Australian social media ban a ‘whack-a-mole nightmare’ for parents says Facebook chief Nick Clegg

Facebook’s head of global affairs Nick Clegg says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposed ban on social media for teenagers will be a “whack-a-mole” nightmare for parents that won’t work.

The former leader of the Liberal Democrats described Mr Albanese’s proposal as “a plan in outline without any detail” but said Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, would comply if the law was passed.

Mr Albanese says he will legislate by the end of the year a bill to ban children, possibly as young as 14 or 16, from using social media to help take the pressure off parents and teachers trying to restrict teenagers from using social media.

But Mr Clegg warned that unless the ban was imposed at the “chokepoints of the internet” – the Play and App stores and the Android and iOs operating systems run by Google and Apple, the ban would not work and be a nightmare scenario for parents.

Asked by The Nightly if he thought the ban was enforceable and even desirable, Mr Clegg said content would simply slosh from one app to another.

“Look at the end of the day if a democratic government passes legislation on that we will of course abide by it,” he said, speaking at an appearance at the Chatham House think tank in London.

“Of course big companies like us will do it but there’s a multitude of apps now.

“As anyone with teenagers knows no teen uses one app.

“If you ask each company to play whack-a-mole with these things, it’s going to be a nightmare for parents … because they have to do it on each single app.”

He said studies showed that in the US teens can use up to 40 different apps on their phones.

Last year Pew Research Centre found that YouTube was the most commonly used app by US teens, followed by TikTok, Snapchat and then Instagram.

The survey showed that 95 per cent of teens had access to a smartphone and half said they were online “almost constantly,” double that recorded around a decade ago.

Mr Clegg said this was why Meta was pushing for the law to force children to seek parental consent to download apps, rather than obliging social media companies to enforce the age of account users.

“So we’re not – I think you said shuffling – we’re not shuffling off anything,” he said.

“We’re saying, if from a parental point of view, or indeed, from a government’s point of view, you really want to have control over who uses social apps or not, the only way you could just practically do it is through … the chokepoint – where you actually download the apps from the app store.”

“In as much as the debate unfolds in Australia and elsewhere, if you’re going to make a big move like that and say we decree at this point, you’ve got to make it workable.

“It’s got to cover all the apps that young people use, not just some of them.”

He said the recent UK riots had shown apps were not used in isolation as Meta had to block harmful content from Telegram that was being posted onto Facebook to rally rioters.

“This content sloshes from one platform to another,” he said.

“If you’re going to take measures as per the one in Australia you’ve got to make sure that it can actually be administered to cover them all.”

On whether banning teens from social media altogether was even desirable, he said that as the father of three sons, he wanted young people to use Meta platforms in a “fruitful and positive way.”

But he said that parents were not using the more than 50 tools already available to them to restrict what content their teenagers saw, who they interacted with and how much time they spent online.

“Guess what, one of the things we do find – I’ll be very open about this – is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them,” he said.

“So we have a bit of a behavioural issue.”

Mr Clegg repeatedly described Meta as an “engineering company” and said the platform was not interested in promoting news content because users no longer wanted to see news in their feeds.

“What we keep hearing from our users over and over again – can you just get the politics out of our feed, I don’t want it,” he said.

He said Facebook had stopped amplifying politics as well as political parties and candidates from being able to use micro-targeting advertising tools and that overall news and current affairs now made up less than three per cent of content on Meta platforms.

“It’s been declining and declining and declining,” the former leader of the Liberal Democrats said.

“Which is why you have this very difficult debate between platforms like us and publishers and the press, because they say ‘oh you’re taking our hard work … content so that you can engage users.

“No, we don’t want it, we don’t need it,” he said.

He said Meta’s 4 billion users around the world had vastly differing political views and unlike X, formerly Twitter, did not join the platforms to “yell at each other” about the latest headlines.

Meta is locked in a war with the Australian and Canadian governments about making tech giants pay news media organisations for hosting news content on their sites.

Meta previously pulled news from Facebook in 2021 but ultimately agreed to pay, along with Google, $200 million to Australian media companies to avoid being designated and forced to pay for news articles.

But in a hardening of its opposition the second time around, Meta has withdrawn news from platforms in Canada in response to a similar law and is now refusing to stump up a second round of cash for Australia’s media companies.