Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (Abu Dhabi)
Last week, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made global headlines when he announced that his party would table new legislation that would effectively put age restrictions on social media usage.
If passed, the proposed law would enforce age verification tools to effectively limit the access of millions of children to social media sites like X, Instagram and Tik Tok.
While many have long called for the greater regulation of tech companies, others including teachers and parents are sceptical about how effective the proposed law will be.
Houman Asefi is a strategist and operations leader based in Sydney. Drawing on his experience as a father of two, he believes that the proposed social media bans may be ineffective.
“Users can easily bypass restrictions using VPN, and there is likely to be multiple alternative platforms that quickly emerge to fill the void,” he told Aletihad.
“There are stats in Australia that suggest 25% of children under 18 have alcohol with or without their parents’ consent, it doesn’t matter if you ban them, they can get access anyway.”
Houman worries that the proposed law could hamper education and deprive the country’s youth from online engagement and community building. He sees the ban as potentially hampering the digital literacy required to work effectively in the modern age.
“Is YouTube considered social media as well? should it be banned?” he asked.
At the GESS education conference in Dubai on Tuesday, teachers and education professionals echoed much of Houman’s sentiments around the feasibility of bans, instead focusing on ways to promote safety online.
John Paton, the head of inclusion at Dubai British School Jumeirah, said: “I’ve met 10-year-olds that are more digitally literate than I am, I think it’s important that we actually involve our students when we are implementing policies.”
Paton highlighted the increased risk that emanates not just from social media but from online games like Roblox, which often exposing children to strangers on the internet.
He believed it was incumbent on schools to come up with protective and educational safeguarding policies that would help students navigate this new and potentially dangerous world.
Annika Jisu Babu, a school counsellor, psychology teacher and academic coordinator at GEMS Modern Academy in Dubai, also stressed the importance of listening to children.
She said that whilst it was inevitable that children would be online, listening to them was the only way to navigate the dangers.
“What worked for one generation doesn’t necessarily work for the other. If we are trying to tell students how to be safe online, then we need to change our methods,” she said.
“What we did is actually engage some of our senior students to actually lead the education and that has worked well.”
According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory, in a survey nearly half of adolescents reported that social media made them feel worse about their body image, with about 46% citing these concerns as personally impactful.
The proposed legislation arguably has its merits, with many believing the impacts of big tech to be prime for disruption.
Dani Elachi, the founder of the Heads-Up Alliance, a grassroots family organisation advocating for social media controls in Australia, believes that something must be done to curb the risk of child suicides, which he says are caused by cyberbullying and social media.
“Experiments are being conducted in every household in this country and we know that social media is distracting our children, addicting them, depressing them, exhausting them, inducing anxiety in them, isolating them, crushing their self-esteem,” Dani told an Australian parliamentary committee.
He said social media should be subject to the rule of law and tech giants must be held accountable to ensure compliance.
