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The Government of Saskatchewan is sending survey postcards to households to gauge public interest and opinion on a potential ban on social media for kids 16 and under.
The government said it wants to hear directly from parents and residents on the role it should play in governing social media use and whether it should consider an outright ban, include some flexibility or leave the matter entirely for parents to decide.
Read more:
- Survey says: Sask. parents to be polled about kids on social media
- Parents who don’t allow kids to have smartphones say social media ban would ease their minds
- Sask. parents have split reactions on need for social media ban for minors
Professor Tama Leaver, an internet studies professor at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, says if Saskatchewan plans to enforce a social media ban on anyone under 16, young people need to be a part of the conversation.
The Australian government banned children younger than 16 from holding accounts on specified platforms in December 2025.
Leaver joined The Evan Bray Show to talk about Australia’s social media ban and also to give advice on how a ban could be successful in Saskatchewan.
Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Bray: What Australia’s social media ban is hoping to do?
Leaver: Australia has put through legislation that prevents users under the age of 16 from holding social media accounts across the big social media platforms. The aim is to, in the words of our Prime Minister, give children space to have a childhood again, which makes a whole lot of interesting presumptions about what a childhood should look like right now.
It is responding largely to widespread parental anxiety that the experience of social media really isn’t appropriate all the time, for 13, 14, 15 year olds, and that something needed to be done.
On YouTube and TikTok, they can see some of the content in a logged out state. It’s not completely blocked, but it is not navigable. You can’t subscribe, you can’t like (and) you can’t comment.
Bray: Which platforms are involved in the ban?
Leaver: The main Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and a couple of others. There are 10 main platforms.
Because the legislation is based on a particular definition of social media, it does mean certain categories are exempt. For example, messaging platforms are exempt — WhatsApp is not covered — and gaming platforms such as Roblox, which is a challenge in itself. We’ve had a lot of evidence in the last year or so that suggests that Roblox hasn’t been doing enough to protect young people on that platform.
It’s a specific piece of legislation that uses the definition of social media as the way to enable what can and can’t be done.
Bray: Did Australia get the ban right?
Leaver: Australia has the best intentions, but has possibly rolled out the ban in the worst possible way.
The ban essentially responded to political pressure just before an election, and it was a race to see who could be seen to do more to protect the kids. While that’s really important as a thing to be seen to be doing, it was done in such a rush that young people really didn’t feel consulted or part of the discussion at all, and it’s very much been an experience for young people that’s being done to them, rather than done with them.
I think for this to work long-term young people have to feel like they were at least part of the conversation.
My worry is that this will be yet another thing that young people basically spend their time trying to either circumvent or ignore. We have seen, anecdotally at least, evidence that young people have gotten around the ban, landed on alternate platforms that look similar in nature, or they have basically reformatted their own experiences in different ways that make these platforms slightly redundant, but the same experiences are happening.
One of the big concerns is that the harms that people imagine that this is preventing aren’t necessarily being addressed. One of the big challenges that was addressed in the lead-up to this was cyber bullying that’s very hard for young people to escape. It follows them home, follows them into the bedroom on their devices, and that is a really big challenge that we need to address.
Leaving messaging platforms exempt means that bullying that might have happened on Instagram or Snapchat is simply going to be happening on Messenger or WhatsApp. I think there’s a logic that we need to be really careful of about which harms we can actually do something about and which platforms need to be included for it to be effective.
Bray: How have the age verification tools been working?
Leaver: We know the eSafety Commissioner doesn’t believe the platforms generally are doing enough, and there is anecdotal evidence that quite a lot of young people either got past the ban or had multiple opportunities to do so.
For example, those platforms that are relying on a video selfie might allow a person to try every day for a couple of weeks to do a new video selfie, (which) seems inconsistent with the philosophy of protecting that young person.
Beyond that, one of the biggest challenges here is that we had a big technical trial that looked at all of the age estimation and age inference tools, and part of the legislation specifically said you can’t request government-issued ID as the primary form of identification.
In some respects that’s good because not all children have easy access to ID, but what it does mean is it’s relying on other technologies that aren’t really fully baked yet. If you look at the detail, you need to use multiple versions of these tools in a row to give any semblance of reliability, which also admits then that none of these tools are quite up to the job. I think the platforms themselves are actually doing some work to find better ways to do this.
Bray: Our province gathering information from Saskatchewan residents as to how they feel about the ban. If you were giving advice to this country, what would you say?
Leaver: I would ask a broader question. I don’t think it’s what would you want out of the ban, (but more) what would you like the experience for young people online to look like.
I think most parents want young people to have the best possible experiences, and they do want them to be safe, but they also want them to have the opportunity to grow, be creative and learn about the online space, so it’s not a shock to them when they eventually get access.
Young people’s voices should be part of that conversation. In many countries this is a ban that is being thought up and done by adults to children, and I think if young people have the opportunity to come up with some potentially very creative and doable solutions themselves, that might be at least a much richer conversation.
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