More than 5 million Australian children will have to learn to communicate verbally with parents, siblings, and peers as the government’s measures to restrict social media access to those aged 16 and over seems all but guaranteed to become law.

After a runup that included a one-day consultation period and a highly divided debate as to whether age limits were an appropriate way to address children’s exposure to “toxic” social media content, the bill passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday with a vote of 102 to 13.

The Senate immediately began debating the measure, which amidst broad bipartisan support was expected to be passed late Thursday, parliament’s final sitting day for the year.

The law is expected to come into effect 12 months after its passage.

Explanatory notes to the new legislation called it “a major step towards shifting the paradigm” in which Big Tech firms “optimise user engagement and time spent on platforms”.

“Young people’s use of social media is a complex issue and there is currently no clear and agreed age at which children can safely use social media,” they added, with some existing 13-year limits based on the 1998 US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

That will change under the new legislation, under which social media giants — including the likes of Reddit, Snapchat, X, TikTok, and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram — face fines of up to $50 million for failing to take “reasonable steps” to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts.

Just what steps this entails is up for debate, with individual platforms expected to “introduce systems and processes that can be demonstrated to ensure that people under the minimum age cannot create and hold a social media account”.

Australia has 3.127 million children aged 0 to 9 and 3.265 million aged 10 to 19, according to government figures, suggesting the new law would in total block nearly 5.1 million children from accessing social media platforms.

There will be no penalties for under-16s who manage to access an age-restricted social media account, but social media firms have begged the government to delay action until, as Meta put it, the “nature or scale of age assurance required by the bill” was clearer.

That includes waiting until the conclusion of the government’s on-again, off-again online age verification pilot, which was revived in May amidst a raft of technology policy reforms coinciding with a global push to reduce social media’s damage to kids.

That included, for example, New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, which prevents social media firms from presenting algorithmically generated content to users under the age of 18.

But not everyone is on board

The government has claimed it is just looking out for the wellbeing of children who have been systematically targeted by social media and profiled by apps and AI platforms, but the legislation’s complexities, passage, and implications have stoked controversy.

Many bristled at recent revelations that the ban would require all social media users to verify their age, with James Chisholm from the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts telling a senate committee hearing “that’s how it has to work”.

The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), for its part, has previously expressed “serious reservations” about the ban, citing “the potential for these laws to significantly interfere with the rights of children and young people”.

Although United Nations human rights provisions demand “appropriate guidelines for the protection of the child from information and material injurious to his or her wellbeing”, the AHRC warned “limitations must be lawful, necessary, and proportionate”.

Noting the government’s efforts to ramrod the legislation through before parliament rises, AHRC commissioner Lorraine Finlay recently complained that just 107 of the more than 15,000 public submissions received had been published at the time of writing.

“Why are over 99 per cent of submissions being ignored in the rush to pass the ban?” she asked.

“This is not the way to introduce a ‘world leading’ reform.”

Even the government’s joint select committee on social media and Australian society initially declined to support the age limit, noting that social media could both damage some users’ wellbeing while helping others find a sense of connection and purpose.

“Balancing these conflicting realities is a wicked problem,” committee chair Sharon Claydon wrote in the final committee report, noting that young people “want to be active participants in co-designing policy, and they want greater user control over the content they see”.

The report summarised 23 recommendations that Claydon said “address the complexity of the problem”.

Big Tech had been put “on notice”, she said, that “social media companies are not immune from the need to have a social license to operate”.