Lushington Brady: How Did Labor’s Social Media Ban Go?

If you’ve ever worked around kids and technology, you’ll know perfectly well that teenage rat cunning will beat adult brains, any time. When I briefly worked in education, the school’s IT manager complained that his job was a constant game of technological whack-a-mole. As soon as he plugged up one digital loophole, even dullards who could barely read or write had figured a way around it.

Peter Williams: Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban

By coincidence, I find myself in Australia this week watching my 15-year-old grandson play cricket against boys his age—precisely the cohort targeted by the new national ban on social media use for under-16s.

The timing could not be better for observing how this “world-first” policy is landing among the teenagers it is meant to protect. And based on the conversations circulating through the junior cricket community, Australia’s lawmakers may have overestimated the willingness of adolescents to quietly accept the sudden disappearance of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and the rest of the digital ecosystem that forms such a large part of their social world.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will Australia's social media ban actually work?

So tomorrow's the big day, isn't it? And it is, I think, not an overstatement to say that the eyes of the world, well, at least politicians around the world, are going to be on Australia and whether the social media ban will actually work.

And that is still a live question, isn't it? We're less than 24 hours from the thing taking effect and none of us can totally say for sure that we know it's going to work.

Kerre Woodham: Australia draws a line in the sand with social media ban

As you will have heard in the news, Australia has passed landmark rules to ban under-16s from social media. In a world first, social media firms will have to take all reasonable steps to prevent young teens from gaining access to sites like Facebook, Instagram, X - formally Twitter - and the like. The firms who own these sites will face fines of up to $50 million AUD if they fail to comply. The tech giants themselves have described the laws as vague, problematic and rushed, and that's probably quite true.