Tech giants won’t bat an eyelid at the fines enforced under Australia’s social media ban but they will start sweating if other nations follow suit, a former Facebook executive says.
Children younger than 16 will be booted off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Threads, Kick and Reddit when Australia’s world-leading ban kicks in on December 10.
The onus is on social media companies, and not parents, to take “reasonable steps” to prevent teens having accounts.
Chief executive of AI startup Omniscient, Stephen Scheeler, who led Facebook’s Australian office from 2013 to 2017, said fines of up to $50 million for systemic breaches were insufficient to encourage compliance.
He said the amount was the equivalent of a parking ticket for billion-dollar companies.
“It takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make $50 million in revenue,” Mr Scheeler told AAP.
“Some of these platforms are absorbed in Europe to billions of Euros.
“They won’t bat an eyelid … this is peanuts in the scheme of things.”
The bigger concern for platforms was whether the ban would spread globally, which would add complexity for compliance and impact revenue, Mr Scheeler said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was lauded by European counterparts in September when he spruiked the ban in New York, with Denmark’s government announcing an agreement to restrict social media access for under-15s last week.
“If Australia is the only country that does this, it will make no difference,” Mr Scheeler said.
“If you’re impeding the ability of people between 13 to 16 from being on a platform, my guess is probably that 15 per cent of users would be in that category … so they’re losing that amount of logged-in users.
“If that happened globally, that’s a substantial hit on revenue.”
Communications Minister Anika Wells said implementation of the reforms would take time for kids and parents to get used to.
Seven out of 10 kids have experienced online harm, she said.
“We’re having a big crack at it with these laws and I don’t pretend we’re certainly going to be perfect,” Ms Wells said after meeting students at a Canberra school on Monday.
“It’s going to look a bit untidy on the way through, big reforms always do.”
More than 200,000 Australians have visited the nation’s official e-safety website since an education campaign launched three weeks ago, attracting almost 100,000 page views weekly, compared to fewer than 10,000 previously.
Mr Albanese said the social media ban, which followed lobbying from media giant News Corp, reflected a “grassroots movement that’s come from the bottom up”.
“It particularly has come from parents who have gone through tragic circumstances, lost their young son or daughter, and channelled that trauma and grief into trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen to others,” he told Nova radio.
One of the issues driving the ban was that young people did not have the capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was not before the age of 16, Mr Albanese said.
“It is just about giving them back their childhood. That is as simple as that, and we want people to be protected,” he said.
But opposition communication spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh claimed the ban was “set up to fail”, saying it was unclear on details such as whether platforms could compel users to verify their age using digital identification.
“The details really matter and the minister should be focused on those first and foremost,” she said.
Discord, Twitch and popular gaming site Roblox won’t be affected by the ban, but Ms Wells said more platforms could be added.
“If we were to detect that people were swarming (to Roblox) and there was more harm being created, absolutely Roblox would be in the sights of the eSafety commissioner,” Ms Wells said.