00:00And as I say to people, behind my smile is a thousand years.
00:05Australian Mia Bannister is still grieving the loss of her teenage son, Ollie.
00:10After enduring months of online bullying and suffering from anorexia, he took his own life.
00:16She's chosen to commemorate him with tattoos.
00:19I'm living my life for him. That reminds me why I'm here.
00:25Bannister blames Ollie's death squarely on social media.
00:28She's one of many in Australia voicing support for an upcoming ban on platforms like Facebook and TikTok for users younger than 16, the first in the world.
00:39She says if the government can't hold platforms accountable for failing to stop the spread of harmful content, it should at least keep children from using them.
00:47I can't bear seeing another suicide and child death due to online harms.
00:54And I'm sick of the social media giants shirking responsibility because it is their platforms and the unfiltered, unchecked, I guess, content that is absolutely fueling it.
01:07But not all parents in Australia agree on banning social media outright for young teens.
01:12Zoe Jones, whose 12-year-old Ava is an online influencer, says the government should not decide how people parent their own kids.
01:20I would say that, yeah, they are protecting as best that they can.
01:27I mean, they're a platform. I'm her parent.
01:29So I guess it's my responsibility to protect her the best that I can in a manner that she's on social media.
01:36And she's not the only one who thinks the ban is a brute approach to online safety.
01:41One expert warns parents might start letting their guard down about what their kids are engaging with online and that teens will find work around.
01:48It's that young people will then go to other online spaces to connect and that those spaces aren't regulated and there may not be transparency around them.
02:00So potentially creating more risk for young people.
02:05Some young people are already looking at ways to stay on the apps or finding other ones not affected by the ban.
02:11And others, like 15-year-old Noah Jones, are taking action.
02:16He and a fellow student are suing Australia's communication authorities over the ban, calling it unconstitutional.
02:23Jones says some of his peers worry that once the rule is in place, kids will be too afraid to seek help if they find themselves in trouble online.
02:32When kids do things in secret, that's when things can be really harmful.
02:37Say they get, they experience online bullying or they experience predators, how are they going to report that to police or parents?
02:46Because they weren't supposed to be on the social media platforms in the first place.
02:51Jones says that ultimately it's the social media company's responsibility to filter out harmful content,
02:58rather than deactivate teens' accounts or block them from joining.
03:01But tech giants that run the platforms have continually struggled to monitor content safely for all users around the world.
03:09As a result, governments are left with two options.
03:13Stop platforms from collecting children's data or keep kids off them altogether.
03:18Now with just a little over a week until Australia's ban takes effect,
03:22other countries are watching to see whether it works.
03:25But for parents like Mia Bannister, who've seen the toll social media can take on kids,
03:30the ban can't come fast enough.
03:33Howard Zhang and Irene Lin for Taiwan Plus.
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