Australia's social media ban for under-16s starts today, and unlike many in the tech industry I'm in favour of it.

Not because it's a good law. The law has a lot of problems: rushed, inconsistent, unproven, it risks privacy and isolates kids and pushes them to less safe platforms. The law may be harmful, yet I'm still in favour of it.

Not because the reasons this law exists are honourable. Of course the parents who lost kids to suicide have honourable intentions, but I'm not so sure about News Corp Australia and Nova Entertainment who campaigned heavily for this ban. News Corp has long been losing advertising revenue to social media, and their campaign coincided with Meta announcing it would no longer pay News Corp (and others) for news. Did they campaign because it is a good cause, or because of the financial interest they have in turning people off social media? I don't know, and yet I'm still in favour of the law.

No, the reason I favour this bad law of questionable provenance is because social media platforms have failed their basic responsibilities. Social media platforms have prioritised maximising engagement over everything else, promoting division, spreading lies, damaging our social fabric, undermining democracy, damaging mental health, and ignoring crimes spreading virally on their platforms. I have reported to Meta dozens of scams and breaches of rules that I've seen on Facebook and Instagram, and almost all of my reports were closed with no action taken. Whether or not their indifference is legal I consider it to be a failure of their basic responsibility to society. When companies fail us so profoundly then government has to step in.

We have to halt this growing hubris from careless people at social media platforms. Several platforms act like they can do anything they want; we need to shock them into a realisation that they have gone too far. A ban on children probably isn't enough to truly scare recalcitrant platforms, but it is a watershed moment where they have lost their invulnerability and the momentum is against them.

My hope is that some social media platforms will recognise the significance of this shift and learn to be responsible citizens. That's because I reckon the tech industry is much more capable of fixing these problems than government is. Social media platforms have plenty of money, lots of staff, better technical knowledge, the ability to move faster than government, and of course access to the code and algorithms that make social media work. Governments are constrained in their attention and budgets, and have a reputation for not regulating technology well.

The answer is not to mope about how the government never gets this stuff right. The answer is that the industry itself has to get its shit together and do things properly, responsibly, and ethically. The industry has to be so good that government doesn't need to step in again. Bad laws are the fault of bad companies that fail to do things right.

Some platforms will not learn. We should shut down the ones that don't. Sure it would cause an uproar if, say, Facebook and Instagram went away. But just like Aussie kids are already finding new places to hang out online, we adults would find alternatives too (those alternatives already exist but you haven't looked for them). And though Australia couldn't force the USA or China to shut down a social media platform, banning Australian businesses from using or advertising on a platform could be quite effective. Why couldn't we sanction a misbehaving social media platform just like we sanction thousands of entities that threaten Australia?

So ultimately I support this flawed law because it's a step in the right direction. It might push some platforms into more responsible behaviour. It will make it more politically palatable to completely ban irresponsible platforms one day. Social media isn't yet fixed, but the platforms are finally on notice.