expense of the other.

Successive Australian Governments have shown themselves to be completely vulnerable to lobbying by legacy media and consequently, social media has become a convenient scapegoat for problems that could just as easily be sheeted home to the mainstream. The demonisation of “the socials” means legacy media can not only be shielded from blame around disinformation, privacy and bullying, but it paves the way for governments to enact legislation like the Media Bargaining code that forces the platforms to pay legacy media outlets.

The pernicious influence of legacy media on how governments understand these issues needs to be addressed because it is distorting the way in which governments respond.

The other issue being ignored in most of the commentary on this topic is what the government actually means by “social media”. What exactly will they be restricting access to with this new age-assurance legislation?

I suspect the prime minister himself hasn’t worked this out for himself yet, though in a recent tweet he suggested he was thinking very broadly:

The phrase “social media and other digital platforms” suggest a maximalist approach that would be a disaster, potentially creating more problems than it solves.

In fact, there are definitions of “social media” in various government documents and legislative instruments, but it is hard to believe that such all-encompassing characterisations could be applied to the proposed new legislation.

For instance, in the government’s Schedule 1 Social Media Services Online Safety Code, they offer the following definition:

This is broad and could include various messaging apps and groups, though in another section (4.3) there is an attempt to exclude family and friends WhatsApp groups and the like. We really need clarity on this because, despite all the motherhood statements coming from supporters of the legislation, settling on a final defintion will be fraught. Surely not even the most gung-ho boosters of age restriction want to ban their kids from messaging apps?

In South Australia, the state legislation which is seeking to enforce a ban on children under 14 from accessing social media draws on the report into the matter written by Robert French AC. The French Report notes that “The term ‘social media service’ is defined broadly based on the definition in the Commonwealth legislation, the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) (‘Online Service Act’) but covering other services of concern. There are options which would be available to the Government in defining ‘social media service’ more or less broadly.”

In fact, the French Report provides a pretty good discussion of the difficulties in understanding how the government might arrive at a defintion, and as I say, I think it is going to be fraught. In the draft legislation French provides, he notes that his defintion “achieves the greatest consistency with the current Commonwealth definition. However, it does not account for the increasing convergence of ‘communication focused services’ and ‘sharing focused services’.”

He adds that exemptions could be provided, but as things stand, the defintion they are using, based on the Commonwealth one, “captures electronic services with a broad range of characteristics and potential risk profiles to children, including…an SMS service that enables end-users to communicate with other end-users…an MMS service that enables end-users to communicate with other end-users…a chat service that enables end-users to communicate with other end-users [and a] service that enables end-users to play online games with other end-users….”

I asked lawyer and founder of Digital Rights Watch, Lizzie O’Shea, for her take on what definition the federal government might apply in the proposed legislation to age-restricting access to social media, and she told me it wasn’t clear at all which direction they would go.

“Age assurance as an idea has been kicking around for a while. The eSafety Commissioner published a roadmap for a trial with respect to pornography, and the government sat on it for a while. Then in August last year, they decided they wouldn't proceed with the trial, for a few reasons, including that they thought the technology wasn't up to scratch.²

“Six months later, when they were in hot water about their policy on gender-based violence, this issue came up as a thing they could do, and they said they would implement the roadmap.”

O’Shea notes the politics of the matter saying that “the conservative side of politics wants to make age assurance an election issue and they have been consulting about it, and I suspect this recent announcement was designed to offset that, to minimize some kind of culture war. It would seem otherwise premature, given the trial under the roadmap has not finished, and the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society is still underway. 

“The announcement also came in response to the News Corp ‘Let Them Be Kids’ campaign, which proposed a ban that went beyond pornographic content and covered all social media. 

“So, that's the context for discussion, but there's no clear guidance about any of this.”

O’Shea thinks the federal government will have to arrive at a more focussed definition, and she mentions the French Report and the difficulties it raises around the convergence of social media and messaging services.

“I don't think the government will come up with a definition like a broadcast platform or one-to-many service, because it will be hard to do. More likely they'll end up listing particular platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.”

On the bright side, O’Shea noted that the “eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has a nuanced position,” and that Grant “correctly talked about the difficulty of separating out social media from other forms of media, and the potential relationship with harm. I think it helps that the regulator is taking a lead in this respect.”

Given all this, I suspect we are a long way from arriving at a satisfactory solution to this issue and the prime minister’s inclination to speak in clumsy clichés about “the real world” versus online engagement is not helping.³

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1. Cam Wilson is your go-to guy on this topic. Worth checking his byline at Crikey. He is particularly good on noting that the government is ignoring expert advice.

2. You can read Digital Rights Watch submission here.

3. It is worth noting that the age-assurance legislation is just one strand of a series of tech-related polices the government is currently pursuing, including new powers for the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to address misinformation and disinformation; reforms to the Privacy Act; and powers for the competition regulator to deal with online scammers.