Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

Let me commence by saying that I share the concerns of some of my colleagues that the process for considering this bill, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, has been suboptimal, to say the least, with the amount of time provided for experts and interested parties to make submissions, and the amount of time for the Senate committee to consider this legislation and, indeed, the lack of supporting evidence that we've been able to marshal. I would have to point the finger at the government. This is something that the opposition has been calling on for some time. The testing of age-verification technology and the trial is something that the eSafety Commissioner first proposed at least two years ago, and the opposition encouraged the government to move expeditiously with it. If that trial had commenced when it should have and had concluded by now, we would be having a more informed discussion about some of the technological solutions available.

In short, I would have liked more time, and I think the Senate and our processes deserved more time to consider this. At the same time, I'm not someone who likes to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I recognise that, in the words of Bismark, the making of legislation is often like the making of sausages; it can be ugly and particularly indecorous at times, but it's how things get done. I recognise there is an opportunity in this parliament at this time to pass this legislation, even with the deficiencies of process, and I don't believe it is an opportunity we should let slip.

I approached this issue, as I do any issue of government regulation and intervention into the private lives of individuals—particularly households and parents—as a sceptic needing to be convinced of the argument for why government should be able to limit the freedom of children, in this instance, and in some respects remove or curtail the rights of parents and their own decisions about how they raise their children. I respect the views of my colleagues here and elsewhere who have made those points. To counter that, I would make two fundamental propositions. Firstly, in my reading of the evidence that is available, the evidence of harm is quite overwhelming and the evidence of benefit is quite limited. But I would also say that protecting children from harm is a conservative proposition. It's about helping preserve families and protecting people who are vulnerable, whose capacities and abilities have not reached the age of maturity. It's a different proposition than interfering in the lives, freedoms and choices of fully formed, consenting adults, and we recognise this in a number of ways. Children do not have the same rights as adults, and in this vertical I think the case is equally well made.

I believe that the evidence that unregulated access to social media is harming children is overwhelming. If you've read Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, the evidence is well marshalled in that book and I think it has a strong empirical basis. This harm seems to be especially pronounced amongst girls—not only amongst girls but predominantly amongst girls. This doesn't mean every child who uses social media is likely to encounter harm; in fact, overwhelmingly, they're not. This is about quite a small but significant enough minority. The harm can go to the more extreme ends: ostracisation leading to bullying leading to self-harm and, in the most tragic cases, suicide; the development of obsessive characteristics; and the development of eating disorders. Those individual instances have been well documented, including here in Australia. Doubtless social media wasn't the sole cause of that—it was only a contributing factor—but it was nonetheless an important contributing factor.

Even those children who do not suffer such harms—and I recognise that is the overwhelming majority of such users—still face some of the more benign consequences such as attention fragmentation, addiction, social deprivation, distraction, irritability, obsessive behaviour and often just the opportunity cost of spending a large amount of time on social media, which means you're not spending time with your family, you're not spending time with your friends, you're not doing exercise, you're not doing your homework, you're not reading a book and you're not getting proper sleep. This is because these social media platforms play on and lean into ingrained human characteristics and evolutionary habits we've developed over a number of years to, effectively, get us hooked. They play on our desire for new information and new input; that's a trait we developed as a species that has always had to concern itself with imminent threats to its survival and which meant we always prioritised new and incoming information and were hypersensitive to it because of our alertness to changes to our environment—that's the dopamine release cycle.

To social comparison: being social animals means that humans spend a lot of time managing relations and trying to navigate the hierarchy of social relations, and social media plays into our desire for affirmation, for friendship, for social status and for social competition in many respects. In some respects, social media exacerbates some of these traits. A well-known phenomenon of audience capture is where a social media persona leans into those characteristics in their digital life, which reflects, in their regular life, those characteristics that seem to generate the most attention or likes or affirmation, which can send people down quite a diverting trajectory. Prestige bias is where people look at who is successful in social media terms—who has the most followers and the most likes and seems to drive the most engagement? They model themselves on those sorts of behaviours. Often, as we all know, the people who seem to do well in social media are often provocateurs, are often outlandish and often embrace extreme attributes—and, indeed, they're encouraged to do so by the way people build an audience on social media.

There are some benefits to children using social media; I don't discount that. It's a way for them to stay in touch and stay connected. We all saw this during the COVID pandemic when our children weren't going to school and stayed in touch through messaging platforms and social media platforms. It allows them to build and maintain a social circle. I also appreciate that for people who are isolated, geographically or socially or otherwise, it provides them a way to build a community which might not be available to them in the real world. But I say the benefits of children using social media overwhelmingly accrue to the digital platforms. This is why they are so interested in maintaining the status quo—because they monetise the children's audience, and they're able to sell that to advertisers. The committee heard evidence that about US$11 billion was accruing to digital platforms in advertising revenue from that market alone from the under-18 audience alone. This is a valuable audience. We know this from children's television. Advertisers like capturing the attention of children. If a social media platform can say that it commands so many hours a day of a child's time, that is a valuable commodity they can then on sell. That is where I believe the benefits overwhelmingly accrue.

Lastly, parents need help with this. That is why I think there is a case for government intervention. That's partly because parents have to grapple with the ubiquity of phones and electronic devices and the crude measure of taking away their kids' phones or giving them a non-smart phone without any of these apps. I don't think that's particularly realistic. In today's era, we expect our children to be able to be contacted and contactable. That is especially true in many households today where both parents work and are not at home when the children are home or are coming home from school. There's also the sheer ingenuity and cleverness of children. Many parents would know this. Children are ingenious at getting around any technical blocks you might seek to fix. You hear stories of parents saying, 'Make sure you delete all these apps,' and the children download them again and label them as something else. The parents don't know, and they create new identities or user IDs.

Overwhelmingly, the main area in which parents need help is the problem of collective action. It has to be a brave parent or a particularly self-assured or confident parent that will say, 'All my children's friends and all of his or her social group are on a platform and using it to connect, but I'm going to take my child off.' They don't want to punish their child. They don't want to risk ostracisation. Indeed, there are documented cases of having their devices taken and then self-harming because they're so concerned about the catastrophic effect that will have on their social status. If there's a situation where it is normalised that children under 16 are not on social media all the time, and it is normalised that they socialise in more traditional ways, then parents will feel more comfortable in leaning into that legislative norm.

There are some legitimate concerns around this piece of legislation. Some of my colleagues across this chamber have expressed these concerns, and some of them will. Firstly, this will be imperfect. I don't doubt it will be. It's new legislation that hasn't been robustly tested. It is used in some jurisdictions around the world, but it has not been widely tried or used. Children will probably find workarounds to it. They will potentially use VPNs. They will find a way to fake their identity or fake their age. They will migrate to other platforms. I don't doubt that's true, but this is about introducing some friction into the process. We recognise this in lots of spheres of life where government seeks to regulate. Even as a homeowner, you'd never expect that your home wouldn't be broken into but you'd still put deadbolts and security grills on the windows and lock the doors. You know it won't be the perfect protection against burglary, but it will make that job a little bit harder. This legislation is about introducing some friction into the process and perhaps tipping the normal point, if you like, between children being overwhelmingly online and somewhat less overwhelmingly online.

There are also important concerns about privacy. I share those concerns. The amendments that the coalition will be introducing will seek to strengthen protections on privacy. It's important to emphasise this. We don't expect and, I think, would be opposed to any digital platforms seeking hard forms of identification from users of any age to verify their identity. It is not part of this legislation that people will be expected to hand over their driver's licence, their passport details or their Medicare card. We expect social media platforms to use their existing datasets and technology and other behavioural tells to make a reasonable estimate of someone's age and take reasonable steps, as the legislation says, to assure them of their age. This doesn't mean it will be perfect. This means that some people under 16 will be able to fool social media platforms. I anticipate there might be people over 16 who should be allowed to use a platform and won't be able to.

But I would say that this technology does exist. We've seen that. TikTok has used the technology. They told a Senate inquiry just earlier this year that they've removed about one million under-age users from their platforms, not by asking them their age but by detecting the patterns of their behaviour that most correlate with a particular age cohort. We have US jurisdictions that are already introducing and using this. Amongst them are Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and Florida. They're not known as bastions of social progressivism. They're often quite Republican leaning and relatively conservative electorates, but they have introduced and embraced this legislation, and the digital platforms operating in those jurisdictions have had to find a way to comply with the legislation. So the technology does exist, and, with a nudge or a push from our government and this government, that technology will get better.

Importantly, it will be some time until this legislation comes into effect, and the parliament will have a regular opportunity to review it and review its operation. I think that will be important, because I recognise this is a new piece of legislation. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that this piece of legislation, if passed, will stop bullying or stop the development of eating disorders or stop social isolation. There are a range of contributing factors to that. But if we can provide some help to parents in the right direction to help lessen the potentiation, the super acceleration that social media platforms provide to some of these things, I think that's a step forward.