Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has backed controversial age verification technologies for social media companies and has pledged to tighten restrictions on the platforms.
Social media use by young people is in the spotlight after numerous instances of children being affected by suicide, sextortion, exposure to violence, pornography, drugs, and other harmful content.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledges to act on social media age verification.
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Albanese’s commitment comes as South Australia and Victoria move to introduce their own social media bans for children under 14.
Appearing on Sunrise on Tuesday, Albanese said he wanted kids back on the “footy fields” and “netball courts”, interacting with real people and having real-life experiences.
Albanese was asked by host Nat Barr about the controversial age-verification technologies, including facial recognition, which has been widely panned as ineffective.
“(Facial recognition) is one of the things we will be trialling, but there is a range of technologies that we can use. We also want to put some responsibility back on to these social media companies,” Albanese said.
“Social media companies have a social responsibility, and we are seeing the mental health issues rising from young people. We know this is having a devastating impact.”
The government is about to trial the age assurance technology, which will be used to enforce the social media age ban for children between 13 and 16 years old, and to prevent access to pornography for children under 18.
The Commonwealth is spending $6.5 million on the trial, with the tender process for the technology starting this week.
Barr questioned Albanese if the facial technologies worked, particularly after the age verification tools caused a huge spike in the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) when trialled in other countries.
“This is why we are doing the trial to get it right. If it was easy, it would have been done around the world,” Albanese said of the new technology.
“Just because something is hard doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try, and we want to work with parents, to work with companies, to work with state and territory governments to make sure that we act in this area.
“We know that getting it perfect will be different. That is the truth because people will try and work their way around it. They are pretty clever on these devices.”
“We are prepared to act. We want to work across the parliament to get this right. That is why we said we will introduce legislation before the end of the year.”
The social media age ban legislation is expected to get bipartisan support after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton called for such a proposal earlier in the year.