It took 13-year-old Isobel less than five minutes to outsmart Australia’s “world-leading” social media ban for children.
A notification from Snapchat, one of the ten platforms affected, had lit up her screen, warning she’d be booted off when the law kicked in this week – if she couldn’t prove she was over 16.
“I got a photo of my mum, and I stuck it in front of the camera and it just let me through. It said thanks for verifying your age,” Isobel claims. “I’ve heard someone used Beyonce’s face,” she adds.
“I texted her,” she gestures to her mum Mel, “and I was like, ‘Hey Mummy, I got past the social media ban’ and she was just like, ‘Oh, you monkey’.”
It made her laugh, Mel explains: “This is exactly what I thought was going to happen.”
Though she had let Isobel use TikTok and Snapchat with tight supervision – preferring that to the teenager using it covertly – she had been hoping the ban, as promised, would help parents like her protect their children from the dangers of the online world.
That hope has now wavered, as a series of experts – and kids themselves – sound the alarm on the viability and safety of the landmark policy, which is being closely watched around the globe and eyed with trepidation by some of its most influential companies.
There’s concern about the reliability of the technology enforcing the ban, along with fears it could isolate vulnerable children and push others into darker, less-regulated corners of the web.
The question nervously being asked in the halls of Canberra, in households across the nation, and in tech boardrooms around the world: is this actually going to work?
