Social media changes

Published Sep 13, 2024, 1:45 AM

Matthew Pantelis speaks with Sarah Davies, CEO, The Alannah & Madeline Foundation who says social media age limits won’t keep children safe online.

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Social media age limits won't keep children safe online. According to the Alana and Madeline Foundation, they welcome the announcement made by the federal government, which followed the state government here in South Australia talking about age limits for social media, but that alone won't ensure children's online safety, according to the CEO, Sarah Davis of the Alana and Madeline Foundation, Sarah joins me, now, good morning.

Good morning, Matthew.

How are you all right? Thank you? What else needs to.

Happen here, Well, Matthew, one of the really really important things that needs to happen happened yesterday, so we are pretty excited. The Attorney General presented a bill yesterday to Parliament as part of the sort of foreshadowed privacy reforms, and one of the pieces of legislation in that bill is provisioned for online online Children's Privacy Code, which is absolutely fantastic because that is going to go to the driver of the harms and the risks that our children are experiencing online and that really will make a difference. So we are pretty pumped.

All right, very good news. It doesn't let parents of the hook in any way, does it. They've got to put the the guidelines in place at home.

Oh completely, So you know there are we all share responsibility for this right. So absolutely it's up to us as parents and schools and teachers and community to make sure that we educate our children and ourselves on how to navigate tech and the online world safely and confidently, and how to participate in that world and create good experiences for us and others. But you know that, as tumes that we're entering into a playing field where there are clear safety by design rules and at the moment that's not the case. So it is government's responsibility to make sure that you're children's digital rights are upheld by setting you know, minimum standards based on community expectations, and then to hold tech companies to account to deliver on that. And that is what this Online Children's Privacy Code will do. It will set the minimum rules of the game about high default privacy settings, no selling of children's data, so that actually when we go online, we know that those basic core safety standards are in place.

Why do tech companies regard children as being of age at thirteen? That's always puzzled me.

Look, I think there are a couple of things. The first thing to say is that I think that we've had twenty to thirty years of this tech evolution and it's happened around us, and it's a bit kind of like the boiling frog. We haven't kind of really noticed and we're waking up now and looking at this going, you know, holy shit, some of this is not great. So I think that's the first thing. I don't think that there was some machiavellian design twenty years ago to build something like this. I think there is an element of that evolution. I think the second point is that the classification system that we have in Australia was built for films and music and television. It wasn't built for the Internet, and so we're applying a framework that actually doesn't work for the Internet. So I agree, I think thirteen is a peculiarly arbitrary age. Right. If you talk to child development experts, they will tell you what the core generic child development processes and age stages are. So I think that's the other thing, is we've tried to forcefit a framework that doesn't work. The third comment, and this is where I'm liable to get into trouble a bit, is that a lot of the tech companies. Actually, and I'm not talking just social media here, I'm talking all techs. I don't know that they could give a rap about what age children are or aren't because their core for many of them, their core business model is a user is the dollar. So we are their currency. It's our data that they make their money from. They trade it, they sell it, they identify it, they profile it. So it's the more data they have, the more users they have, the more money they make. So I think if you put those three kind of bits together, that's kind of why I reckon we've ended up where we are.

Okay, they've been off the hook too, I know and totally accept. Actually, I think you make a good point with the boiling frog argument that this has happened around us, but there's been enough said about the dangers of this, and social media companies giants have just looked the other way all the way through, including you know, Elon must taking over from Jeck Dawson before him, and there's been no change in any of.

This is belief, It really does.

Yah. No.

Tech companies have a responsibility to absolutely prevent their services and products being used in ways that violate children's rights and expose them to harm and what is fabulous. I had a look at the bill that was presented yesterday just to quick read last night, and what it says is that the bill will apply to all tech services that are likely to be accessed by children, So not just social media sites targeted at children, but all tech service is likely to be accessed by children, and that the providers have got to think about the nature and content of their service, whether it might have a particular appeal to children, what the current usage behavior is, or usage of similar or existing services, the way the service is accessed, so they've actually got to they've got to assess whether a service is likely to be used by children based on dat all of that information. That is fantastic. So yeah, we have to hold them to account. And sorry, Matthew. The other thing, and I think we may have talked about this before, is it is absolutely time that tech stopped self and co regulating in Australia. We really need to see strong independent regulation. And again this Online Children's Privacy Code will be designed and regulated and enforced by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. So it just takes tech out of the picture. They can't design their own rules of the game in this space, and we need that across all tech. But this is a massive start.

Yeah. Absolutely. The Safety Commissioner's role in this is that the same as the Australian Commissioner you just mentioned that or is that a difference we have.

There are three commissioners that kind of all work in this space. We have the Safety Commissioner, who, as you know, I think it is this frick and amazing and she has powers under her Act around the safety. We then have the Australian Information Commissioner that's Elizabeth Todd, and so she's been given carriage or that commission's being given carriage of the Online Children's Privacy Code, and I actually think that's a really smart move because what it's saying is it's saying this is applicable to the whole of children's life. So yes, this is online, but actually it's embedded in a legal sense and therefore in an enforcement in privacy legislation. And then we also have our Privacy Commissioners, So there are three parts of that that need to play together.

All right, I have to leave it there, Sarah, thank you for your time this morning.

Anytime, and Matthew, I just want to say thank you because you know, these are complicated issues. Simple solutions aren't going to work. And you know often when you talk about data, people roll their eyes and heads for the exit. But the more we understand about the causes and the drivers, the more likely we are to fix it. So just thank you for the opportunity.

Oh no, probl and you know they are complicated. I was just thinking as you were talking a few minutes ago, when I'd come home from school. I mean, the closest you got to social media and particularly content was whatever was on TV between four and six. It was aimed for kids, you know, Bugs, Bunny and more racier shows like Get Smart or Batman. You know, yeah, that was it. It was kids TV of that that era, and it was black and white on our TV anyway, and we went.

Yeah, let's have a children's yeah for children?

Absolutely? Yeah, all right, good Sarah, appreciate the time. Thank you. Sarah Davis from the Atlana and Madeline Foundation