Australian Teens Impacted By Age Verification Are Becoming Less Informed

The damage being done by age verification laws in Australia is continuing to be felt by teens across the country.

The Australian age verification law is continuing to be a complete disaster. Numerous teenagers continue to circumvent age gates thanks to the ease of accomplishing this. Whether that involves sharpies, pictures of golden retrievers, or using VPN technologies, the options are pretty much endless for teens.

More recently, there was some interesting research on this very topic. As it turns out, only 1 in 4 teens were “significantly impacted” by the ban in the first place. Others weren’t impacted at all (likely thanks to figuring out how to defeat the government censorship schemes that were implemented). From TechDirt:

In February we surveyed 1,027 young people aged 10 to 17, just two months after the legislation took effect.

As part of a longitudinal survey that has examined young Australians’ news engagement since 2017, we asked young people questions about the ban’s impact on their social media use and their news engagement.

First, we investigated if the ban had affected young people’s social media use by asking them if their engagement with each banned platform had changed at all, and if so, whether the change was a complete stop or if they just used it less.

We found 61% of under-16s who had previously been using banned platforms reported little or no change in their social media use. For the majority of young people surveyed, the ban was ineffectual.

In fact, only one in four (26%) reported their social media use had been affected.

This clearly only adds to the evidence that age gates are obviously ineffective.

Of course, what is more interesting is the impact this censorship has had on teens who were impacted. As many know, when people passively scroll social media platforms, some people see news articles appear in their feeds. If they see something that is interesting, they may be inclined to click it. So, what happens when teens are cut off? Apparently, that leads to less informed teenagers:

Next, we asked young people if the ban had affected their engagement with news.

For those whose social media use was significantly disrupted, the result was stark: 51% reported getting less news as a direct result of the ban.

This finding is a significant concern because it suggests that as the ban becomes more “successful”, with a greater number of young people being removed from platforms, their news engagement will fall in parallel.

Some might look at this and say that this isn’t a problem because they can go directly to news websites instead. The researchers, however, poured cold water on that, pointing out that teens have long felt disconnected from traditional media outlets thanks to rampant demonizing:

It’s unlikely that being cut off from news on social media will lead young people back to traditional news sources.

Most young Australians say they don’t feel represented or heard by traditional news organisations. They also feel the news mainstream outlets create isn’t accessible to young people and doesn’t focus on the issues that matter most to them.

In our survey, 75% said news organisations have no idea what their lives are actually like, and 71% said they find it difficult to find news relevant to people their age.

Our earlier research also shows Australian news organisations rarely include young people in news stories. When they are included, they are seen but not heard.

For instance, young people are shown in news stories in photographs and video footage ten times more than their voices are heard or they are quoted in stories.

In addition, another study of news has shown that when young people are included in breaking news events, they are often stereotyped as being lazy, dangerous and entitled.

This has long been a problem in mainstream media in numerous places in the world. Nothing in standard broadcasts or news outlets really touches on the culture of anything other than those who are part of the Baby Boomer generation. games like Pac Man and Space Invaders might get a mention or two in the media. Music tends to get mentioned more, but it’s always music related to the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Whenever the internet is brought up, teens are bombarded by messaging that their safe space is supposedly “dangerous”, “terrible”, “addicting”, or worse in their quest to spread moral panic. Their culture, when it is brought up, is always cast in a negative light. So, one can hardly blame them for shunning traditional outlets. Why would you watch something that is constantly telling you that you are awful in some way?

So, really, social media would be a way to bridge that gap because not every article in existence is about bashing younger generations. It allows younger people to filter out the propaganda, disinformation, and scaremongering constantly pumped out by the mainstream media and get the occasional nugget that comes out from time to time. The problem is that when you cut off social media, you sever that tiny connection you are making in the process. For the people that get disconnected from social media, there is no media content that works their way to them and, simply put, they just do without. It’s a deeply problematic thing and one of the many many ways people pushing age verification clearly haven’t thought this whole thing all the way through.

I know some die hard supporters out there love to use the excuse that the “data isn’t in” or “you’ll have to wait a while for the results”, but the reality is that the results are already in and it’s looking terrible for this concept of a law in general. Age verification laws are extraordinarily damaging in a huge variety of ways. This study really only represents the latest data point in all of this.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.