Is a social media ban workable?

0:02Jonathan Samuels:Sky News, the full story first.

0:08Mickey Carroll:Coming up on the Sky News Daily with me, Jonathan Samuels. The government's looking into whether social media should be banned for under-16s. A similar ban was launched in Australia last year. So, has it been a success?

0:26Mickey Carroll:From cyberbullying to grooming, the online world is fraught with dangers for young people. And for many, of course, it starts with social media. But could all this be about to change? The government has announced a consultation that could lead to a ban on certain social media platforms for under-16s. So what might a ban actually look like and what can we learn from Australia where a similar ban was introduced last month? Someone who's been following this closely is Sky's science and technology reporter Mickey Carroll. Mickey, great to have you on the podcast. So the UK is starting this consultation on whether or not we should ban social media for under-16s.

1:07Mickey Carroll:But one country has started that ban already. It's Australia. Tell me how it's worked down under.

1:13Jonathan Samuels:So in December, Australia implemented this ban on nine major social media platforms. It's kind of the ones that you'd expect. It's Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitch, the ones where you see the most young people. But it also applies to other platforms that meet three criteria. So if their main purpose is to enable social interaction online, if they allow their users to interact with other end users, and if they allow people to post content online. So essentially, they're trying to come up with an umbrella term for social media. Restrictions applied to those platforms, meaning that anyone under 16 shouldn't be able to have an account.

1:51Jonathan Samuels:And the way they would stop people having an account would usually be through age verification and making sure through various means that there weren't children on those platforms.

2:00Mickey Carroll:Because that's very interesting, isn't it? How do they stop kids going on to these platforms? Because as we all know, teenagers especially are very good at getting around bans.

2:11Jonathan Samuels:And that's been a kind of defining factor of the last month since it has been implemented. So the technology that's used to age verify children in Australia is actually very similar to the technology that's used here in the UK. It's AI facial age estimation. And so you essentially upload millions of faces to an AI model and teach it the difference between a 35 year old, a 21 year old, a 16 year old and a 10 year old. So it can tell the difference between a child and an adult. And when it comes to the difference between a 13-year-old and a 25-year-old, it's really good at telling the difference, just like a human would be.

2:46Jonathan Samuels:But when it comes to telling the difference between a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old, it's less good at that because there are fundamentally fewer differences in their faces. What we've heard, I mean, we spoke to Australian teenagers this week, and a lot of them said that life hasn't really changed that much for them because they just told the AI they were over 16 and it believed them.

3:05Mickey Carroll:And it works the other way, doesn't it? If you were 17 and AI was telling you that you're banned, you'd be pretty frustrated.

3:11Jonathan Samuels:Yeah, absolutely. And as part of the rules, the government has made sure that platforms have to stop people being incorrectly banned because they don't want to be accused of censorship. And so there are ways that you can appeal it. Generally, if the AI says that you're under 16, it will then offer you the option to prove that you're not, usually through a government ID. And in Australia, that's not so much for a problem because you can get a driving licence, you can get a learner's permit from 16. So a lot of young people that are of age should have a driving licence. Obviously, when that comes to the UK, that might be a bit of a bigger problem because a lot of 16-year-olds won't have a government ID yet.

3:46Mickey Carroll:So most of the big social media platforms will come under this ban. And you've mentioned some of them. But I'm looking at the list of those which aren't restricted at the moment. Things like Discord, Pinterest, Messenger, Roblox, hugely popular. How has the government come to this decision as to who to ban and who not to ban?

4:06Jonathan Samuels:That's been a fairly controversial part of this whole ban, actually. Things like Pinterest, they're not primarily designed, technically, as a social media platform. That's about image sharing. But Discord especially has been a particularly controversial platform not to have included in this ban. Because, I mean, technically it calls itself a gaming platform, but it is a social media platform. and there's a lot of people on it. A lot of people use Discord to talk to each other, to share images, to do exactly the kind of thing that the government says it's trying to stop young people from being pressured into doing.

4:39Jonathan Samuels:And then Roblox as well wouldn't come under the ban necessarily because it is primarily a game. But again, like you say, people interact on that. People talk and socialise. And so there have been a lot of kind of arguments about which platform should be included.

4:52Mickey Carroll:As a father of two devious teenagers, I know how their minds work, or at least I think I do. If they're banned from something, They're going to try and get onto the platform, surely, that won't ban them.

5:03Jonathan Samuels:Yeah, and that is exactly what happened. First of all, a spike in people downloading VPNs, virtual private networks, which they were hoping would help them get past these age restrictions. There was also a spike in people downloading new social media apps that hadn't been that popular before. But I think what's crucial is social media works because it's social. For something to be that addictive, you have to have your mates on there. If you've downloaded some random social media app, sure, you can scroll through content. But if you haven't got your friends there liking what you're doing, commenting on what you're doing, updating on their lives, it's just less grabby.

5:38Jonathan Samuels:So although there was this initial spike in people downloading those apps, they haven't necessarily seen the kind of sustained popularity that you might expect. What there has been, though, is we've just heard repeatedly from teenagers that they've just managed to get past the age verification in the first place.

5:52Mickey Carroll:So I guess in Australia, some of the social media platforms, which are so huge now and have so much influence, will have kicked back when this was proposed as an idea.

6:02Jonathan Samuels:Yeah. And I think we could probably expect them to kick back because obviously they're going to be losing some of their market. So you'd expect it. But they also had, you could say, a fairly nuanced reaction to it. Both Meta, so Facebook and Instagram, and Google, so YouTube, said that this would actually put more young people at risk. And so Google used the example, at the moment, if you're a teenager or a young person on YouTube, you're probably going to have parental controls on your account. Whereas if you block under 16s from having an account, you can first of all just watch videos on YouTube sometimes without being logged in.

6:38Jonathan Samuels:but secondly if a kid then makes an account kind of illegitimately they're not going to tell their parents and so their parents will have less control over what they do online and that was the kind of main reaction from a lot of the big social media companies that actually they would prefer better age verification so that they can control the content that's being shown to children instead of just an all-out ban it's interesting isn't it wondering what the reaction would be

7:05Mickey Carroll:here in the UK. I was reading some comments from Andy Burrows. The chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation is pretty worried about this. Molly, of course, was the 14-year-old who took her own life after viewing many images of self-harm online. He thinks the law is flawed and better regulation is the way ahead, looking at how platforms are designed and also the whole wellness aspect.

7:31Jonathan Samuels:It's a really interesting nuanced point, Matt, because it would be really easy to assume that everyone who's worried about children online wants there to be a social media ban. But like you said, Molly Rose Foundation doesn't support it. The NSPCC doesn't support it either. They call it a blunt instrument. And I think there is this idea that social media companies, if they're going to be able to run platforms, should be able to look after their users. And actually one of the points that the NSPCC makes is this is sort of punishing children for a lack of regulation and enforcement in the first place.

8:05Jonathan Samuels:And so there's a lot of debate happening at the moment, but there is widespread support as well.

8:10Mickey Carroll:There's also this term cliff edge where children might be banned until their 16th birthday from social media, but then the floodgates open on the day that they turn 16. And there's a concern about that.

8:23Jonathan Samuels:We're all adults and able to control our social media use, I'm sure. But ultimately, it's still sometimes you can see some really harmful stuff on there. There are also restrictions in both Australia and the UK on just generally the kind of content that should be seen on social media. So Australia actually has a really similar system to us. They even have the same name for the law that's the Online Safety Act. That means that platforms have to take down illegal content, so child sexual abuse material, or that sort of thing. And they have to moderate harmful content. So under 18s shouldn't be able to see adult content, for example.

8:59Jonathan Samuels:But anything that's actually illegal shouldn't be on there anyway. The problem is, we've done loads of reporting in the last few months on the fact that that harmful content is still on there. And so I think there is a worry that, yeah, once these kids get past that age ban, are they just going to open this floodgate to a world of horror.

9:17Mickey Carroll:It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's not just social media that as parents we worry about. Now we've got AI to deal with as well and things like ChatGPT and other AI platforms. Should they be restricted? Should they also have some sort of ban for under-16s?

9:34Jonathan Samuels:All of the rules that apply to platforms under the Online Safety Act here in the UK also apply to AI platforms. So OpenAI's ChatGPT faces exactly the same or should face exactly the same restrictions as something like Instagram in terms of what content you can and can't see if you're under 18. And so you could assume from that that a ban would also include AI. But I mean, that could also be quite controversial because a lot of teenagers now are using AI in a pretty legitimate way to help them with schoolwork and research and that sort of thing.

10:05Mickey Carroll:And kids will probably ask AI how they can get around the AI ban, won't they? And finally, Mickey, just in summary, tell us what we can expect perhaps over the next few months in the UK.

10:14Jonathan Samuels:So the government's opened this consultation to look at whether there should be a ban. It's also looking at whether age verification rules that are already in place need to be better and whether the systems that are running need to be better. There's things like Ofcom now will inspect the kind of enforcement of schools' phone policies when they go and do a school inspection. So there are things in place that are already happening. The Lords are also debating whether an amendment to a bill that's currently passing through about how children are looked after in school, whether an online safety ban for under-16s should be put into that bill as well.

10:48Jonathan Samuels:So there's quite a lot of movement in this space and it's happening quite fast. I mean, the government has never ruled out the idea that they would have a social media ban, but there definitely seems to be a gathering pace at the moment to bring one in.

11:01Mickey Carroll:Fascinating stuff. Mickey Carroll, thank you very much. For more on Mickey's reporting on this and what a social media ban might look like head over to skynews.com or the Sky News app The Daily is back tomorrow