Sabra Lane: Australian teenagers are waking up to a warning from tech giant Meta that their social media accounts will be deleted in two weeks and they've got a fortnight to download or delete their data on Instagram, Facebook and threads. A world first social media ban stopping under 16 year olds from having accounts kicks in from December the 10th but the company will start purging accounts from December the 4th as it races to remove more than half a million users by the deadline. The ABC's national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre joined me earlier. And are Australian teenagers ready for this? Would today's warning be a shock?
Ange Lavoipierre: I think it might be a bit of a shock to some of them. It's happening about a week earlier than they might have expected. So Meta has started sending out these two week warnings on email, SMS within its apps. The message is pretty blunt. It's that there are new laws in Australia which mean that in two weeks you will not have access to this account. There are also instructions there for those young people. Really download and save your posts and messages is the message there or delete your account. There's also a nudge to provide contact details so that your account can be reactivated once you've turned 16 so Meta can contact you. So Meta taking this moment to try to make sure those users do bounce back eventually. But yes, it is about a week earlier than we possibly expected. The first of these accounts receiving notices today will lose access on December 4, which is a week before the law kicks in. And that's really because of the size of the task. Meta is aiming to remove at least half a million accounts across Facebook and Instagram. And it is expecting to contact all those users over the course of the coming week.
Sabra Lane: Who are getting these warnings and are there people who should be and aren't?
Ange Lavoipierre: Yes, so these users who are getting the warning today and over the coming days, these are the users that Meta is the most confident that they're under 16, but there will be stragglers. So in many cases, the people hearing from Meta this week, they're the ones who've been up front about their age. They've told Meta their actual age. In other cases, though, it might be because the companies managed to work out they're probably younger than they said they were based on their online activity. Now, my question to a Meta spokesperson was, if you don't get a message this week from Meta, does that mean you're in the clear? And the answer basically is no, you're not out of the woods. The company says it's going to keep improving, reviewing its systems for proactively detecting under 16s. So this is just the first wave. That said, many Australian users, older people might never hear from them.
Sabra Lane: Now we know none of this has failed safe. What happens to the Meta users who receive a message like this and they're over 16 years old?
Ange Lavoipierre: Yeah, we've heard some of the detail today about how the appeals process will work for Meta. So if a user has got a message like this, a warning message, they can challenge their removal if they say, well, no, I'm actually over 16 by undergoing facial age scans with a video selfie, that kind of thing, or providing a government issued ID such as a driver's license. Now, Meta's working with a third party company called Yoti, which is one of the market leaders. It's got one of the most accurate tools out there according to independent testing. But the issue with facial age checks is that they do get less accurate at that crucial 16 year threshold and they can often return false positives, false negatives to the people nearest to the cut-off range. Speaking to Meta yesterday, it is still not clear what recourse will be available to Meta users who are wrongly flagged as under 16 in the first place. So get a warning like this. They're then wrongly blocked by facial age checks. And if they're then unable to provide government ID, it's not clear what the next step for that person would be.
Sabra Lane: Ange Lavoipierre there.