Australia's social media ban for children takes effect in world first!!

will be 100% clear … Australia sets the legal drinking age at 18 because our society recognises the ­benefits to the individual and the community of such an ­approach.

“The fact that teenagers occasionally find a way to have a drink doesn’t diminish the value of having a clear, ­national standard.”

Polling has consistently shown that two-thirds of voters support raising the minimum age for social media to 16. The opposition, including leader Sussan Ley, have recently voiced alarm about the ban, despite waving the legislation through parliament and the former Liberal leader Peter Dutton championing it.

The ban has garnered worldwide attention, with several nations indicating they will adopt a ban of their own, including Malaysia, Denmark and Norway. The European Union passed a resolution to adopt similar restrictions, while a spokesperson for the British government told Reuters it was “closely monitoring Australia’s approach to age restrictions”.

Inman Grant told the Guardian that from Thursday, she would be sending notices to the platforms covered by the ban to find out how the implementation was progressing.

Questions included “how many accounts [they’ve] deactivated or removed, what challenges they’re finding, how they’re preventing recidivism and preventing circumvention, whether or not their abuse or reporting abuse and the appeals processes are working as planned”, she said.

Albanese said the information gathered in this process would be made public.

The regulator would need to assess whether platforms were taking reasonable steps. If they were not, it could take that platform to court to seek fines.

There would be an independent evaluation of the ban conducted by an academic advisory group examining the short-term, medium-term and longer-term impacts of the ban.

“It will look at the benefits over time, but also the unintended consequences,” Inman Grant said.

“Everything from are sleeping? Are they interacting or are they actually getting out on the sports fields? Are they reading books? Are they taking less medication like antidepressants? Are their Naplan scores improving over time?” Inman Grant said.

Potential unintended consequences to be investigated included whether children were moving on to “darker areas of the internet”, learning how to bypass the bans through VPNs, or moving on to other platforms, she said.

Teens on Snapchat affected by the ban had been publicly sharing their mobile numbers in their profiles ahead of their accounts being shut down.

A spokesperson for Snapchat said the platform understood under-16s were disappointed by the ban but “would strongly encourage any teens using Snapchat not to publicly share their personal contact information”.

Inman Grant said she had sent notices to 15 companies not initially included in the ban, asking them to self-assess whether they should be.

Yope and Lemon8, which shot up the app store rankings as teens looked for alternatives, were among those contacted.

From :- THE DAILY MIRROR