10 Dec 2025 | News
Enacted today, Australia’s ban of selected social media platforms for under 16-year-olds is the most sweeping attempt carried out by a democratic state to address online harms facing young people. While we acknowledge the need to ensure young people are protected from inappropriate content and are supported in how they engage with information and content shared online, this approach raises a number of significant issues.
Any such ban on platforms curtails the user’s ability to navigate the open web and access public-interest information. As a result, it is a disproportionate threat to free expression as outlined in Australian and international law. It could also hinder young peoples’ ability to navigate these online spaces when they do come of age. This was outlined by James Ball after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act’s child protection provisions in July 2025: “If we try to keep young people away from it, they will be woefully underskilled, undersocialised, and unprepared for the world they’ll first encounter as 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds,” he wrote.
The realities of social media mean that the very platforms that give access to inappropriate content also give access to a wider range of content that undoubtedly benefits society. Whether that is public-interest reporting, testimony from those living in authoritarian regimes where state control over conventional media outlets leaves online platforms as the sole route available to access international audiences, or a space for marginalised users to find communities outside their direct environment, social media bans do not attempt to differentiate between the good and the bad. They simply cut young people off from all content hosted or shared on that platform, without giving them the tools or support they need to be able to differentiate, interrogate or navigate this complex but important information ecosystem.
For too long, free expression has been presented as an opposition or explicit threat to young people, with few meaningful conversations about how young people can be supported to access their rights. But young people have free expression rights, alongside a wide range of other human rights. These rights are not only available to them once they turn 16. For instance, Article 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that “[t]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” As in broader international law, this is not an absolute right and the Declaration of the Rights of the Child also acknowledges the need of “special safeguards” for children. However, social media bans for every young person with no way for them to consent to or challenge the law does little to give the child a choice as to the media they can use. In fact, the choice is made on their behalf.
Specific provisions in the Australian law also raise a number of significant questions that, while too early to track in terms of implementation, should be considered. Australia’s social media ban only covers a specific number of platforms, leaving several outside the law’s scope. This is inconsistent. For example, Facebook and Instagram are included, but Messenger and WhatsApp (other platforms owned by Meta) are not. While this will increase the complexity for big platforms to differentiate its access requirements across the different services it provides, it also establishes spaces where young people can turn to to avoid age checks. This could encourage bad faith actors to target their actions towards these unregulated areas in a more concerted and impactful manner. Users who are now unable to access the platforms on which they have established communities will be susceptible to such exploitation, with few avenues of recourse or support.
Any policy of this type requires the significant deployment of untested for-profit tools to ensure young people cannot access the platforms included in the law. With many of these tools, users are required to upload sensitive documents such as a passport or bank card to platforms, or consent to face scanning, run by untested and opaque third-party providers. In many cases, users will not be able to choose different methods or vendors and so will be forced to trust these providers with their sensitive data. This is not without risk. Last month, “68,000 Australian Discord users had their personal information compromised” through a tool the platform used as part of its age assurance checks. The compromised data included “government ID images, names, usernames, email addresses, and some limited billing information”.
Requiring users, including young people over the age of 16 in the case of Australia, to blindly trust such platforms, with limited forms of choice or accountability may require them to choose free expression rights over the rights of privacy. But you cannot have one without the other. Without a private space to call their own or the ability to actively choose what data they share, users may curtail their involvement in online discourse, thus undermining their rights to free expression beyond the objectives of this law. As outlined by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the social media ban “normalises broad-based age checks – whether through ID verification or invisible profiling – and creates vast new datasets about how we live and interact, all just to prove we’re old enough to be on social media.” In an age of rampant digital surveillance carried out by private opaque platforms, whose decisions are informed by profit not rights, we should be cautious as to what data we require to be shared. The development of AI age inference tools raises further fears, especially considering academic studies have monitored “higher false positive rate … for certain groups compared to others” and “that minors from East and West Africa were misclassified as older than they were compared to minors of the same age from the other regions”.
We are concerned that outright bans, like the type enacted in Australia, are presented as a silver bullet to protect young people against inappropriate content. This risks closing the door to a more nuanced and proportionate response that centres young people and incorporates a society-wide approach including anti-monopoly and algorithmic transparency measures, improved educational support, information literacy initiatives, sustainable media funding, the development of young person-specific and young person-created media content, or a more participatory strategy across government and society.
As other countries and bodies, including the European Parliament and the UK, are monitoring Australia’s laws, with many policy-makers calling for the policy to be emulated, we urge extreme caution. One day is wholly insufficient to gauge the impact on young people and we must avoid knee-jerk measures for such an important and complex issue. Bans are seldom the answer to the challenging issues of our time. We owe it to young people to approach this issue with the care, complexity, nuance and depth it requires.
9 Jul 2021 | BannedByBeijing, China, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”117061″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Threats to free speech and free expression come in many guises. In the year since I’ve joined the team at Index, I’ve used this blog to highlight issues as diverse as journalists being assassinated in Afghanistan to the threats of new British legislation on online harms.
One of recurring themes of my blogs has been the way in which authoritarian regimes and groups use every tool at their disposal to repress their populations. From Belarus to Myanmar, from Modi to Trump, we’ve seen global leaders act against their own populations to hold onto power and stop dissent.
For an organisation such as Index it would be easy to think that our job was solely to highlight the worst excesses of these despots, to shine a spotlight on their actions and to celebrate the work and activities of those inspirational people who stand up against this tyranny. And of course, that’s exactly what we were founded to do. But as the world moves on and technology and finance facilitate new ways of communicating to the world, Index also has a responsibility to investigate, analyse and expose the impact of some countries beyond their borders.
Over the course of the last year, Index’s attention has been drawn to the fact that there have been multiple high-profile examples of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) using its influence beyond its border in order to manipulate the world’s view of China and what it means to be Chinese:
Since the implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong in June 2020, universities in the UK and in the US have reportedly had to change the way they teach certain courses – grading papers by number not name, asking students to present anonymised work of others so nothing can be attributed to an individual student and limited debate in lectures. All in order to make sure that the students are protected, and their families aren’t targeted at home in China.
In September 2020 Disney released a new film – Mulan. This film not only represents Mulan as Han Chinese rather than Mongolian as she likely was in the legend, but it was also filmed, in part, in Xinjiang province, home of the persecuted Uighur community. Seemingly an effort to change the narrative on the ongoing Uighur genocide happening in Xinjiang.
In October 2020, a scheduled exhibition on Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire in Nantes, France was postponed – not because of Covid19 but because the CCP reportedly attempted to change the narrative of the exhibition, attempting to rewrite history.
It is clear that the CCP is using soft (sharp) power in a concerted effort to censor dissent and to create a narrative that is in keeping with Xi Jinping’s vision in an effort to secure international support for the CCP, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary. We have no idea how strategic or vast this level of censorship is. What we do know is that it is happening across Europe and beyond.
It is in this vein that I’m delighted to be able to tell you about a new workstream for Index:
#BannedbyBeijing will seek to analyse and expose the extent to which China is trying to manipulate the conversation abroad.
Next week I’m delighted that we have an amazing panel to get the ball rolling and to establish how big an issue this is.
So join Mareike Ohlberg, Tom Tugendhat MP, Edward Lucas and our Chair Trevor Phillips, on Wednesday as they start this vital conversation. You can sign up here >> https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/banned-by-beijing-is-china-censoring-europe-tickets-162403107065[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
25 Jun 2021 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116995″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]It’s a year since I joined the Index family.
I think for all of us the last 12 months have been an emotional rollercoaster. The impact of Covid-19 has been a cloud over our lives; we’ve lost people close to us, we’ve all feared the effect of a virus no one had heard of 18 months ago, we’ve missed our loved ones and we’ve looked on in horror at events both at home and abroad as political leaders have both failed to manage the pandemic and undermined basic human rights under the guise of public health protections.
Repressive leaders have moved against their citizens, we’ve witnessed coups, heard testimony from detention camps and totalitarian regimes have restricted freedoms to an even greater extent throughout the world. And we’ve seen some of the most important vehicles of media freedom undermined – from Rappler to the Apple Daily.
It’s been difficult not to feel impotent. We haven’t been able to travel to stand with those being oppressed. Democratic countries have understandably focused their efforts on their domestic challenges and the institutions we depend on to enforce our shared norms as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been distracted by the global public health emergency. In other words, it has felt that totalitarian leaders have had a free pass to enforce even harsher restrictions on their peoples.
At Index, even despite the pandemic, we’ve strived to shine a spotlight on some of the most egregious attacks on free expression around the globe. In the last 12 months, we’ve supported journalists, writers, artists and academics in over two dozen countries. We’ve published reports on the impact of Covid-19, the current use of SLAPPs to undermine journalists and on online harms. Index has held events exploring the impact of 100 years of CCP rule in China, as well as on the untold stories hidden by Covid-19 and the impact of AI on social media content. And nearly three quarters of a million people have engaged with our work.
We’ve rebranded, redesigned the magazine and have completely changed our annual Freedom of Expression awards and we’ve started the celebrations to mark our 50th birthday. All of this and our team have only met in person three times, as we continue to do our work from home.
I’m so proud of the Index family, they have adapted and continue to push the envelope, making sure that no dictator can think that the world isn’t watching and that activists around the world know that we have their back. There is so much work to do in the months and years ahead in the ongoing battle for free speech, but after working with the team for a year I don’t doubt that we are making a positive difference, highlighting the bravest campaigners in the world and with your help – providing a voice for the persecuted.
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30 Apr 2021 | Football, News, United Kingdom
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The Premier League and a coalition of football governing bodies from across the United Kingdom are set to commence a social media blackout from 30 April to 3 May to raise awareness of online racist abuse, but the initiative has raised questions over its end goal.
Clubs, players and governing bodies have called for implementation of the contentious Online Harms Bill (also known as the Online Safety Bill), which will impose regulation on social media companies in order to ensure they remove hateful speech online. They hope the blackout will draw awareness and support of the issue.
The legislation has been criticised as the bill will introduce several key points that a number of free expression groups, including Index, believe to be regressive and will impact on people’s free speech online.
This includes the definition of terms such as “legal but harmful”, which will classify some speech as legal offline but illegal online, meaning there would be inconsistency within the UK system of law.
The Professional Footballers Association (PFA), however, are in strong support of the bill. In a statement they said they hoped social media companies would be held “more accountable”.
“While football takes a stand, we urge the UK Government to ensure its Online Safety Bill will bring in strong legislation to make social media companies more accountable for what happens on their platforms, as discussed at the DCMS Online Abuse roundtable earlier this week,” they said. “We will not stop talking about this issue and will continue to work with the government in ensuring that the Online Safety Bill gives sufficient regulatory and supervisory powers to Ofcom. Social media companies need to be held accountable if they continue to fall short of their moral and social responsibilities to address this endemic problem.”
Index’s CEO Ruth Smeeth has questioned using the bill as a solution to targeting racism, as well as the use of a blackout.
“No one who has spent any time on social media could deny the fact that there is a real problem, with abuse, racism and misogyny,” she said. “The nature of social media platforms seems to bring out the worst in too many people and empower hate from every corner. The question is, though, how to fix it.”
“This is more than about what platforms allow on their sites, it’s about the culture that has been allowed to thrive online. We are all responsible for it, so we all need to work together to fix it as we can’t legislate for cultural change. I understand why the PFA wants to boycott social media platforms – but we saw only last year when others did the same because of antisemitism, boycotts deliver only temporary respite, the haters are still hating. We all deserve better.”
The blackout will see a period of silence on social media to symbolise clubs and governing bodies coming together against the serious issue of racism in football, though some believe the action to be counter-productive and may discourage those affected from speaking out, or removing a place for discourse where people can debate such issues.
Editor of football website These Football Times, Omar Saleem, released a statement explaining why they won’t be joining the blackout over the weekend saying clubs need to take “genuine action”, “not the weekend off”, but also called for social media companies to be held accountable.
“Silence is not the answer. I truly believe that. As a minority in football, that’s my opinion,” he said. “Racism cannot be fought by white-led social media teams suggesting we go silent for the weekend during some of the quietest times on those platforms.”
“Instead of silence, we need action. We need voices to speak louder than ever, programmes that educate and organise. We needed that societally post-George Floyd and we need it in football, too. We need clubs to take genuine action – not the weekend off.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also like to read” category_id=”581″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
