“The ban is out of goodwill, but there is a risk of ‘unintended consequences,'” Rachel Lord, YouTube’s local spokeswoman, told a Senate committee, according to AFP.
The ban is “not only very difficult to implement, but it also fails to deliver on its promise to keep children safer online,” Lorde said, stressing that “the solution to keep children safer online is not to prevent them from being active online.”
“Because we are not an SNS service, the platform is not subject to this law,” he claimed.
In November last year, the Australian Parliament passed a bill to ban teenagers under the age of 16 from using SNS until December. According to the bill, adolescents cannot create their own accounts on SNS, and existing accounts are also deactivated.
Platform companies such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram should take reasonable steps to block their access. If the platform fails to comply, Australian online regulator “Esafety” will fine up to A$49.5 million.
Initially, the Australian government excluded YouTube from the ban, saying it could be used for educational purposes, but included it in the ban in July after a survey showed that YouTube had a high exposure rate to harmful content for minors. YouTube protested, saying, “It is a video sharing platform with free high-quality content, not SNS.”
Australia’s current Internet law provides few details on how to enforce the ban, AFP reported.
After platform companies protested that the law was “ambiguous, problematic, and hasty,” the Australian government said last month that social media platforms were not required to verify the age of all users, but that they should take “reasonable steps” to detect and deactivate minors.
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
