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How Europe is gearing up to follow Australia's teen social media ban
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- Title
- The EU has voted in favour of a teen social media ban, but not like Australia's
- Published
- Dec 7 2025
- Word count
- 997 words
Is this implying that parents need their governments to pass laws to prevent their kids from doing something? Seems to me that if your parents don't consent, you already need to dodge their restrictions. What's stopping you from dodging further?
Last I checked every freaking forum had a "confirm you're at least 13 years old" checkbox already.
...
Why does it seem like all western democracies do is pass useless legislation to appease public opinion?
Actually no, more like passing legislation that appeases public opinion while at the same time putting more restrictions and justifications on surveillance on the internet.
I genuinely don’t know where I stand on these laws - I strongly dislike government control of the media landscape in principle, but I also recognise the enormous collective harm being done by these platforms, so it’s a bit of a catch 22.
What I will say, though, is that a sweeping ban is a way different thing to a parental consent requirement given that social networks rely on, well, network effects. Make it a parental consent question and you’re dividing teenagers into an in group and an out group - parents are pressured to agree because the harm of being a social outcast could well be worse than the harm of being on whatever platform, and teenagers themselves (many of whom are intelligent, introspective people quite capable of recognising the mental health concerns and addictive behaviours their phones are bringing) face exactly that same lose-lose choice. If the network effect is disrupted by a ban (and yes, that’s a big “if”), it changes that dynamic dramatically.
I don’t like government bans, at all. I particularly don’t like them when they’re so laughably easily circumvented, and when their enforcement tends to stray into areas of technically absurd invasiveness. But I’m at least willing to watch this one with an open mind and see if it acts more as a government enforced escape hatch from networks that most people probably shouldn’t be part of in the first place, rather than as a ban to work around on something they’re going to do anyway.
People speak of ban vs. no ban, but I think the primary problem is one of design: online spaces currently allow children to have excessive space and time out of sight of the 'village': parents, relatives, family friends, trusted community members who can see and correct misbehavior. Instead, we effectively let moderation tools parent children online.
Yes. First of all, there should be parental controls on the devices. Instead of website asking for your age it should call a system API that asks their parent. If they want an app to work around it, it should ask their parents and so on. People in stores should ask parents if they want to enable parental control on the device and connect it to them. And there should be standards for this to combat lock-in.
Same with devices for very old people with cognitive decline who are willing to wire money to fraudsters. There should be a confirmation of any large transfer from their kids.
In school, devices go to locker or switch to school mode where teachers allow certain apps / categories as they need. Kids can take the device out of school mode if they wish, but that notifies both parents and school.
But that's designing for specific outcomes, not making the casino larger. Liberals prefer larger casino with more chances to win/lose big, so this won't fly. So socialists who want to protect and nurture their families have to ally with conservatives instead, but those just want the world unequal, i.e. take away phones from kids, so that teachers can reign supreme once more.
Now I am not saying we should ban exploration altogether in this space, but it's about time we started pruning the tree and started exploiting the beneficial modes we have discovered. Maybe liberals could finally join in and think about structuring this part of our lives and not just about "free markets" they seem to obsess over lately. The next big word should be "human agency"
I'm not sure about human agency. The internet as it is offers almost unlimited human agency with little IRL social accountability. On one side, there's advocacy for free markets. On the other side, there's advocacy for privacy.
I think that parental app controls can be clumsy, because you only control what apps the child can install and use, but it still doesn't address the problem that parents are still removed from the behavioral observation and feedback loop.
It increasingly doesn't, though. Most platforms are happy when people just follow whatever they serve them and there is absolutely no incentive to actually empower the users. Have you noticed YT can no longer be searched as it used to be for instance?
The software should be actively helping people to engage with whatever is out there more productively, but it isn't. The internet is not getting closer to becoming a great library where we can obtain knowledge, go on a grand adventure with our heroes or just have a coffee with a friend, it is getting more and more Black Mirror with our eyes glued to mandatory streams.
So yeah, while a lot of parents should absolutely get their s**t together, they would more readily when it's shoved into their face that maybe they actually should, like, right now, make sure their kids are not bullying a classmate over poor photoop or something, on a platform they are not yet able to handle, that likely nobody is equipped to handle.
The idea that the Internet should be a place of knowledge, productivity, and progress is a worldview very specific to college-educated liberals... whose values are knowledge, productivity, and progress.
That's not the vast majority of humans' values. Their values are: money, family, and pleasure. And the Internet evolved to serve those values.
Yeah, sure. Except liberals don't care. They only care about chances and maybe fairness (when it's about them). They gave us heavily commercialization, ads and pervassive monitoring, not clergy, oil moguls, unions nor youth climate activists.
When I say productive, I mean you walk away with something besides hole in your pocket, mixed feelings and wasted time. And I haven't even mentioned progress!
Nobody besides liberals values money. Everyone else, who isn't deeply fascinated by the number going up or the concept of money, is just using money as a tool. Or actually is being subjected to it by via taxation and thus the necessity of it's acquisition.
So how exactly does current state of the internet cater to the needs of families and gives us pleasure? Because I feel you've got a lot of explaining to do wrt. pleasures of being on Twitter, for instance.
This is such an important point. One of the scariest moments for me as a parent was when I heard about a colleague whose child had a secret snapchat account in defiance of their parents social media ban. But I have no doubt that is a result of that social pressure.
It's kind of a lowest common denominator thing - parents in a community don't act as a group, they act as individuals, but the choices of a few parents to allow social media use at a young age creates that social pressure for everyone. This is where a ban would give those parents when are trying to keep social media out of their kids lives standing to push back against the other parents.
A ban might also create legal recourse against the social media companies for underage account creation, which would require the social media companies to better police their own verification processes, something they won't do on their own because, as you say, they rely on growth and network effects.
There are reports of parents who i.e. agreed that no kid in class is getting an iPhone to prevent financial situation of family to cause bullying in school.
I think teacher suggested it in the 1st grade.
Maybe we can empower schools to reach out to parents and educate them and maybe even set a policy for school-compliant equipment. No need to go uniforms, but maybe steering away from expensive devices, social media, brand clothing and in-game spending would alleviate some of the pressure on kids..?
As I try to train my daughter and navigate the way other people teach their kids, I think the difficulty is that there are no rules or consistent norms for device usage among adults. As an elder millennial, were never trained just dropped into it to sink or swim. So ideas about what's right for kids are all over the place based on the personal inclination and experiences of parents and their close friends.
As someone who is on the bleeding edge of giving my daughter a device (she got a smartphones in the 2nd grade), there also needs to be some nuance around what the limits actually are.
My daughter can call and text (very useful when she uses a sometimes unreliable bus system), play a limited number of games, listen to audiobooks, but she has no access to the general internet, youtube, or social media. Initially her allowed call/text circle was limited to extended family, but as she's gotten older, we've widened it to include a few friends. We won't be giving her access to social media until she's older (probably high school).
We've seen a lot of benefits to this phased approach. She's had an offline device that mainly provides (curated) audiobooks since she was 5. Being exposed to narrative that she's able to understand even though she's not yet able to read at that level is showing in the nuanced way she interacts with her reading now. With her online device, she's developed the skills around keeping up with her phone, keeping it charged, and being able to use it to communicate.
I recognize that not every child can have a phone without it taking over their attention, but for her I'm very happy with the ways she's developing, including her level of skill and her self-awareness around her relationship to the phone.
Your approach sounds extremely sane and I am very happy for both of you that it seems to work. Fingers crossed.
I think it's reasonable for parents to expect some cooperation from the community. For example, it would probably be harder to keep kids from smoking if any store will sell them cigarettes.
They might get cigarettes anyway, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy.
The ten apps getting banned for under-16's in Australia are:
Annoyingly and likely because of the new legislation, Discord is now enforcing ID verification if you want to access 18+ channels (I'm guessing this is only happening in Australia as well). This is not me advocating for children having access to adult content, this is me complaining that I want to keep access to those channels and don't want to give Discord my personal information, especially since that time one of their third parties leaked a bunch of government IDs.
The APIs for digital age verification based on personal ID cards, which have had chip capabilities for a while now, exist here in Germany, and I imagine in the wider EU too.
The issue is it’s slightly more costly to set up than looking at (and then storing forever…) photos of that ID card compared to having the user do an NFC-like scan and then a simple, binary “over/under” age check in the app, where no personal info, not even date of birth, would have to be stored.
That is to say, I also would like to keep using e.g. Discord without uploading photos of my ID, and it’d be possible for them, but I’m not holding out much hope.
Further reading: The online ID card functionality (original in German, Kagi-translated page).
Later edit: Here’s a CCC talk also about this topic, dubbed English version available for free.
The EU is preparing an EU-wide verification solution allowing you to do precisely that without sharing unnecessary data
Nice! Got any more details?
From https://ageverification.dev/ linked within https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification:
Also check the blueprint: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/blueprint-age-verification-solution-help-protect-minors-online
Thank you!
I wanted to comment that this solution is really the only way to go. Nice to know that EU is going this way! Verification needs to be done by someone else than the aervice itself and only in binary form (can/cannot access).
The only thing is that by doing it on (presimably) EU governmental level means the EU will likely know what you are accessing. But then there are things like GDPR and other privacy oriented things in EU, so we'll see how it goes.
Still better than giving all your personal info to ie. TikTok or Elon Musk...
Huh.
4Chan or TruthSocial are OK?
I imagine they're going after the largest, most visible networks. Not necessarily the "worst," which is technically subjective. Otherwise, they should also be going after places like Kiwi Farms. But again, that's subjective.
As bad as 4chan is, I imagine it doesn't hold a candle to any of those ten social media properties in terms of size and DAUs and such. Not necessarily relevant, but is 4chan "social media" as think of it? Though I guess if one questions 4Chan, then reddit could also be questionable. Though reddit inc. has definitely been social-mediafying reddit.com.
And Truth Social...do kids really hang out there? Does anyone actually hang out there?
Well, if the bans work at all, the kids will go to the next site...
I'm generally for regulation (if the alternative is the "free market") but I can't imagine[0] this path is a path that will serve society at large including kids & their guardians.
[0] As in I can't actually make up a scenario, using my current knowledge of the world, that will be beneficial in the way people are presenting these kinds of laws.
The ban specifically exempts some platforms (notably Discord, among others), which I think is sensible in trying to mitigate that issue a bit - they're guiding people towards a more specific subset of platforms, rather than just saying "no online communication for you" and pulling a surprised Pikachu face when everyone ends up somewhere even worse via a VPN.
Will it work? I'm not sure, I've already expressed some concerns about that further up. But it looks like they're at least attempting to guide people towards the smaller, more human platforms for actual group conversation and away from the churning infinite feeds of advertising and propaganda.
To add to that, don't all the banned platforms have their own official mobile apps? I don't think 4chan does, just third party apps according to a quick search. And most kids do seem to prefer apps over websites...
(Granted, pretty sure Truth Social also has an app, but like you said, I don't think many kids would hang out there. Especially Australian kids. If one goes out of their way to sign up they're already deep into the mire...)
As much as kids probably shouldn't be on 4chan for other reasons, it doesn't really have user accounts or serve up tailored algorithmic content. So I can see how the methods and criteria being talked about for many of these other platforms can't be directly applied.
Does Truth Social even have much of a presence in Australia? I would have hoped not and I haven't ever heard mention of it outside of the US political sphere, but I guess I'm not exactly keyed in to where the local far right hang out.
On one hand, I think it is a good thing that politicians are finally realizing the harms of these algorithmically controlled media platforms. We already have strict regulations and age restrictions on online gambling, for similar reasons of being highly addictive. Just not sure an age restriction is the right way, or even enough. I mean, these platforms are harmful and addictive for adults too. Just putting an age label on it doesn't solve much. I think we should consider actual requirements for these platforms, mitigating and regulating their addictiveness. Like force the option of a linear non-algorithmic feed, more transparency and user control over which content you get recommended, high fines for allowing outright scam advertising and so forth. But of course, their only contribution is the "easy" one of a dumb age restriction.
Looking forward to seeing how this is implemented. NZ tends to let big brother Aussie try things first and then copy them if they work out fine.
To be fair, if this kicks everyone back into IRC-style independent chats rather than giant algorithmically driven advertising engines I’d consider that an absolute win!
I don’t think that can really happen - the internet is too big and the incentives to infiltrate any and all platforms with bots are too high nowadays - but even a bit of fragmentation might not be a bad thing.
I don't think it's meant to be an overall solution. If they move to discord, that's fine, that's not full of algorithmic poison. A lot of these kids aren't that tech savvy, they might not know how to get around it.
Like, if you're really intent in getting around it, you will. But you might be surprised on what simple roadblocks can do. Like, emulation is trivial, but I still see people excited about basic ports, even though it'd take them 30 secs to set up the game if they wanted to. Or how I still see so many people with ads in their browser, even though getting ublock origin is literally 2 or 3 clicks.
A simple roadblock can filter out a ton of people.
I think that's perfectly fine. Like I said, if kicking them off Reddit gets them into Discord, that's fine. It's not ideal, ideally they go outside and socialise. But Discord doesn't have the algorithmic poison that FB, TikTok and Instagram have. If they self organise and make their own bootleg forum, the government considers that a win.
Ultimately, this will resolve around metrics. If literacy goes up and suicides go down, this will be successful and we in NZ will replicate it. If it makes it worse, it'll be repealed and we'll try something else.
I don't think laws are made under the expectation that they'll work 100% of time. Some will use VPNs, some will use other websites. Some will use less social media. That is by design.
Maybe we'll see a renaissance of tech skills amongst Gen Alphas. I remember how many of us Millennials tried to get around the web filters at school or at the library.
I have really mixed feelings about this trend.
I had very few friends in my teen years and only found refuge in online communities. On the other hand I'm hardly a model for good mental health so lol
It's worth noting that the banned platforms seem to be those centered around alogirthmic content creation. Discord isn't getting banned, so platforms meant for actual direct socializing rather than media seem to be safe overall. Tumblr also seems safe, possibly since it doesn't use an algorithm to flood feeds the way other platforms do.
Honestly my biggest concern about the headline was cutting off kids from support networks. There was a young Australian teen on a Discord server I run dealing with some messed up stuff at home, and Discord was one of the only places they could seek advice and support. Thankfully things seem much better now, but that was my first thought. Just having people to talk to and validate your feelings is HUGE, and can be the literal difference between life and death for some people.
I'm going to say it: an incalculable number of young people will kill themselves over this.
Many, many people are only alive today because they were able to, though the internet, find information and people like them. Whether that's LGBT teens having the tools to find out why they're different and navigate that, or nerds finding like-minded people while they're trapped in a desert of fools.
And this is precisely what this growing global movement is about at its core: social conservatives desperately trying to stop the youth from becoming "woke," by isolating them. And implementing de-anonymization of the internet for censorship and control for everyone.
The internet is still open to them. Forums are open to them, Discord is open to them, tildes is open to them.
In terms of social conservatives, they want to do this for their own reasons, but liberals are forcing leftists (mostly parents) to ally with them. So far the liberal approach has been (and continued to be) to not do a single thing about the effect of social media on kids. Similar to the leftist-MAGA alliance in stopping the Trump admin from going full GenAI. Both camps have two very different reasons for stopping this, but in the face of liberal indifference, who the heck are we meant to ally with then?
I think it's a bit extreme to say that an incalculable number of people are going to kill themselves over this, don't you think? I'm not going to say zero, because I truly have no idea, but if Aus does actually successfully implement this (which is a big if), I suspect that in average literacy will go up and suicide rates will go down, as some of these kids actually start going outside and socialising.
Yeah. This is the sticking point of why I have mixed feelings. Social media at young age kind of gave me some weird mental illnesses but I'm not sure how far I would've gone without social media anyway
So this is where I struggle on these issues. On the one hand, I think there is a lot of harm that comes out of social media - constant, pervasive bullying, FOMO, sexting/sextortion and recently AI enabled fake nudes using real people, child predators, and probably a lot more I'm not aware of or can't conceive of myself.
But on the other hand, people like yourself find communities and groups to feel included in, feel not so alone, or feel like they have people that do understand them.
So which takes precedence? I think the human reaction is to focus on the negative and not the positive. Maybe that's because we avoid negative consequences so it's easier to "quantify" those and ban things than it is to see the positive outcomes as those are mostly below the surface or harder to see.
In your instance, are you better off (even with your self described mental state) having had that space online or would you be in a much worse space today without them? (This is a question I ask knowing nothing about you and please don't take it the wrong way.)
At the end of the day I think that the only thing that helps kids is trusted adults teaching them how to navigate our society, how to build resilience against the negatives of these platforms, and managing access based on the needs/maturity of any given child. Blanket banning things from the top feels like the wrong approach to me, but I can understand the desire for people to feel like they're doing something.
I think seeking refuge online is a bandaid , not a solution. I spent a ton of time online growing up, made hundreds of "friends", and in the end, I learned that none of those relationships are truly real. They're just words on a screen, and they can very easily just vanish without a trace one day. I have friends that I made online who I've met and still regularly visit, but those are no longer "online friends". They're just my friends.
I think long term, it would have been better and healthier for me to make more friends in real life, find communities around me that were supportive and welcoming, and develop real social skills instead of internet chatting skills, but that wasn't an option for me a lot of the time.
That's just covering the positive aspects of online communities too, there was also a lot of harassment, bullying, cynicism, sexualization and so on that I really shouldn't have been exposed to at that age.
All of this was also before the internet became a huge for-profit attention stealing competition. I think overall, people are happier without social media, and restricting kids from it makes sense.
That said, I do really worry about the privacy implications of actually implementing anything like this.
As usual, I side with the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
All attempts at age verification online are nothing more than de-anonymization attempts to further authoritarian social control. Even device-based ones have fingerprinting concerns, or further the repeated attempts for device attestation (i.e. online services no longer working if the owner of hardware has root access).
Even if social media was conclusively bad for peoples' health (and we're far from having evidence of that), this paternalistic attempt to mold society to someone's preference is still unethical and incompatible with a free society. It's counter to peoples' right to freedom of speech and association. And that's the last thing anyone needs going on with a global rise of fascist movements. (And yes, it fits into the Project 2025 puzzle.)
I'd say "authoritarian social control" is a technically correct, but very uncharitable way to put it. Restricting alcohol to over 21, r rated movies, child welfare laws and tons of other things would fall under that category as well on a technical basis.
Maybe some of these proposals are being brought up because it gives government more control to surveil people for reasons other than what's being publicly stated, but I think most of them are aiming to do just what they're being promoted as; protecting kids from harmful or exploitative content. As far as it being part of project 2025, maybe? But proposals like this in the US have come up before as well, and sometimes by Democrats, so I don't think the argument that in the US it's solely a conservative power grab really holds a lot of water.
I agree though, in practice it would be very difficult to implement without compromising anonymity on the internet.
Just because a justification has been used in disingenuous or harmful ways doesn't mean it's always used that way though.
Surely there are some laws ostensibly passed to protect children from harm that were actually passed to protect children from harm, and there are some proposals that are raised for the same reason.
I don't know why you're lumping social media age verification with all of these other issues. That feels like painting with a very overly broad brush. There is a lot of age verification legislation that has been passed in blue states, sponsored by Democrats. It's not always the same people who are voting against LGBTQ rights or child welfare in general.
It makes sense to criticize these efforts because their implementations often compromise privacy, or because you think the issue of childhood exposure to social media algorithms is overblown, or because of other specific issues that make the costs not outweigh the benefits.
Criticizing it just because similar justifications have been used by other harmful laws strikes me as fallacious though.
Passing the ACA and destroying it were both done under the guise of making healthcare affordable, after all. One of those clearly does address the stated goal, and one does not. That doesn't mean that any law with the justification of making healthcare affordable is automatically bad or disengenous though.
I think there is a difference between "think what would happen if the children were exposed to this" and "this is actively hurting children and we can see it in our lived experiences".
This law isn't trying to stop a theoretical problem dreamt up by Parliament, who then blasted propaganda on state tv to get the public onside. This is addressing something that the overwhelming majority of the Australian public considers to be a problem, which Parliament is responding to.
You're not going to be able to tell a parent whose kid's response to any difficult situation is the Gen Z stare, who jokes about being unable to read stories that don't have any pictures (I've seen this!) that there's not a problem. And yes, these are anecdotal, but if every parent has similar anecdotes and the other side's solution is that there's no problem everything's fine, well then of course there's going to be a break there.