Thirteen-year-old Sadie Dooley Thiffault wants a phone, badly. The Toronto teen said she’s missing out on group chats with her friends and often only gets invited to gatherings at the last minute, since she’s not on social media.
Sadie said she had Snapchat, an app where users can send disappearing messages and photos, in secret for a year on her computer, but has been offline since her parents found out about her account in March.
“I would text my friends (on Snapchat), they would text at any time of the night, any time in the morning, because they were always on their phones, and I would never have to wait more than five minutes for a response.”
“It’s so hard to be a kid and a parent right now,” said her mom, Mary Dooley Thiffault. She said she wishes there were restrictions from the government, like in Australia, or similar to rules in Canada for drivers’ licences and alcohol, about what age is appropriate for kids to get social media accounts.
In December, Australia became the first country to ban social media for those under 16, targeting sites including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X. As countries around the world take note of the harms of social media for children, momentum has also been building in Canada to enact a similar law. In the last five months, kids Down Under are reporting more social connection, though some are getting around the rules as enforcement has been less than airtight. Are there lessons for Canada?
How does the social media ban work in Australia?
When the ban was implemented in December, accounts registered to users under 16 were shut down by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Meta said it closed 550,000 accounts during the first days.
New users are now required to self-declare their age, and the platforms are supposed to flag and shut down accounts suspected to belong to those under 16. However, nine of the 10 main platforms are not doing age checks when a user signs up, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Age Verification Providers Association.
The Australian government has asked platforms to take steps to keep kids offline using age verification technology, like uploading ID, face and voice recognition, or monitoring behaviour to estimate age, though that doesn’t appear to be happening in most cases, according to the report.
The onus to comply with the ban is on social media companies, who will face fines of about $45 million Canadian for repeated offences.
Australian 12-year-old Kaydee Farrell wanted to get Snapchat for her 13th birthday this September, but that dream died when the ban came in.
She said having to wait three more years to get the app has made her feel “very sad,” because she can’t talk to her friends there. She said she understands that her parents want her to be safe and not talk to strangers online, but she’s missing out on plans her friends make, like going to the mall in Brisbane.
But she said she has no choice, and three of her friends recently had their accounts removed to comply with the ban.
“My parents say, every time I ask them, don’t ask me till I’m 16.”
Both Kaydee and Sadie say their peers don’t exchange cellphone numbers to communicate, typically using Snapchat and other social media to talk. They both said by not letting them have accounts on these platforms, they’re losing out on opportunities to connect with their friends.
Why don’t they just exchange phone numbers and have group text chats? Sadie and Kaydee, a world apart, said those are just not done in their circles. Snapchat’s appeal is that messages disappear after a user reads them, kind of like talking in real life.
Kaydee said though she’s frustrated, she understands why the Australian government pursued the legislation. She witnessed a friend bullied by other kids through messages on Snapchat, and said it may not have happened without access to social media.
Sadie’s mother, Mary, said when she looks at social media, she starts feeling she should be eating out and vacationing more — but the worst is seeing posts about gatherings she wasn’t invited to.
“I often wonder how I can expect a 13-year-old with a not fully developed brain to be OK with those feelings when I struggle with them at 45.”
Canada’s politicians take note
The last few weeks have shown a growing interest among Canadian politicians in emulating Australia.
Earlier this month in Montreal, the federal Liberal party adopted a motion to make 16 the age of majority for social media at the party’s convention.
Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra said on Tuesday the province is considering an even more expansive move: banning cellphones from schools altogether.
Last weekend, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew was the first premier to announce he would bring in a social media ban for his province — as well as AI chatbots’ use by youth — though details are still to come.
Canadians are largely in favour of a social media ban for kids. A recent survey from the Angus Reid Institute found that 75 per cent of respondents agreed with banning social media for kids under 16.
Austria, Denmark, France and Germany, the U.K., Malaysia, Indonesia are among countries also considering similar bans for youth.
The problem of enforcement
Kaydee’s mom, Amy Farrell, said that even though the ban took effect months ago, she hasn’t seen it enforced.
“She has a bunch of friends who post publicly to TikTok in their school uniforms and they don’t get kicked off the platform,” she said.
Even when someone underage is caught, they still find ways to get around age verifications, using tools like virtual private networks (VPNs), which mask a user’s location.
It’s not the fault of the age verification software; rather, social media giants need stronger enforcement of such tools, said Iain Corby, executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association.
“Kids lie,” he said. “It is verification we’re looking for, not just the self-declaration. And the regulation was clear that self-declaration isn’t good enough.”
The policing is starting out softly to give everyone time to adjust, said Sabrina Caldwell, who teaches ethics in technology at the University of New South Wales Canberra. But the leniency is unlikely to continue for much longer as the Australian government’s eSafety Commission rolls out additional age verification enforcement controls.
Some early signs of progress
Anecdotally, some children are reporting increased social interaction, physical activity, relief from the pressures of online life, and parents are feeling like they are more able to discourage kids from excessive social media use, Caldwell said.
Following the ban’s implementation, 61 per cent of surveyed parents said they noticed their children being more socially engaged with others and 38 per cent reported better parent-child relationships. However, 25 per cent said their children had reduced social connection, according to a January YouGov survey presented at the Australian Government and Social Research Conference.
“It is unrealistic to expect this legislation to work flawlessly, but the way it was constructed was appropriate and as effective as any such legislation could be expected to be,” said Caldwell, who participated in early stages of consultation for the ban.
Calling for a social media ban in Canada can’t be the only solution, said lawyer Sonia Nijjar, who is representing 22 Ontario school boards in individual lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, alleging widespread education disruption.
The lawsuits claim social media has fundamentally changed school and learning environments because of prolific, compulsive student use. The suits’ goal is for platforms to make their products safer and compensate school boards for disrupting their educational mandate. The companies have denied the allegations, but have not yet filed statements of defence.
“Kids are literally addicted to these products, and they will do whatever they can to have access to them,” she said. Banning these platforms would more likely drive children’s online activity underground than prevent them from using the websites altogether, she said.
She said the goal of the lawsuits is to gain recognition that these products are unsafe for children, similar to how alcohol and tobacco are acknowledged to be harmful.
“It’s not about policing kids,” she said.
Ontario has been and will be engaging in discussions with social media companies as opposed to joining the school board lawsuits, but “we first want to work with the feds,” said Calandra.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the ban is sending a strong message that adults want children to be protected from online harms like cyberbullying and grooming, Caldwell said.
“If kids circumvent the ban, they are doing so knowing that they are crossing a line and are in potentially dangerous territory,” Caldwell said, “which is different to society throwing the doors wide open to children to delve where they will, and in some cases, suffer great harm.”
