Australia’s social media restrictions on children were sold as decisive action on harm. But the policy risks becoming symbolic, unenforceable, and ultimately counterproductive.

It’s March 2028, and a federal election is due. The government is confident given the ructions within the opposition but nonetheless somewhat nervous because it has been under sustained assault for rising prices, houses prices and defence budget pressures. About 300,000 new voters are on the electoral roll, people who are aged 15 or 16 now.

At an early election meeting, one of these new voters invites the prime minister, Anthony Albanese to explain just what the social media bans were all about, and whether, in the light of what (in 2028) was known it had been a worthwhile policy, worth persisting with, perhaps expanding into other social control areas.

I have little doubt that the prime minister will perceive that the question is somewhat hostile in intent and will want to cut it off straight away. He will hope and expect that many of the nation’s 13 or 15-year-olds will broadly agree that government had to respond to a serious social problem. But they, of course, are not the only ones to be considered. Millions of parents, teachers and others in the community have been concerned about online bullying and harassment, youth suicide, the sexualisation of children and pressure upon young people to conform, and the addiction of some young people to various forms of social media systems.

He will explain that people on both sides of politics recognised the problem, and the need to restrict access to some of the more harmful new forms of online interchange emerging. The former leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton, for example had been a strong supporter of government intervention on the issue.

Albanese was once a king of the kids himself and will admit that nanny-state responses can be unpopular. But the responses must be proportionate to the problem and government, he will say, was very careful in deciding that its response to the problem had to be in putting pressure on the source of the problem – the social media companies – rather than on kids themselves. Government had also recognised the ingenuity of kids, and the fact that many would be able quickly to get around any systems put in. No one was going to police this or make it a crime. The pressure would be on the online companies to see if they were seriously trying to reduce access.

He would no doubt be also thinking smugly that hardly anyone would be blaming him for trying, even if they had come to realise that sincere and well-intended efforts had been largely useless. There are some cynical politicians – I can think of a number who are or recently were among coalition conservatives – who proclaim themselves to be against some general social evil, accusing other politicians of ignoring or condoning the problem. They use such occasions for moral grandstanding whenever they need a political distraction or are suffering relevance deprivation.

Likewise, some left-of-centre politicians are not beyond the political equivalent, described by some as virtue signalling. Usually, one side is against sin and supposed offences against personal morality; the other against wider social evils or injustices, including sexual violence.

Albanese may have something of a niche with his taking the lead to protect kids against the evils of social media. But he is not hypocritical in the sense that he is using the issue as a distraction, doesn’t really care, or is using such issues, as Scott Morrison sometimes did, to confect some pretence of character or deep underlying belief. Voters, even kids, can count him sincere in wanting a simpler safer society.

But he is vulnerable – more vulnerable than the government currently realises – to an attack on the practicality of the measures the government has endorsed. Just because something had to be done and this is something does not make it the right solution. Nor is a completely voluntary law providing a good example of legislative or executive will. Possibly, down the track, of judicial will either.

The problem with the legislation, first and foremost, is that it will not achieve its object. Not of restricting access to bad things on social media, or online exchanges with others in which bad things – such as bullying, exchange of sexual material, the formation of groups focused on aberrant behaviour or the discussion of unhealthy, unsavoury or otherwise bad things.

Today’s 13 to 15-year-olds, particularly those most predisposed to the sort of behaviour online that the law is intended to restrict will find it easy to get around any controls. We already know that between 30 to 50 per cent of parents will not be making any effort to prevent their children accessing such material or stopping them from seeing material on other computers. Parents may worry about access to the materials the government wants to restrict, but they do not necessarily believe that their own children are searching for the worst material, either for prurient purposes or to bully, harass or stalk. Nor are they dismissive when their children point to perfectly legitimate reasons, including study, why they want access to a banned app. The more this happens, the more the public will come to think the crisis overblown. And the more that the public will disrespect both the law and its guardians.

Each of the online platforms the government wants to restrict serves useful purposes. Some are purely social, keeping up with friends, idle chit-chat and boasting, and as a bulletin board of activities affecting groups of like-minded people. Others have some study purpose, including researching for school projects, sometimes collectively. Other uses involve accessing news, which may not involve accessing news sites so much as connecting up with exchanges that make incidental reference to topical events and how they affect the lives of the kids involved. Some are a window in what individuals are thinking, including their vanities and anxieties.

The collective of the material on the sites is often sorted by the online platform to profile individuals online (including making informed estimates of their age) and to develop algorithms so that advertisers can focus on their buying habits, personalities, locations and interests. Kids are markets in just the same way that adults are. These days they often have money too. They may well also have attributes, including sexual ones, which make them of interest and vulnerable to predators and potential exploiters. Such exploitation is bad and there must be protections. But the decisions that adults are making for (if not on behalf of) young Australians will cause disruption to their lives, compromise perfectly normal friendships and relationships and disrupt some of the myriad ways by which ordinary folk have adapted to a strange, and sometimes terrifying modern era. In this age, devices and apps come and go, become popular and old hat, and are used for hundreds of different purposes. Not everybody is engaged in nefarious purposes whenever they are using a smartphone, tablet or computer.

The complete disappearance of these apps would not stop the abuse of the Internet to harass, stalk or abuse others, including vulnerable schoolgirls and boys. There is, for example, no plan to ban email. Or online gambling. Albanese has adopted a phrase saying that “no government” has done more about online gambling than any other. I can think of no government that has done less, unless it was Julia Gillard’s. Same problem, of course. The important Labor factions, including the one to which Albanese is in thrall, are wholly owned subsidiaries of gambling and liquor interests, and Albanese will make any excuse, develop any distinction, and make any specious argument to avoid doing anything at all about it.

Long before the Internet predators were targeting young people. Those, including police, who think that the main problem comes from strangers are deluding themselves: in the overwhelming proportion of cases of child sexual assault the perpetrators are people known to the victim, and often relatives, neighbours, teachers and coaches. I have been arguing for years (if apparently unavailingly) that the focus on stranger danger, or on wicked insidious outsiders stalking our children, may increase the vulnerability of those who are actually most at risk – at home and in the neighbourhood. They are attempted (but sometimes one single deliberate) distractions from the lack of protection provided by society from the predators from whom children are most at risk. The louder the song and dance about the stranger or online predator, the more the system can snooze about the far more significant danger in our midst. I do not stress this to dismiss or diminish the risk of opportunist strangers, including those making contact online.

But many of the activities said to be a feature of online activities – such as grooming behaviours, exchanges and requests for pornographic materials or of personal photos, “trawling” for potential victims showing curiosity about relationships, and the search for vulnerable and isolated children – are features of all forms of predatory behaviour, not merely online predation. And many predators do not confine themselves to one medium – such as the computer – for their activities. It is a fundamental error of the war against crime that the enforcers of the law park themselves where they are most comfortable, and at least stress, rather than where the crime is, the victims live, and the perpetrators flourish.

I do not know if all of the practical and political problems that the legislation, due to commence effect in less than a fortnight, faces. There is already litigation, including constitutional litigation in prospect. It will be seen that the online platforms are behind most of it, and that they will have deep pockets and an American-based theory of freedom of speech behind them. Their legal tactics will be oriented to challenge not only the spirit and the letter of the new law in Australia, but the strategies and tactics of other countries, particularly in Europe where they are closely watching the Australian initiative and considering legislation of their own.

The big providers, such as Elon Musk, see any interference as an illegitimate interference with their business model. And, if it could not occur in their home jurisdiction, for American constitutional reasons, it is (to them) illegal and impermissible anywhere that tries to impose it. The only sovereignty they recognise is America’s, and they will not hesitate to put pressure on the American government to retaliate as if the Australian law was an invalid breach of trade laws.

The US can, and has, retaliated to conduct they don’t like, including, for some countries, increased tariffs. Some, if not all, of the players are spoiling for a fight. One might think that Internet porn and protection of children would be as good a battlefield as one could want, but I doubt that Richard Marles, effectively our prime minister in terms of his power over Albanese’s numbers, has the stomach for a fight with our great and powerful friends.

For the big online moguls, the fight against online access is but a subset of another inevitable fight, in Australia as well as in the wider world. That is the business of extracting taxes from the Amazons, the Apples, the Microsofts, and on those using apps, such as Facebook to focus paid advertising at customers.

Given the way that these businesses have destroyed mainstream media and their traditional sources, some countries, including Australia, have tried to make them contribute to the cost of national media. But the Internet companies have wiggled out of their obligations, just as new AI companies are wiggling out of obligations and are using published material to “train” their AI systems. There’s a developing consensus among industrialised countries that the only way of extracting reasonable amounts of tax from these US-based multinationals is by turnover taxes. Ones that simply override tactics such as transfer pricing, the parking of profits in low-tax countries, or tricks with loans, debts, capital and turnover. This response, when it comes, will spark deep resistance from the multinationals, and inevitable pressure from the US government, through a very compliant president Trump, for retaliation. They will also seek to manipulate laws they otherwise frequently ignore, such as free trade treaties, to argue against any idea that the nations also have sovereign and inalienable rights.

It is impossible to guess how this will have ended up two years from now, and what the impact will be of on online bans (or as the government is trying, cutely, to call it, “deferred access”). But it will not be steady as it goes. In two years time, anyway, a major review of what has been happened is promised. And an election is becoming due.

In the meantime, however, there’s the prospect of a purely symbolic law, creating onuses only on outsiders, and only tokenly on ordinary Australians. Unenforced, or enforceable only at will. A farce of law and a farce of a law.

Affecting only ordinary, but as-yet-unenfranchised Australians, since they are, for the moment, too young to vote. But right on the margins of an age of enfranchisement. Unimpressed by being described as mostly addicted to porn or Minecraft or focused on shaming and stalking their peers. Encouraged to gamble online, but discouraged from having any sort of online relationship with each other or, soon, with any AI machine.

Much as I would like to tame the Internet billionaires – ones our politicians will not directly criticise because of their status among the great and good in the nations whose values we are said to share – I cannot see this as being a long-term winner.

Republished from the Canberra Times.