DHARSHINI DAVID, HOST: How easy is it to clamp down on children’s use of social media? Well, we expect to learn of the government's plans within days, but how will any plan survive contact with reality? Well, the Education Secretary has said anything they do do, they have to ensure will work. So, what can be learned from the experience in Australia, the first country to attempt to block under-16s from platforms such as Instagram and YouTube? I’m very pleased to say that Anika Wells, who's Australia’s Communications Minister who led the country’s social media ban, is joining us this morning. Good morning.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS ANIKA WELLS: Good morning. Good to be with you.

DAVID: Well, thank you for joining us. You opted for a full ban. There's been a lot of debate here about the right way to go. Take us through your thinking.

WELLS: Well, we ultimately decided that you can’t fence the ocean, but you can police the sharks. Parents have a lot of powerlessness about the forces of the internet and the powers of addictive screen time and were feeling that battle in their households was just one that they couldn't win. So we decided that the full ban was the best way to go in order to give kids 36 more months to learn who they are before the platforms try to tell them who they are.

DAVID: But we're now six months into this, aren't we? And hindsight is always a wonderful thing. What have you learned from the experience and what might you have done differently?

WELLS: Well, a lot of it's panned out as we expected, which is that we had an initial flush of accounts deactivated. We had more than 5 million accounts deactivated. And, given there's only 1.2 million Australians aged between 13 and 16, that's a huge result for us. It speaks to the number of different accounts people had. But it also is- we’re very aware that many children remain on their social media accounts, and that is for a number of different reasons, all of which we expected. Some of the tactics that we're seeing deployed by the social media platforms are there to undermine Australia as being the first because they want to make sure that other countries, like the UK, don't follow in our footsteps. We expected that from the start. We also expected young people to try and get around the ban.

DAVID: And they have. I mean, that is the worry, isn't it? When you look at the research, the majority of under-16s have retained access to at least one platform. So, regardless of the intention here, it's not just the social media giants, but children themselves are finding workarounds.

WELLS: We've always said the onus here is on big tech. The platforms that come to Australia, seek to do business on our shores, if they want to come here and do business, they need to follow our laws. This isn't on parents and kids to regulate. So we expected kids to try and get around it. Young people have a huge amount of ingenuity. We always expected that. But it was about having the backs of Australian parents and saying, this isn't a fight that you need to have with your child. We will stand with you, and we will say big tech should be doing this.

So, like you say, we are aware of widespread instances of ways, not just around the ban, but of under-16s who have declared themselves as being under 16 by entering a birthday or what have you, never have been asked to prove that they are now over 16 by the platform, and remaining online. So, our eSafety Commissioner, which is your equivalent of Ofcom, is investigating five different platforms for systemic breaches. And if they are found to have systemically breached these laws, they'll face fines of up to $49.5 million Australian.

DAVID: Well, Meta, which of course is the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has said the company is committed to complying with the ban and that accurate age determination is a challenge for the whole industry. And it's talking about robust age verification and parental approval at the App Store level is the most effective approach to protect young people. This is a challenge that the White House has raised as well. So are you going about it the right way to make sure that we can crack down on this?

WELLS: The social media platforms have always argued that Apple, Google should be responsible for this rather than them having to deliver it. But you would have seen yesterday that Apple themselves announced a huge uplift to parental controls, and the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, called our Australian Prime Minister to let him know it was inspired by our social media laws. So we applaud where big tech is trying to do the right thing. But like I said, we expected big tech to throw everything at us because they want things to fail in Australia so that the dozen other countries who have already announced they're following in our footsteps hesitate and other countries like the UK, which are still deliberating, do not follow in our footsteps. But we would urge you to join us. This is the right thing. All of the feedback I've received from Australians, Australian parents in the six months since we have attempted this has been, thank you for trying, we appreciate this wasn't going to be perfect, it is untidy. That's what parenting looks like in the modern age.

DAVID: Well, that is the challenge of parenting in the modern age, but what about your approach? Because are there things you might have done differently, for example, the platforms you have targeted- I mean, Roblox, for example, remains approved, doesn't it, despite the fact that you expressed concerns about reports on child grooming?

WELLS: That's right. Roblox is regulated by some of our industry codes here in Australia, but it doesn't form part of the social media ban. The social media ban is about social media and the four particularly harmful functions and features that you find on social media platforms, which is the algorithms, the endless scroll, the toxic popularity metres, likes and upvotes, and disappearing messages. So it's those particular features we've been targeting, and that's why we arrived at the 10 platforms in the list and not gaming platforms.

However, like you say, Roblox are on notice in Australia for needing to clean up their act, and they have introduced children’s accounts since we said that and we're still looking to them to do more to protect children online.

DAVID: Which is an ongoing challenge. What would your advice be, when you think about all that's happened in the last year or two when you've been putting this in place and what you've learned, what would your advice be to the British Government and indeed to parents over here from a practical point of view?

WELLS: Well, I did meet with your Minister, Kanishka Narayan, when we came to Australia recently about our Digital Duty of Care, which is what we're going to do next. And it addresses a lot of the what-abouts in our social media ban. It puts the onus on all big tech to have systemic methods in place to prevent harm before it occurs, rather than this ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach that we have now, which is where individuals have to react to suffering harm online and try and take measures. So, we talked about that, and I obviously gave him some very honest feedback about what it looks like here to be at the coalface of one of the most important policy dilemmas we face in our time.

DAVID: Honest feedback in what sense? How blunt was it?

WELLS: Well, I guess as you said, you guys have been through a long consultation process about various different ways that this could happen, and you've got the different jurisdictions coming out of the United States. Different states have attempted different methods there. You've got the full ban method that Australia has delivered and implemented here, which now has six months’ worth of feedback. We have lots of qualitative and quantitative data and surveys running out of eSafety, which is our Ofcom, alongside this ban and alongside the enforcement measures that eSafety is taking.

DAVID: Have to leave it there. Anika Wells, thank you for your time. Have a good one.