Australia has passed a law banning all under-16s from accessing social media (this presumably means the big social media sites like Facebook or TikTok because obviously the whole internet is too vast to control in this way). People are wondering whether that would be a good idea here in Germany, too. But is it?

In theory, you have to be 13 or older to use most social media sites. This is not because the operators of social media sites feel the need to protect younger kids by making their services unavailable to them but because it is a legal requirement in the USA. Certainly for any sufficiently-clever under-13-year-old it is not a real hurdle at all to check the I AM SO 13 YEARS OR MORE TRUST ME box when signing up for an account on www.social-media.com, irrespective of their actual age, so that barrier is not as effective as one might think. The number of younger kids with accounts on the popular platforms speaks for itself. So obviously, “self-certification” is not the way to go here – but whether requiring people to go through the type of video-based identification used, e.g., to open an online bank account would fly is a very good question – certainly when considering issues of scaling and cost, because for most social media sites you're not a (paying) customer where the initial outlay of getting you IDed is offset by the money you'll be bringing in through your long and fruitful association with the service. Instead, as is worth pointing out again and again, if you don't pay money for your social-media account, you're the product being marketed to the social-media operators' real paying customers, namely advertisers on the platform. The social-media operators certainly don't mind extra eyes on those ads, which is why they have no incentive whatsoever to come up with working methods to exclude youngsters.

The real issue, of course, is that we shouldn't expect only teenagers to prove reasonable maturity before letting them use social media. What we want instead is to require this from all users, most definitely including adults. After all, we do just the same for motor vehicles – it is well-known to, and accepted by, everyone that to legally operate a car or motorcycle on public roads you need to attend drivers' ed and pass a series of tests before you're issued a licence. Since the Internet is at least as dangerous as cars (which after all are merely tons of metal hurtling about at breakneck speeds), it stands to reason that social media users, too, should be expected to demonstrate a certain basic level of proficiency when it comes to critical thinking, being able to tell “fake news” from the real thing, spotting deep-fake videos, dealing with malware, spam, phishing messages, and viruses, etc. Add the possibility of getting your licence suspended or revoked if you misbehave too egregiously, and the mandatory “Internet licence” starts looking really enticing in a world of online mobbing, bullying, hate speech and “fake news”. It would certainly go a long way towards making the 'Net a better place, and as such is virtually certain to never become reality.