Indeed, this will be an interesting one to watch!

It would be such a disruption if it actually got paused, postponed or cancelled now with the entire Labor govt's reputation hanging on the ban working!

I haven't (but to be fair, I haven't looked for them, they might exist)

For parents, carers and trusted adults: take the feelings, concerns and quite possible trauma teens are feeling seriously. Be there to talk, be there to offer support, take these feelings seriously. If needs be, there's help out there, too, from Headspace, Kids Helpline (1800 55 1800) and others.

For teens: don't panic, you'll be able to find your feet, your people, your space another way if you need to. But do take some steps to prepare, including downloading the content you care about, and thinking about how you'll (re)connect with friends a different way.

We know the #SocialMediaBan for under16s in Aust kicks in on Dec 10th, but for a lot of teens it only felt real a day or 2 ago when they started getting notifications that their Meta accounts were flagged for deactivation.

For teens & for parents, we hope there's some useful advice in this piece.

All good points, and all quite hard to convey during the soundbite political messaging surrounding the ban!

It was odd the Kick (basically a Twitch clone) was included & Twitch wasn't, but adding platforms so late makes talking about this ban even more complicated/confusing.

And to be fair to the platform, 2 weeks isn't a huge amount of time for Twitch to get age gating in place for the under16s, either.

For parents/carers/schools/support orgs: the reality of the ban is only sinking in today for a large number of teens. It's our job to take their concerns, their feelings & their potential trauma seriously & help them through it as best we can.

medium.com/@MetaANZ/rem...

There is an appeals process, which involves a 'video selfie' or, failing that, uploading government-issued ID.

While I don't know how it would be possible to comply with the legislation in a more effective way, it's still a pretty clunky process.

It's a relief to see Meta warning teens and encouraging them to consider downloading the content they'll lost access to. Meta is already flagging there will likely be a meaningful number of false positives, that is people who are 16 or over who are flagged as being under 16 for a range of reasons.