The Law Is Clear. The TV Segment Wasn’t.

This morning I was sent a link to a segment on an Australian breakfast show by a colleague. It was framed as a check-in, one month on, asking whether the new Australian social media minimum age law was “working”. By the time the guest cyber safety expert began talking about kids “getting around the ban” and parents “helping them do it”, calling the government “stupid” with the timing, the damage was already done.

I want to say this as respectfully as possible, but the premise of the entire segment was wrong. Legally wrong. Ethically unhelpful and in a way that is not neutral at all, because it lands exactly where the platforms need it to land.

There is no ban on children using social media in Australia. That is a media invention, not a legal one. There is no law that criminalises a child for having an account. None.

Yet the segment was built as if there were, as if the country had drawn a hard line in the sand and children were now misbehaving on the other side of it. What has actually happened is quieter, and far more significant. Responsibility has shifted. Slowly, deliberately, and long overdue.

For the first time since social media started appearing approx. 20yrs ago now, the burden is not sitting primarily on children and parents. It is sitting where it should have been all along, with the platforms that design these systems, market them aggressively, and extract profit from them at scale.

The Australian Government did not ban kids. It restricted platforms from accessing kids. That is the entire point.

We already understand this model in other parts of life. We don’t say children are banned from alcohol. We say pubs and bottle shops are banned from selling it to them. We regulate the supplier. Same logic. Same structure. We don’t let kids onto a playground where the swings are rusted, the slide has no guardrail, and the climbing frame is twenty feet high with concrete underneath. We don’t tell children to “be more careful.” We don’t put the responsibility on parents to supervise harder. We shut the gate. We make it clear until the space is safe, no child should be inside it.

That’s what this law is doing. It’s not blaming the child for wanting to play. It’s not blaming the parent for letting them. It’s saying this place was built without safety in mind, and it’s on the people who built it to fix it before they open the gate again.

The other thing that keeps happening is that clarity keeps getting lost and it always gets lost around the same number. Thirteen.Again, this morning, it was said as if it were fact. As if it were law. As if it had always been so.

It hasn’t.

Thirteen is not a legal age to use social media. It never has been. That number comes from a US law COPPA, introduced to limit how companies collect and use data from children under 13. It doesn’t ban kids from using apps. It bans companies from collecting their data without parental consent if they are under 13yrs.

Children have always been able to use platforms under 13 with parental permission. That has never been illegal.

But consent is inconvenient. It requires systems, verification, oversight. So instead of building for that, platforms inserted a sentence into their terms and conditions: “I am over 13.” That checkbox does a lot of work. If a child clicks yes, the company can say it didn’t knowingly collect data from a child. It shields them from fines. It shifts the risk. It protects the business. It was never designed to protect the child.

Over time, that workaround hardened into something else entirely repeated often enough, it started to sound like law.

For more than fifteen years, parents have been told their child is doing something wrong by being online. That they are doing something wrong by allowing it. That under 13 equals illegal, dangerous, irresponsible and bad parenting.

That message did not empower parents. It shamed them. It accumulates and it shows up years later when parents stop coming to school talks, stop engaging with safety messaging, stop listening. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re tired of being blamed for a system they never designed and never controlled.

So when a national TV program, one month into a new law, frames the story around kids breaking rules and parents helping them cheat, it doesn’t just miss the point. It actively reinforces the myth that keeps platforms out of the frame.

The claim that the “ban isn’t working”, based on how many underage accounts have been removed, misunderstands enforcement entirely. This is not about visible crackdowns. It is not measured by which teenager lost access to TikTok this week. It has been one month.

These laws work through systemic assessment. Through design obligations. Through risk notices and enforceable changes. The measure of success is safer defaults, less data extraction, reduced exposure to harm. Not public spectacles. Every time this is reduced to “kids being sneaky”, the real issues disappear again. Algorithmic addiction. Data profiling of minors. Grooming. Image-based abuse. A business model built on capturing attention early and holding it for life. None of that is caused by parenting failure. It is caused by design.

The interview didn’t mention duty of care or the dire need for safety by design.

It didn’t mention platform accountability or the enforcement role and incredible work of the team at the Australian eSafety Office. It didn’t mention children’s rights. Only children’s behaviour.

That framing may not have been intentional. But it was complete.

So here is the sentence that could have changed everything, and should have been said this morning:

Australia has not banned children from social media. It has begun restricting platforms from offering unsafe services to children. This is about platform accountability, not child punishment. That is the truth and it matters because this is not a story about disobedient kids or negligent parents. It is a story about powerful companies designing unsafe systems and a media ecosystem that keeps letting them off the hook.