I put in a submission to the committee for this issue[1]. The big issues from my point of view are widespread ID validation and the security and privacy consequences of that, definition of social media, lack of controls provided by social media websites, and further risks to centralisation (like ID providers requiring an app that can only run on an iOS or Google Play device). Many of the ID verification services that have spun up over recent years like AU10TIX are private companies that don't have their users' interests at heart. It wouldn't surprise me if they become more involved with the so-called data economy (data broker ecosystem)—if they aren't already.
Meta itself causes harm to users of all ages with their algorithms (like suggested content on the feed) which can't really be turned off, and fueled the misinformation crisis which really took off a few years ago. The social media companies have done a good job of convincing the Australian government to overlook these harms.
Last I checked if you're over 60 then you're an Adult and can do adult things. You have long since stopped growing into your body by then. Children are not finished yet, and continue to have their brains mature and grow into the early 20s
If at “over 60 you can do adult things”, why do we take their drivers licenses away from and make them sit a drivers test every year unlike adults under 60?
Voting rights should be proportional to remaining quality-adjusted life years remaining based on life expectancy.
I am joking of course, but there is something to ponder about the growing number of childless people over 40 voting with little concern for the long term.
As a childless person over 40, wtf are you talking about?
People don't all vote purely on self-interest, some of us vote on how we think human society should be run, and what we think is genuinely best for everyone. Not just for our own immediate bottom line.
This whole ageist line of reasoning is pretty offensive.
Militarism and ‘strong regimentation of society’ are two that very obviously don’t apply to Trumpian politics. Trump was an isolationist militarily in his first term - an expansionist nationalist military is a sine qua non of fascism.
And Trump’s fetish for deregulation works against the second one.
Then why do the people he hand-picked say it is? Should I ignore the words coming out of their mouths and pens? Should I ignore the words coming out of Trump's own mouth? Then what should I use to determine whether it's fascism or not?
That is actually a pretty interesting question, fascism doesn't seem to have any actual meaning. It is very hard to outline what a "fascist" is unless they self-identify. I thought briefly in writing this comment and I can't actually rule out Trump being a fascist, based on the fact that any policy that isn't explicitly in the liberal or communist traditions may technically be fascist.
Anyway; it has reached the point where I no longer believe people who claim Trump said something negative. Back in the 2010s I spent enough time reading up primary sources to reveal it was a misquote. Possibly a malicious misinterpretation, possibly the man just makes people so emotional that they can't listen to him for a full minute and try to interpret with a neutral lens.
He appears to be close to a saint given how much time his opponents have to spend making up stuff about him to dislike. Realistically there are a lot of real problems that people should focus on; like bad policies.
Within the past 24 hours, you said that "poisoning the blood of this country" is "Nazi rhetoric." Can you explain how both of Trump's recent usages of that "Nazi rhetoric" were misquoted?
I've always been a supporter of those, my view on democracy is not to be mature enough, but to be a part of society with needs and ideas, school students neee to be represented because they're part of a society
I wonder how can you implement such a law without forcing people to identify online ? Will they enforce a digital ID that you need to use to access the web or social media ?
No comment on the implementation, but I wonder if there's some value in just allowing parents to be able to point to this and say "No, little Fred, you're not allowed to have an Instagram account until you're 16. It's the actual rule."
Yep, the "everyone else has BLAH" argument is a strong one. If we collectively take action through government to set a standard it is MUCH easier to shut down those self-fulfilling claims.
I have three kids. They have access to devices they use primarily for reading and language/music lessons. They don't use social media and would likely pay a decent level of attention if (in addition to us having explained concerns about social media for children) we indicated that there was government advice/ruling around this.
A drop down list of birth dates/years "works" for most age restricted sites - I guess the logic is that if a user is lying about their age, it's not the sites problem.
Article states that sites must demonstrate they are taking reasonable measures to enforce this though - a lot will come down as to how courts interpret that. If they go to the extremes of the KYC laws in australia I imagine a significant fraction of adults will not want to verify their age.
The government currently tendering for providers of different systems. See here [1] and here [2]:
Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.
Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).
In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.
They note that existing age verification setups largely either rely on providing ID, or on a combination of manual and automated behavior profiling (face recognition, text classification, reports from other users), both of which have obvious privacy and/or accuracy issues. The "double-blind tokens" point to a summary by LINC explaining how they _could_ be implemented with zero-knowledge proofs, but I could not find an article or a practical implementation (could just be a mistake on my part, admittedly)
At _best_ you end up with a solution in the vein of Privacy Pass - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.pdf - but that requires a browser extension, a functioning digital ID solution you can build on top of, and buy-in from the websites. Personally, I also suspect the strongest sign a company is going to screw up the cryptographic side of it is if they agree to implement it...
It's a bit wild that instead of parents just being responsible and teaching their children properly, we'll resort to neutering privacy and freedom on the Internet.
That's exactly what they're aspiring to here, following on from a well-established pedigree of Australian lawmakers and their dysfunctional relationship with the Internet.
You don't necessarily need to actually attempt to globally enforce it. It's like speeding, right? Everybody knows the law, and a lot of people choose to break it. We can't check everybody's speed all the time, so instead we selectively enforce.
The real change though comes from parent's perceptions. Right now there's age limits of 14-years-old on most social media platforms, however most parents just see this as a ToS thing, and nobody cares about actually violating it. Once it becomes law, the parents are suddenly responsible (and liable) for ensuring their children are not breaking the law by accessing social media. It's not going to stop everybody, but it'll certainly move the needle on a lot of people who are currently apathetic to the ToS of social media platforms.
The government is being deliberately non-prescriptive about that, as they are about what qualifies as 'social media' (statement of fact - no comment on the approach itself). Ideally the legislation is accompanied by a government digital service that allows 3rd parties to verify age _without_ divulging full identity, but I don't see that side of things being discussed anywhere down here :(
Hell of a time to run a VPN or a blackmail service... Porn site profiles with activity history + real traceable identities will make the Ashley Madison leak look quaint.
They're probably referring to the scope. Very few people were directly impacted by Ashley Madison (though there was at least one reported suicide due to the leaks), but lots of people watch porn and most of those people would not be too keen on their browsing history being leaked even if it's relatively tame, and especially if it's not.
The funny thing these days is that all porn is tailored to appear as far from "tame" as imaginable.
The average PornHub user's history will be full of weird incest shit at the very least, not because of any specific interest in the genre but because so much generic heterosexual porn is labeled as such. Looks really bad for you if it makes the newspaper.
So even "tame" leakage is 100x more embarrassing than it ought to be, and thus snooping on bf/husband's devices to humiliate them over their porn usage is normalized on relationship subreddits. Same goes for them plugging your email address into the password reset form to try to verify whether you have an account on any given site.
How long are VPN services for consumers like that going to be viable? All the 5 eyes countries are trending in the same direction and they US isn't shy to press other countries to follow their regulations with the threat of being sanctioned.
What even counts as social media? Is Hackernews social media? Is my future platform where people can talk to each other social media?
It's all pure desperation, they could instead force social media companies to only promote useful educational, pro-science, pro-fitness, documentaries, family style content and then social media would be helpful. Forming communities around learning, robotics, science? What could possibly be better for children who look for purpose in life? It would be fantastic. But of course half the grifters on social media are also already hiding in those tags and serving the most shallow, useless, fake content about e.g ancient pyramid aliens or discussions about how veganism will help your body. As you can tell by my last little insertion here, half the problem is that even all the adults can't come to a shared understanding of what is "good" or true.
I think the way the EU approached this with their "digital gatekeepers" is smart. Recognize that policing the entire internet isn't possible or even desirable. Focus on those few companies with the largest capacity for harm. Different criteria might be appropriate when focusing on potential harm for children (e.g. Roblox rather than Twitter) but besides a few changes you'll probably end up with roughly the same list.
I'm not sure I'd support an outright ban, but rather very strict monitoring and requirements around moderation, in app purchasing, gambling mechanics, and so on.
In a way it shouldn't be tied to size either, it should be tied to results. If a social company is clearly only interested in profit to the exclusion of societal benefits then they deserve to be regulated.
Australia takes a different approach and says (in their Basic Online Safety Expectations 2024) that every online account must be linked to a phone number.
This is the same country that brought you "the laws of mathematics are very commendable but they don't apply in Australia".
I foresee a two- or three-tier Internet in the future, and Australia will probably be the first "western" country to block Tor.
> Australia will probably be the first "western" country to block Tor.
The Australian way would be to "ban" tor without any particular concern for enforceability or technical feasibility. Any actual blocking would be pushed onto industry somehow, which would then proceed to half-ass it, doing the absolute minimum possible to demonstrate they are complying with regulation.
I like Australia a lot, but a lot of the time it feels like political priority is to "make it look like something is being done". No one would actually care if the blocking worked or not unless the media made a big song and dance about it.
I also wonder how much of this ban is about "punishing" X and Meta in particular - Meta for it's refusal to pay for news and X because they didn't jump to immediately remove stuff the government wanted taken down.
> What even counts as social media?
Anything the government needs more leverage over or wants to shake down for money.
I would say anything with algorithmic personalized feed is a social media, and that's I would stop kids having access to.
I think the main danger is in the engagement maximisation done through these algorithmic feeds.
Mandate that the home/landing page of social media sites is a chronological display of people/artists/whatevers you've legitimately chosen to follow rather than maximization algorithm force feeding. For all users. The have to click to get to the algorithm zone. Problem solved.
I don't think that's really solved. Facebook had lots of engagement pre-feed. Reddit has lots of engagement even without personalisation. It's still going to be problematic for lots of people.
> What could possibly be better for children who look for purpose in life?
They sort of naturally do that if you have the appropriate challenges and opportunities around them.
> ancient pyramid aliens or discussions about how veganism will help your body.
There used to be a tabloid called "News of the Weird." This stuff just exists. You'll find it anywhere people gather. We're story tellers. When we don't have a compelling story we just make stuff up. It's identical to the point above.
> even all the adults can't come to a shared understanding of what is "good" or true.
It's not possible. If the children are intended to inherit the future then this is a flawed and reductive strategy. You will not achieve what you seek through parochial means.
Really.. I think your biggest problem should be advertising. It should be nowhere near children. Ban _that_ but keep the social media.
I think the proposal is fundamentally flawed because of this reason.
Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter are probably what's intended here, but what about Tumblr, DeviantArt or Discord? What about Reddit or a generic forum? What about VRChat or Webfishing?
If this is about protecting children from harmful depictions of body image or misogynistic content, then why not instead propose a law that states online services that allow children to join need to appropriately moderate the content that is shown to children or could face massive fines. I don't necessarily agree with that approach, but at least it would make sense with what their stated objectives are.
Also note that the government is attacking social media on a second front.
Last night they took advantage of the population being distracted by the US election by having an extended parliamentary session to push forward with a second reading of the controversial misinformation bill.
The government and state media apparatus are of course both immune from any penalty under the bill.
Part of the concerted effort against social media is the (sudden?) loss of ability to control the narrative by the established power base. Politics and Print / Television Media used to have the last word on "facts", but now every man and his dog can create their own narrative.
Methinks they're, again, using "think of the children" as a bulwark against the inevitability of their own waning power. The more things change...
Can we also prevent under 16s from being exposed to religious teachings?
All of these <16s will be voting in a few years, and Australia has compulsory voting. I hope they remember this on their first visit to the ballot box.
Kids in schools which forbid phone use for everyone are often happy with the result. Banning social networks for everyone may be popular with them by the time they vote.
This will be wholly supported by both parties of our primarily two-party system. There's no alternative but a protest vote to one of those fringe parties that will never get any real power anyway.
A protest vote is still free in Australia due to a reasonable voting system. And quite a few independents still get in. Is not terrible and actually can make a difference.
Meta itself causes harm to users of all ages with their algorithms (like suggested content on the feed) which can't really be turned off, and fueled the misinformation crisis which really took off a few years ago. The social media companies have done a good job of convincing the Australian government to overlook these harms.
1: https://roffey.au/static/submission-social-media-2024.pdf
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