There are going to be some extremely irritable Australian kids this morning. Spare a thought for their parents.
What happened: As of today, millions of children under 16 in Australia will be blocked from using social media, a first-of-its-kind ban that will put the onus on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and X to remove all underage accounts and prevent kids from making new ones.
To enforce the ban, Australia will use a new biometric data scanning system to help verify users' age.
Catch-up: The Aussies are not the only ones trying to get kids to put down their phones and touch grass. In Canada, most provinces have rolled out some form of cell phone ban in schools, while Québec is considering an outright social media ban for kids under 16.
Why it matters: The big question mark around age restrictions on social media has been how to enforce them. Australia will serve as a global guinea pig — if its ID system works, it could quickly be adopted by other countries grappling with their own generation of chronically online children.
Bottom line: Few people now dispute the countless studies showing the negative effects of social media on children’s mental health and development. The real question is whether parents, governments and social media platforms can collectively make an outright ban like this work in practice.—LA