Luckily Australia’s trying a kids’ social-media ban before us: Selley

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“Is Ontario’s school cellphone ban actually going well?” a recent Toronto Star headline asked. There are “some reasons to think so,” the author explained, which is of course good news. It’s bananas it wasn’t tried before this year. Basically nobody opposes the idea: A poll conducted in May by Toronto Metropolitan University’s The Dais think tank found no more than 13 per cent opposition in any region of the country, just nine per cent in Ontario and six per cent in Quebec. And the arguments against it are preposterous, “what if there’s a school shooting” being the worst of them all. Even in the United States, your child is in far more danger travelling to and from school than at it.

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But I sort of understood the headline’s incredulous tone: Is it actually going well?On one hand, if schools have any control over their students at all, they should certainly be able to police cellphone usage. On the other hand, a lot of seemingly simple things that should work in Canada nowadays … don’t.

But there’s a new front in this mostly righteous war to uncouple kids from their devices and dull their obsession with social media. This week, the Australian Senate passed a law purporting to ban children under 16 from social media sites like Instagram, TikTok and (not that anyone under 16 has even heard of it) Facebook.

A spate of “should Canada follow suit?” articles has ensued. At the very least, I think we should wait and see how things go Down Under.

First of all, 16 is a lot older than 13, which is the current minimum age at least nominally for many social-media sites. No doubt there are plenty of 15-year-olds out there using social media in responsible, non-harmful and indeed very productive ways: Showcasing their talents, pursuing worthwhile causes and generally engaging with other sane people under reasonable guidelines set and enforced by their parents.

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The Australian law excludes from its purview any services that children might use to seek official forms of help. But during the pandemic, I imagined myself going through lockdowns when I was 13 or 14, as an only child. Had it existed, social media may have been my only extracurricular contact with anyone else for months, and months, and months on end.

I’m not talking down the challenge parents face in this regard. If my hypothetical children were anything like me, it would be a constant battle. But we should at least spare a thought for kids and parents who have achieved a healthy balance.

The much bigger questions, though, are will this actually work, and if so, how?

The Australian law makes clear that it’s only establishing a general expectation of social-media companies. It would punish systemic failures to make reasonable attempts to keep children off their platforms, not individual failures. And it passed without any provision specifying how social-media sites are actually meant to verify users’ age. The government is running a trial with a U.K.-based group to test out the technology.

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“The outcomes of the Australian government’s ‘age assurance trial‘ are likely to be instructive for regulated entities, and will form the basis of regulatory guidance,” the bill’s explanatory memorandum notes.

Age-assurance breaks down into three main tranches, which the Aussies will now study and test: verification, estimation and inference.

Verification: The Australian trial “will involve document-verification testing using a dataset of 4,000+ legitimate, fake, and altered identity documents (e.g., passports, driver’s licenses) from various regions, nationally and internationally.”

So, kids giving TikTok their passport details. Sure, why not?

Estimation: The trial will “test the .., ability to estimate a user’s age based on biological or behavioural features that vary with age,” including still and video images, “voice, hand geometry (and) typing speed analysis,” with allowances for “outliers, such as individuals with facial features that may not correspond to their chronological age.”

“Creepy” isn’t the most descriptive adjective for the government scanning children’s biometrics, but it’s the best one I can come up with. Yuck. Hard pass. I’d almost rather my hypothetical 16-year-old sent his passport to Beijing.

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And inference: The trial will “test systems that infer a user’s age based on data inputs such as purchase history, possession of other age-related evidence, browser behaviour or online activity.”

Privacy advocates sometimes stretch a point, in my view, but heads are quite rightly exploding about the idea of the government prowling through browser histories.

And as concerning as all these ideas are, it’s still difficult to imagine determined kids wouldn’t find a way around them. It’s pretty remarkable how easy it is to fool many websites into thinking you’re in, say, Cape Town rather than Canberra. In which case, parents are going to have an even tougher time drawing the same kind of boundaries they struggle with now.

Luckily, Australia is one of the more similar countries in the world to Canada, in terms of governance and temperament and demographics. So we should welcome their experiment, but keep our powder dry in the meantime. Unlike the cellphone ban in schools, this very much looks like a failure waiting to happen.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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