Do Australia's Efforts to Protect Kids Online Go Far Enough?
Is passing an imperfect law really worse than not doing anything at all?
On Feb. 20, 2007, Carly Ryan, a 15-year-old girl from the southern Australian town of Stirling, was brutally killed by Garry Francis Newman, a 50-year-old serial pedophile.
After Carly’s death, an investigation revealed the grim series of events that had led to her murder. Newman met Carly online, where he’d assumed the fake persona of an 18-year-old boy living in Melbourne, an apparently beguiling Texas-born musician, named Brandon Kane.
Over the next 18 months, Newman, posing as Brandon, groomed Carly over the internet, talking to her in chat rooms and later on the phone. At one point, he pretended to be Brandon’s father, and met Carly’s family in person. During that visit, he tried to seduce Carly. She rejected his advances, infuriating him, but remained oblivious to the fact that Brandon was entirely made up. Carly still agreed to meet Brandon.
According to Carly’s mother Sonya Ryan, Carly really felt she loved “Brandon.” But that evening in February 2007, when Carly thought she was going to meet her “dream boyfriend,” the real-life Newman smothered and drowned the teenager off a nearby beach. Her body was found the next morning.
A week and a half after Carly’s death, police raided Newman’s home and found him online, this time chatting to a girl from Perth. His diaries revealed he had 200 fictitious internet identities, created with the specific goal of meeting and having sex with young girls. Newman was eventually sentenced to a minimum of 29 years in jail.
A Social Responsibility
In 2010, Sonya Ryan set up a foundation in her daughter’s memory to promote internet safety. Three years later The Carly Ryan Foundation started explicitly lobbying for changes to the law that would protect girls and boys from being duped by online predators.
It was an uphill battle but last Friday, Ryan celebrated what she described as a “monumental moment” in the fight to protect “children from horrendous harms online” when Australia’s parliament passed a ban on social media for children under the age of 16.
“It’s too late for my daughter, Carly, and the many other children who have suffered terribly and those who have lost their lives in Australia,” Ryan told the Associated Press. “But let us stand together on their behalf and embrace this together.
The law, which has broad support in Australia, will make social media platforms—likely including TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Reddit—liable for a fine of up to AUS$49.5 million, or about $32 million, if they’re found to have failed to prevent individuals below the age of 16 from holding accounts.
Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is the leader of the Labor Party, emphasized that the move explicitly supports parents who are worried about online harms to their children. “Platforms now have a social responsibility to ensure the safety of our kids is a priority for them,” he told reporters.
The major tech companies have a year to figure out how they’ll enforce the ban on their platforms. The government said that some exemptions will exist for health and education apps including YouTube, Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Kids Helpline and Google Classroom.
No Panacea
By no means is this law a panacea. Questions around implementation, enforcement and effectiveness are already flying. And critics of the law have accused it of not considering the positive aspects of social media—the sense of connection and community that social platforms can foster, especially among members of marginalized communities.
Then there’s the fact that in countries where similar bans have been implemented, predatory online behavior is still rampant. And to be sure, platforms including TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat have already implemented their own rules that stipulate that people need to be at least 13 to sign up.
Lisa Given, a professor of information sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne, told The New York Times that a more effective approach would be to force social media companies to do a better job of moderating and removing harmful content. And Annabel Crabb, a journalist at Australia’s national broadcaster ABC, described the bill as “performative,” arguing that it “raises more questions than answers.”
All of which leads to my million-dollar question: Is passing an imperfect law really worse than not doing anything at all? Is it worse than leaving it to social media platforms to—incentivized as they are to have as many people spend as much time on their platforms as possible—put their own guardrails in place?
Better Than Nothing
In many ways, Australia’s legislation, for all its flaws and open questions, represents a step in the right direction: an unequivocal acknowledgement that the internet, while positive in so many ways, can also do so much damage. It acknowledges that the most impressionable among us have largely been left to navigate it alone.
Official statistics are hard to come by, but Pew research from 2022 showed that almost half of U.S. teenagers reported having been bullied or harassed online. This can have devastating consequences. Suicide is directly linked to bullying, including online. Research also shows that many social media algorithms amplify content that normalizes harmful ideologies—including misogyny—among young people.
Even if what happened in Australia last week only so much as elevates the conversation about the dark corners of the web (and sadly about some of the very visible corners, too); even if it prompts just one more teenager to think more critically about her or his online activities; or spurs one more parent to ask one more question about what their daughter or son is doing—I think it’s worth it.
It’s unlikely that any law in any country will cause tech companies to fully eliminate harmful content and use, and to really internalize the duty of care they should feel toward everyone. Indeed, their business models are widely premised on doing precisely the inverse. But the internet can be better.
For now, as long as the internet offers a breeding ground for the worst version of human behavior, we can’t allow its benefits to create loopholes that are so easily exploited. So as we continue to be confronted by headlines as awful as those about Carly Ryan, doing anything at all is better than doing nothing. And in this sense, any shred of progress is better than no progress at all.
Emma Haslett
Josie Cox
Mara Altman
