Australia plans to set a minimum age for children to access social media due to concerns about mental and physical health.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government would soon trial age verification technology before banning children from opening social media accounts later this year.

He said the limit would likely be between the age of 14 and 16.

“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts,” Mr Albanese
told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm.”

The law would make Australia one of the first countries in the world to impose such an age restriction on social media.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram and has a self-imposed minimum age of 13, said it wanted to empower young people to benefit from its platforms and provide parents tools to support them “instead of just cutting off access”.

Four-fifths of Australia’s population of 26 million are on social media, according to tech industry figures, making it one of the world’s most online populations.

It comes amid a parliamentary inquiry into social media’s effects on Australian society, which has heard about the poor mental health impacts on teenagers.

But it has also heard concerns about whether a lower age limit could be enforced and whether it could inadvertently harm younger people by encouraging them to go online in secret.

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Australia’s internet regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, warned in a submission to the inquiry that “restriction-based approaches may limit young people’s access to critical support” and push them to “less regulated non-mainstream services”.

DIGI, an industry body representing social media platforms, said the government should consider “expert voices such as the eSafety Commissioner … mental health experts, as well as LGBTQIA+ and other marginalised groups who have expressed concerns about bans so that we’re not unintentionally pushing our kids into unsafe, less visible parts of the internet”.