Youths on proposed social media ban: Cautious approval, but questions around enforcement | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

“How are you going to enforce this?” That’s the response from young people who grew up with social media to the proposed ban for under-16s.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said social media is exposing young people to harmful content, addictive technology and pressure they aren’t equipped to deal with, and the government would push ahead with the Online Safety Bill.

“We would never knowingly let our children wander into places in the real world we know to be unsafe. We put boundaries around cars, around alcohol, around gambling, because we know children aren’t yet equipped for them.”

So, it has been proposed that social media platforms will risk financial penalties if they don’t take steps to verify the age of users.

But some Auckland 17- and 18-year-olds say they’re not convinced a complete ban will work.

For some teens who jumped on to social media around 12 years old, some of what the government mentioned during their announcement resembled their experiences.

Checkpoint spoke with some Year 13 students from Auckland’s Albany Senior High School.

Jeremy Ouwejan said he often saw content that came from online communities such as the manosphere.

“Andrew Tate speaking to young impressionable men about very damaging ideologies like misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, or, armchair psychology that says how to manipulate your friends and how to do certain things.

“Or people will say, ‘I used to be a dietitian, here’s what you should and shouldn’t eat.’ [Instagram] Reels on working out and harmful gym content saying, ‘If you’re not benching 100kg are you even a real person?'”

Ouwejan said he also had seen posts that were violent.

“I’ll hop onto Reels and I’ll be flashed with a [dead] body. It’ll completely ruin the experience of just wanting to talk to a friend.”

Last year, research from Te Mana Whakaatu / The Classification Office, found young people don’t generally go looking for objectionable content. But it could be hard to avoid when it came up on social media, in group chats or was shown around in person.

Some examples of this included pornography and real-world violence.

Another student, Natalie Osmond, told Checkpoint coming across extreme, violent and misogynistic content every day took a toll.

“When you’re giving people ranked numerical scores, especially women… it’s objectification to the highest level. You can’t just put a number value on someone, it’s bad it comes with the podcasts.

“A lot of my feed is about Ariana Grande for example, and other female artists. The [comments] will be all about body image and they’re just saying horrible things.”

But, she said, social media also came with its positives.

“Social media is also a good way to get informed from people. There’s a fine line between getting informed and seeing all of the bad stuff.

“I do think it’s a crazy time to be alive and we can see what’s going on in any corner of the world.”

Osmond agreed restricting some parts of social media and having consequences for creating or promoting harmful content was a good thing.

“I wish it was socially acceptable to have a Nokia brick – I know I could actually do that, but I really couldn’t.

“Also, even as a child I remember being 12 years old and it would socially stunt you even if you weren’t allowed social media… you’re pressured to have it from a very young age.”

But Osmond and the other students Checkpoint spoke to weren’t convinced a ban would work, with reports from Australia of teens using loopholes to get around it.

Ouwejan said change was needed, but had to be thought through.

“I think currently there is a lot of very young people on some very damaging platforms, and it is changing them for the worse for the rest of their lives.

“However, as we have seen from Australia and what we can interpolate from other studies and other bans, banning is not the way to go – we need a controlled method, but balancing that with free speech.”

Another student, Isabella Green, said she was concerned around how the government would enforce a ban.

“How are you going to track and enforce this? That doesn’t feel like it’s something that would respect the privacy of people.”

ACT and New Zealand First will not support the bill, meaning National will need Labour’s support if it’s to progress.

Children’s Commissioner Jane Searle told Checkpoint more evidence into the effectiveness of a complete ban was needed before implementing one in Aotearoa.

“We know that [kids have told] us that they want the internet to be made safer or online harm to be reduced for them. Whether the solution is just in a complete ban, that remains to be seen, and we need to look at the evidence around that.”

Searle said that a more comprehensive plan to tackle the issues around social media was needed, rather than just an outright ban.

“I think that we need good education for young people and their families to be able to make good decisions that keep them safe. But we also need to be able to hold tech companies to account and have robust obligations on them.

“Then we need to look at the regulation – do we have an independent regulator?”

She said there was also a concern over young people who may be marginalised or isolated as the result of a ban.

“We need to be very careful when we move forward, and we need to look at the evidence. We need to know, what will this ban look like in practice? How will it actually impact the way that young people are engaging with social media?”

Searle said there wasn’t currently enough information to know if a ban would be successful.

“Even if you look at other countries, what they’ve implemented, it wasn’t long ago, so we don’t have that evidence to know.”

She said more onus needed to be put on social media companies to manage what content they were showing to young people.

“It’s about how they design the algorithms, how they engage with young people, how they put checks in places on what age and what is age appropriate.”

However, she acknowledged that enforcing regulations on large tech companies would be difficult.

“I think we need to try and we need to put as much in place as possible. And then hopefully we can work with other governments around the world to actually have some influence as well.”

She said youth should be regularly surveyed to ensure their voices were being heard on the issue.