Our CEO was interviewed by Kat Feeney on 612 ABC Radio Brisbane and Gold Coast on the Australian Government’s announcements that ti would be moving forward with a trial of age verification for children on social media. The proposal is to limit the minimum age that children can be on social media.
Dr Oboler explained how on social media the users are the product not the customer, and the design of platfroms exploits this. While it may be reasonable for adults to accept a certain amount of risk, and harm, it isn’t appropriate to expose children, particularly younger children, to the same harms.
Noting that the harms of social media are pretty well understood at this point, Dr Oboler explained that the main concern was one of privacy. If the age verification was entirely left to the social media platform, it might involve them having even more personal information, including on children who are permitted to use the platform.
Dr Oboler explained that there are technical solutions that can solve this problem by seperating the age verification function, and knowledge of the personal information, from the platform the user wants to access. Think of PayPal which can pay a third party site, with money form your bank account, without sharing the bank account details (or our PayPal password) with the merchant. An even closer example is secure website browsing (over HTTPS) where a third party authority has checked the identity of a website and issued them an encrypted key. After that establishing the identity of the site become a matter of verifying the key is valid (not re-checking all of the documentation that was initially checked to issue the key).
With the identification challenge removed, and the personal information trusted to one or more authorised identity authorities (such as schools being able to issue a digital key to each of their students that verifies they are over a certain age), the challenge is what age should children be allowed on adult social media and will they miss out if they are excluded from social media altogether?
Dr Oboler suggested the solution was not banning children from social media entirely, but having sites that are appropriate to different age groups or communities. A school might have its own social media platform, limited to students and teachers, where concerns about cyberbullying, for example, might be addressed by the school in a similar way to in-person bullying. More broadly, platforms could be developed that operate in a less harmful manner. This could come at the cost of significantly limiting self-expression and fucntionality, but that might be appropriate in some cases. YouTube alsready does this on their YouTube Kids platform which is designed for very yong children. Older children might might be given more freedom for self expression, but with stricter limits (thjan apply for adults) on the sort of content is appropriate.
A caller gave the example of swimming, saying that out of a fear of drowning we don’t ban children from swimming, but neither do we throw them in the ocean and leave them there unsupervised. Kat extended the analogy noting how public pools often have a shallow paddling pool for young children where adult supervision is required. We have a range of safety mechanisms around water, particularly to protect children, but also to protect members of the public in general. The flags where life savers operate are another example. Adults might be able to swim elsewhere, but they know where the designated safe area is where added protections are in place.
The interview discussed various aspects of the OHPI Submission to the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society.