This week, YouTube officially joined the list of platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, where under-16s will be banned from creating accounts, posting, commenting or being targeted once Australia’s world-first social media legislation comes into place from December 11. It’s a huge moment for Australia and a deeply personal victory for the grassroots movement behind it: 36 Months.
Chatting with B&T after the announcement, 36 Months director Greg Attwells said that the campaign was never about politics. “It’s about giving kids three more years to get to know themselves before the world does,” he explained.
Attwells stood alongside Communications Minister Anika Wells and bereaved parents in Canberra this week as the final scope of the social media law was confirmed. With the inclusion of YouTube, despite Google’s legal threats, Australia is now forging a new frontier in tech regulation and adolescent safety.
It’s a long way from the 147,000-strong petition 36 Months delivered to Parliament last year, calling for the age of social media “citizenship” to be raised from 13 to 16. That call, made alongside grieving families who had lost children to suicide linked to online harm, became a catalyst for national change.
“The stories keep the main thing the main thing,” Attwells said. “Big Tech wants to shift the arena to anything technical, privacy, age verification, and enforcement. But this isn’t a communications debate. This is a public health crisis.”
Research proves this point with clear links drawn between the rise of social media and increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders and suicide among young people. For Attwells and his co-founders, Nova’s Michael “Wippa” Wipfli and FINCH CEO Rob Galluzzo, those numbers represent lives lost, families shattered and systems that failed.
He confessed that the new system isn’t perfect, but not trying would be even worse. “We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” he said.
“To not do something while we try and work on more nuanced remedies is just negligent,” Attwells says. “This needed policy change as well as behaviour change. And I’m actually really proud of our government, because this is world-first legislation. No one else in the world is doing this.”
Critics argue that enforcement will be inconsistent, and some teens will still slip through the cracks. But according to Attwells, there is simply no excuse for inaction.
“Even if 60% of the kids are now no longer on these platforms, but 40% still find a way around it… It’s still better than what we’ve got currently,” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re just taking meaningful and important steps forward and being deliberate”.
That deliberate step, he says, gives parents something powerful: backup.
“Before, when my daughter asked for Snapchat, I didn’t want to give it to her, but I also didn’t want her to be socially isolated. Now I can just say, ‘Sorry mate, not yet.’ And more importantly, her friends aren’t on it either. That is really helpful as a parent.”
YouTube remains firm in its defence of the platform. “We share the Government’s goal of addressing and reducing online harms. Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It’s not social media,” a spokesperson for the platform said.
“The Government’s announcement today reverses a clear, public commitment to exclude YouTube from this ban. We will consider next steps and will continue to engage with the Government.”
Despite Google’s insistence and a former admission that YouTube is in a “different category”, Attwells believes the government got the balance right with this legislation.
“No one’s saying that you can’t watch your YouTube videos. People are still going to be able to go on YouTube, search up content, and watch it in a logged-out state. YouTube Kids won’t be touched. The restrictions are specific to account creation.”
That distinction matters. It preserves access to educational and entertainment content, but delays social participation, the ability to be targeted or manipulated online, and crucially, it keeps kids away from adult-only age-restricted content.
With the legislation only a few months away, Attwells assured B&T that 36 Months’ journey is far from over. “Our mission is to rebuild the ecosystem around adolescence”.
“We will continue to support grassroots movements campaigning for similar policy change in other countries, but we’re also addressing other points of failure… Healthy teens don’t raise themselves. They’re raised by adults brave enough to build better systems.”
“We will continue to support grassroots movements campaigning for similar policy change in other countries, like the UK, New Zealand, Japan and the EU, but we’re also addressing other points of failure in this system around teenagers, and building innovative solutions to strengthen these, like in schools, homes and workplaces,” he explained.
“We have this belief that healthy teens don’t raise themselves. They’re raised by adults brave enough to build better systems”.
And to the tech giants’ claiming they can’t do it? Attwells isn’t buying it.
“I really love this quote by Professor Scott Galloway… ‘The social media giants know where you are, what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, if you’re experiencing suicidal ideation… but they can’t figure out your age? You can’t make this shit up’”.
“They know how to do this,” he said firmly. “No one has made them do this until now.”
Australia is now doing just that, and Attwells hopes it’s only the beginning.
“Who decided that 13 was old enough?” he asked. “That was set by tech companies a long time ago. A sovereign state has now said, ‘We’ll decide for ourselves.’ And that is a powerful precedent.”
