On a summer’s day in 2007 a 15-year-old girl headed to a secluded beach an hour south of her home town in the Adelaide Hills.
Carly Ryan thought she was about to meet her boyfriend in person for the first time: an 18-year-old she had been chatting to on MySpace for a year and a half.
But lying in wait was Garry Francis Newman, a 50-year-old paedophile who had posed online as a fictitious Texan-born musician and groomed Carly. He assaulted and suffocated her before leaving her in the water to drown. The murder shocked a nation just getting to grips with social media; Carly is believed to be the first person in Australia killed by a predator they had met online.
Now, with a new generation of children hooked on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, Australia is preparing to become the first country to impose a national social media ban on children under 16.
It comes after British ministers were accused last week of capitulating to Big Tech over a similar plan, by “gutting” a private member’s bill that would have restricted social media for under-16s and banned smartphones in schools.
Australia’s legislation willl come in to force by the end of the year. Big tech firms face fines of up to AU$49.5million (£25 million) if they flout the rules.
The change cannot come a moment too soon for Carly’s mother, Sonya, who has dedicated her life to protecting children online through a foundation she set up in her daughter’s name. “I miss her terribly. It doesn’t get any easier as each year goes by,” she told me.
“Carly was the first girl in Australia to be murdered by an online predator, but we have lost so many more children since then.”
Sonya Ryan
MICK TSIKAS/AAP
A parliamentary inquiry opened last year by the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, heard from parents of children driven to suicide by bullying on social media, suffering anxiety, or battling eating disorders after being bombarded with bogus information about diets and unrealistic body images.
“Parents are overwhelmed with trying to navigate social media with their kids,” Ryan said. “This ban finally puts the onus on social media companies to protect children.”
France and several American states, including Florida and Texas, have passed laws to restrict social media access for minors, but Australia has gone much further. “Parents want kids off their phones and on the footy field. So do I,” Albanese said when he announced his plans in September.
The legislation, which was fast-tracked through parliament and passed in November, aims to remove children from social media sites including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitch. YouTube, which is widely used in schools, is exempt.
What is not yet clear is how Australia is going to do it. “I’ve got to figure out how to implement this dang legislation,” said Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner, who is responsible for enforcing the ban. “The world is watching.”
Julie Inman Grant is responsible for implementing the legislation
MICK TSIKAS/AAP/ALAMY
The need to act was reinforced by the findings of a national survey published by her organisation last month, which underlined how easy it is for children to access social media by giving a false date of birth. It looked at eight social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube and Discord.
Social media platforms typically specify a minimum age of 13. All eight platforms, apart from Reddit which did not ask for details, required the user to submit their date of birth when signing up for an account but made no further checks. The watchdog found that 80 per cent of children aged eight to 12 in Australia, about 1.3 million youngsters, use one or more of these popular social media services.
Grant, who is from Seattle and has spent more than 20 years working for Microsoft and Twitter (now X), said that implementing the ban would be extremely difficult. “We’re kind of building the plane as we fly it,” she said.
Aiming to pass the legislation before a general election, which must be held by May at the latest, the prime minister acted before the age verification technology required for the ban to work had been tested.
Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister
LUKAS COCH/AAP/AP
That trial is being led by Age Check Certification Scheme, a small British company based in an old converted cotton mill in Stockport, Greater Manchester, which counts the Home Office, the European Union, Lloyds and NatWest among its clients. Its founder, Tony Allen, and his team are roughly halfway through vetting more than 60 systems provided by 55 social media platforms to see whether they are fit for purpose. He said they were on track to report back by the end of June deadline.
The systems being vetted fall into three categories: age verification, age estimation and age inference.
These systems are already used, with limited effect, by some social media platforms to weed out underage users who have signed up for an account, Allen said.
“But one of the problems, of course, is they only get to know this information after someone starts using social media. Australia is basically saying they want social media companies to do more upfront, rather than let a child onto the account and then finding out about them as they start using it.”
As well as enjoying bipartisan political support, the ban has been praised by parent groups, anti-bullying campaigners and mental health charities.
However, it been criticised by human rights campaigners, children’s welfare advocates and technology experts amid concern it will be unenforceable. Critics suspect children will find their way around the ban, perhaps by using a virtual private network to pretend they are living in a different country, be driven into the darker recesses of the web, or access social media behind their parents’ backs.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the government-funded Australian Human Rights Commission, are worried that banning children from social media will deprive them of a vital way of connecting and expressing themselves. Lorraine Finlay, the human rights commissioner, said: “I think there’s a clear recognition that something needs to be done to protect children, because we recognise the harms social media can cause, but this ban neglects the positive benefits that can come from responsible use of social media. This is a rushed process that we fear will deliver bad results for both kids and parents.”
Grant shares some of these reservations and has compared the idea to banning children from swimming in the sea, rather than teaching them to swim safely. “I don’t endorse the legislation. I enforce it,” she said.
She is determined to shield children, one way or another, from ultra-violent, sexual or misogynistic content, which is so rife online. She was involved in a high-profile clash with Elon Musk last year when she tried to force X to remove all footage globally of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel being stabbed by a teenager while he was delivering a sermon in a Sydney church in April last year.
Australia wants to shield teenagers from violent online content
WILLIAM WEST/AFP
The stabbing, which left the bishop seriously injured and led to a riot outside the church, was declared a terrorist attack. The platform refused to take down the videos, instead opting to block the content from Australian users. Grant was described by Musk on X as the “censorship commissar”, and he accused her of stifling free speech and straying beyond her jurisdiction.
Grant took the matter to court but was forced to drop the case when an Australian federal court judge found that banning the posts would not be “reasonable” because it would be probably be “ignored or disparaged by other countries”. Almost a year after the bishop’s stabbing, Grant said she and her family were still receiving “credible” death threats, while her children had been “doxxed”, meaning their private information had been posted online.
Last month it emerged that the British teenager Axel Rudakubana searched online for the video of Emmanuel being assaulted 40 minutes before he stabbed three young girls to death in Southport last July.
Grant described the revelation as heartbreaking and evidence that “this kind of content normalises violence, desensitises and radicalises”. She added: “We know that young people are accessing this video in schoolyards, on their smart phones, and this is not content you can unsee.”
Now she just has to work out how to stop them.
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