As regular readers know, the Canadian plan to establish a social media ban for under 16s in Bill C-34 is based largely on the Australian model that took effect last December. With more data on the ban’s effectiveness continuing to roll in, multiple studies now confirm that it simply hasn’t worked as the majority of under-age users still have access to social media accounts. Yet rather than treating that as a reason to reconsider the model, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Parliament in late June that his government is working “as a priority” to strengthen the law. The failure highlights a troubling correlation: the better the privacy protection, the less effective the ban. In other words, since users will find ways to circumvent the ban, “strengthening” the law likely means less privacy and more surveillance.

It is still only six months in, but the data thus far is pretty clear cut. The eSafety Commissioner’s own March compliance figures found that roughly seven in ten under 16s still held accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok months after the December 10 commencement. A peer-reviewed study published in the British Medical Journal in June found that more than 85 per cent of under 16s were still using restricted platforms three months in. An April working paper from a team including Cass Sunstein and Angela Duckworth, bluntly titled “Why Bans Fail,” estimated compliance among fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at about 27 per cent, found that three-quarters of teens considered circumvention easy, and found that nearly two-thirds had never had an account removed. The Molly Rose Foundation’s survey of Australian children found that most who had accounts before the ban still have access, with the Foundation warning the ban “risks offering parents a false sense of safety and risks letting tech firms off the hook for safety failings.”

The Australian government blames the platforms for the law’s failures and therefore wants to crack down harder on the social media companies. But it is worth considering what cracking down on the companies actually requires. Given the widespread use of circumvention with false birthdates entered at sign-up, accounts borrowed from parents and older siblings, fake accounts, and logins through a private browser, cracking down on the companies really means cracking down on users. These circumvention techniques are stopped by more intrusive identification of all users which involves reduced privacy protection and risks of increased surveillance.

The increased reliance on surveillance is precisely where the studies lead: the BMJ authors call for more stringent measures such as device-based age estimation and third-party age assurance, while the Sunstein and Duckworth team conclude that changing behaviour would require stricter age verification requirements or automated detection and removal of underage accounts. This would require surrendering more personal information, biometric data, and more identity-linked verification. And since an under-16 ban requires age verification of the entire population, the loss of privacy hits everyone. In fact, given that officials intend to implement the ban in Canada without even conducting a privacy analysis, surveillance may be baked into Bill C-34 from the outset, despite ample evidence that the ban will not work.