Australia’s decision to restrict social media access for children under 16 has attracted global attention.
Supporters argue that the measure is a necessary response to growing concerns about cyberbullying, harmful content, compulsive usage patterns and deteriorating adolescent mental health.
Similar proposals are now being discussed in Europe and elsewhere. South Africa’s communications minister, Solly Malatsi of the Democratic Alliance, has reportedly said that our government is thinking about similar measures.
However, the debate is often framed too simplisticly, as though societies face a straightforward choice between protecting children and protecting the interests of large technology firms.
The reality is more complicated.
Once governments require social media companies to block younger users, they must also create systems capable of determining who is old enough to gain access. This transforms what initially appears to be a child-protection measure into a much broader question about privacy, anonymity, surveillance and the future architecture of the internet itself.
Burdens
A conference paper prepared by Bronwyn Howell and your writer, to be presented at the ITS2026Tokyo conference in June, argues that Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act of 2024 raises serious proportionality concerns.
The paper examines whether the expected benefits of mandatory age-gating outweigh the burdens imposed on the fundamental freedoms of ordinary users and concludes that the case is far from having been convincingly made.
At the centre of the problem lies a basic technical reality: effective age restrictions require some form of age verification or age estimation. In practice, this means users may need to provide government identification documents, facial scans, biometric information or cryptographic credentials proving they are above a threshold age.
Read: Australia fires starting gun on global social media reform
Even systems marketed as “privacy preserving” still require somebody, somewhere, to verify identity and issue credentials.
This changes the nature of online participation. Activities that once allowed pseudonymity or anonymity become tied to identity checks. Adults who simply wish to access lawful online services may increasingly find themselves required to prove their age before reading content, joining discussions or using communication platforms.
Supporters of age restrictions often dismiss these concerns by arguing that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. However, anonymity online serves many legitimate functions. Journalists, whistle-blowers, political dissidents, victims of abuse, individuals in hostile environments for other reasons and ordinary citizens discussing sensitive topics all benefit from the ability to participate without constantly revealing their identities.
Moreover, the evidence that broad age-gating systems substantially reduce harm remains uncertain. Australia’s own early compliance reports suggest that many underage users continue to access restricted platforms through alternative accounts, shared devices or other workarounds. Young people are technologically adaptable, and history shows that restrictive systems are frequently circumvented.
This creates a troubling policy dilemma. If age restrictions are enforced weakly, they may achieve little beyond inconvenience and symbolic politics. On the other hand, if governments seek to enforce them rigorously, the systems become progressively more intrusive.
Stronger enforcement generally requires more persistent identity verification, more data collection and tighter monitoring of user behaviour. The result may be a gradual shift from an open internet towards a permissioned internet, where participation increasingly depends upon identity-linked credentials. These credentials might also leak from the central points where they are processed, leading to an unprecedented loss of private and personal information. Indeed, any age restriction for internet use is in an unresolvable conflict with the protection of personal and private data.
The technologies themselves also raise important concerns. Facial age-estimation systems are probabilistic rather than certain. They can produce false positives and false negatives, particularly for users near the legal threshold age. Research has also shown that some biometric systems perform unevenly across demographic groups.
Genuine issues
Even where privacy-preserving cryptographic systems are proposed, institutional questions remain unresolved. Who issues the credentials? Which organisations are trusted to verify identities? How are credentials revoked? How is misuse prevented? And what happens when governments later decide that the same infrastructure should be used for other purposes?
Critics fear that once age-verification systems become normalised for social media, they could gradually expand into other domains such as news access, gaming, online forums, encrypted communications or politically sensitive content.
Read: Social media’s Big Tobacco moment is coming
None of this means that concerns about children’s online experiences should be ignored. There are genuine and serious issues involving harassment, harmful recommendation systems, exploitative platform design and excessive screen time. However, less intrusive alternatives may exist.
These include stronger parental control tools (which already exist on all major platforms, allowing parents control over content on children’s devices), digital literacy education, school smartphone policies and targeted interventions against specific harmful conduct. Such measures focus more directly on harmful behaviours rather than requiring universal identity checks for broad categories of online participation.
The debate therefore should not be framed as “protect children or defend Big Tech”. Instead, societies must decide what kind of internet they wish to preserve. Do we really want the heavily controlled internet of China or Russia?
A heavily monitored online environment may reduce some risks while simultaneously creating many others. Privacy, anonymity and freedom of expression are not luxuries relevant only to activists and academics. They are foundational features of open democratic societies.
Australia’s experiment with social media age restrictions is likely to influence policymakers around the world. But before other countries – including South Africa – rush to adopt similar systems, they should ask a difficult but necessary question: are they solving online harms, or are they gradually constructing a more surveilled and identity-dependent internet for everyone?
- The author, Petrus Potgieter, is professor in the department of decision sciences at Unisa and is an associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity
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