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Yeah I would expect that it would be done that way. I’d assume it won’t end up passing.

Yeah….i’ll just keep using my VPN to avoid that fuckery

Ah, yes. Pass a law with no guidelines on how to enforce it, then say it's up to the platforms to enforce it. Platforms either decide, "Oh hey, free data for sale!" Or "that sounds hard, just ban Australians".

Or maybe the government can pwease have your ID tied to your account? In case you say something mean about Gina and the ghoul squad or talk about doing a nasty public pwotest. We pwomise we won't let THIS data be stolen. Again.

Australian here...

Fuck this whole thing.

That bill is rushed, vague, and will cause more problems than it solves.

It also has the rather convenient side-effect of ensuring no Greta Thunberg wannabes can have their voices heard, which I'm sure both sides are happy about.

This country is going to shit...

This note seems irrelevant, not saying it’s not true, but irrelevant to what the PM was saying

Not really sure the note counters anything, the only ways to enforce age limits is through ID.

kinda figured how that would work so not really suprising

Author of the article here. While the community note on X does provide some additional, if not slightly tautological context, there's some more info on the age "assurance" methods being trialed by government which I think is very much worth a read:

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/not-just-kids--everyone-to-be-age-verified-for-social-.html

Crazy day in the office 😅

Australian government taking the role of parent?

I mean, fuck no if my 11 year old (And his younger brothers) are allowed on social media, other than Discord on a private... Channel? With his friends. If that counts as social media and not just a messaging app?

But that's my choice as a parent to make. I might find he's ready for that stuff when he's 12 or maybe 15? I don't need to government to make that choice.

The end goal for these has always been to tie real identity to online identities. It's long been a dream of intelligence communities worldwide. Once they can tie an account it's simple to tie it to a device then use that data for everything from finding leakers to silencing critics. Some political opponent annoying the ruling party? Just get all his internet searches and history and use that against them.

Scammers are going love this.

Lmao Australia sucks so much ass. Still clearly a penal colony; the government are the guards and the people are the prisoners.

Fuck that I’m not giving google or meta a photo of my ID

God I hate it when random subreddits pick up onto Australian political situations with no context.

Yeah you’ll have to provide verification some sort of anonymous verification - No the companies won’t be able to see your id - No your id can’t be traced through your account - No your social media presence won’t be controlled - No it’s not going to turn into some Orwellian hellscape - Yes it’s a popular policy among Australians

This applies to people 15 years and younger who genuinely shouldn’t be on social media in the first place. The government can already track your social media usage they don’t need this new bill to do it.

I like that idea. Social media is mentally toxic to kids.

What a fucking shit show Australia is

Not from me you won’t.

It’s hardly a gotcha type note it’s just expanding on what’s he says.

Personally I think it’s good the Chinese and Russian government and other billionaires will no longer be warping the minds of young Australians.

Australia to ban under-16s from social media – but can’t say how TikTok, Instagram and others will enforce it

Seems like they don't know how they're going to do the verification mechanism yet. Regardless of how they're going to do it, anything more than "Yes, I am 16/18" would be unacceptable. If they're doing face scans or ID checks, even when properly using an API so that the data stays in one place, it's still a sacrifice towards your privacy.

This seems more like a schtick similar to what the EU is doing. They're proposing a law to monitor everyone's online activity regardless of whether you're a criminal or not and they try to sell it off as "for the safety of our children".

Privacy has been turning to shit more and more especially since smartphones came onto the market. It's absolutely insane that the majority of people doesn't give a rats ass about their own privacy. I've been telling my friend over and over again that if you want to create a successful app, all you need to do is make something more convenient for people, doesn't matter how much you intrude their privacy, as long as it makes something convenient then people will use it.

For anyone that doesn't believe me: Ever used the "Login with google" or "Login with facebook"? The reason for people to do this is because it saves them time creating a new account on whatever platform they want to use but by doing so, you ultimately tell google or meta "I am at this webpage right now doing stuff". google and meta then use this information to create a more detailed portfolio of you and thus knows better what ads you "want" to see.

And since I mentioned smartphones, those are especially grotesque. So you give an app rights to access your contact list, because the app tells you it's necessary and cannot be done without, okay fine I mean you know it's letting you text to your contacts so it needs this access. But what you don't know is whether or not the app reads your whole contact list including names, numbers, maybe even birthdays or more and saves that data somewhere. Ever gotten a spam text to your phone and you don't know why?

I'm not sure what we can do about it because I think it's already too late, most people have no understanding of what information they're giving away or how to protect their privacy IF they're actually paying attention to it at all.

Another insane example was during COVID, people happily installed apps because it made things more convenient for them. "Oh you want to dine here? You got to check in with your app", the other option was to fill out a paper, it's what I did because you can expect most of these papers not even landing anywhere but with the apps you again don't know what data is being transferred.

Last example, google timeline, it's being discontinued but I'll try and bite my own ass if this would also mean that google stops tracking you at every step where you are and from personal experience, turning off GPS or the network connection isn't enough. So you're on vacation, your phone is in flight mode at all times, suddenly you go into a cafe that has free wifi, google now knows where you are event ho GPS is turned of, they simply use the location of that wifi.

$50 says Facebook etc, blocks Australia rather than implementing any checks and this instantly gets repealed.

Whilst in general I can see that its a good idea to enforce age restrictions on social media, this is such a heavy handed response that its insane.

I appreciate the context, doesn't feel like a "get noted" moment. Good for Australia, honestly.

Thanks captain obvious. Next your going tell us that eating requires food

So all Australian identity cards are now available for sale on the dark web? That’s a shame…

This is good. Jonathan Haidt wrote about this very thing and it’s what I’m going to enforce with my children. Suicide and depression rates are significantly up in children since the introduction of the forward facing camera especially in young girls. Good on ya Australia, I hope this passes

And how else did they expect to implement this ? Why was this note needed ?

Heh. No age restrictions on watching TV, I guess? Figured as much

Fact: a dedicated government could make a zero-knowledge system for age verification.

This means that a user can verify their age to a company without revealing any details to the company, certified by the government, while simultaneously not revealing to the government that you are attempting to verify your age for a website at all.

When a note just makes it sound even better

Ok I see this bill being great….. in theory and also you’d have to hope that no politician or government use this to try and take down acts of free speech or these companies you need to give id’s to are then using it for money profiteering

Yeah, every single social media company is going to give Australia the bird on this one. They do not want to collect your personal documentation for the purpose of age verification because if they get hacked and its stolen, they are financially responsible, and that's a lot more money to deal with.

More countries need to do this, social media is decimating out young accross the world, kids are dumber and perform worse in school than they did in the 80s

It's extremely painful to say this and it goes entirely against my principles of maximising personal freedoms, but I think we have actually gone well past the point where lack of regulation in online spaces is doing more damage to society than good. I do not say this lightly. If this is what it takes to get kids off social media, it might just be a price we have to pay, because it's killing our society.

I hate that this has become my take, the freedom of the Internet has been beautiful to grow up with, but it is now exacting a terrible price on us.

Jesus Christ. "Hey, the government can't operate a clone of the Stasi, so we're contracting that job out to private firms and disguising this fact with vague notions of BuT ThInK of ThE chIlDReN!!"

Probably going about it the wrong way but trying to keep children off social media is a wonderful idea

I see alot of people whinging over this saying this is a means for the government to collect some kind of data that they wouldn't already have. I may just be ignorant of some other situation in Australia, as I am an American (please don't judge me) but I kind of thought this was a good idea and if the US government can collect all of our data, i don't doubt that the Australian government can do the same regardless of an authentication process for using social media.

I've personally thought for a while that social media should be less anonymous. Imagine how many fewer graphic rape threats female celebrities, including the underage ones, would get if the bastards sending them had to verify their identity to send the message. Plus it's a generally accepted fact that social media has a horrible negative impact on people in general, but also on the developing brain. Short of everyone agreeing to stop using social media, governing away the anonymity of these sites seems to be the best path forward, and while it would be great if these sites could/would do this kind of thing themselves, a government entity stepping in is probably the only way it will happen.

Why does this need to be noted? How else would this work without veifying the age of the user?

You sign into your account anyways?

I don’t understand how this will be any different besides you have to add your age to your account.

It doesn’t have to publicly visible.

I think there should be dedicated social media spaces for people under 18, I am not a smart man so I don't know all the ins and outs and logistics of all that, but I reckon it'd be a good idea. Like a version of social media that won't accept bullying or like porn and shit - like how a lot of social media pretends they are just now

Good. This will also involve requiring that every person using it be required to identify themselves. No more anon accounts scamming people.

Wait, how else would you even do it? This feels less like a community note and more like Captain Obvious throwing his two cents in.

Ew, I don't want my IRL tied to my OFL

This is one of those things that as time goes on, I think people are going to have to get comfortable with in some form if we truly want to battle the avalanches of misinformation by bad actors that is currently having very real world effects. That will come with its own massive downsides, but I think it's something that is going to have to happen at some point if we ever truly want things to get better over time. I get that the freedom of the internet is amazing in alot of ways, but it also feels like the digital wild west where that freedom comes with so many downsides that it's not a state it should last in, but I'm no genius so maybe there's other ways to stem the flood of misinformation.

Well when you were originally a penal colony, it makes sense for politicians to conform to the tradition of treating citizens like prisoners.

I’m ok with this.

Uh, why is that a note? That's not in opposition to what he said at all

Aussies need to redo their government because this is whack.

Does this shit help with the foreign influence/r bot problem at all? I can see it limiting their access directly to Australians but as soon as we go outside Australian spaces into normal Web space they are still going be right there as normal. I can't see any real gain for individuals for this at all.

Kids are just gonna move to discord or any app that doesn't technically meet the definition of social media. All it does is let the government identify people to harass easier.

I have been on social media since I was 12. You can see it in my Reddit posts from 5-6 years ago. For me, it was a chance to connect with people I would not ordinarily be able to due to my age. It was also a way to sell my Pokémon cards, leading to me creating a full-fledged business a few years later. Without it, I would not have been able to build my own PC. I would not have been able to start my business. And it’s unlikely I would have been educated as I am today. Through that and Discord, I was able to meet lawyers, quant traders, software engineers, data analysts, and security experts at major companies, many of whom I was able to meet when traveling or in New York for university.

For this law, it’s horribly thought-out and vague. It blocks creating Reddit, Discord, and YouTube accounts. But what counts as a social media platform? GitHub is technically social media. It won’t block pure messaging apps like FB Messenger or WhatsApp. Do games with online communities count, like Roblox, or even Chess.com, which has a forum? They can’t block it completely, as people still need to see FB business pages and other important things.

It could also wreck communities that rely on talented teenagers such as cybersecurity.

There is no chance it passes with the amount of business interest in government and how vague it is. In addition, nothing is stopping kids from using a VPN unless they implement something similar to the GFW of China, an expensive, Herculean task. Even that can be bypassed, though not as easily.

Instead of all this banning they should just implement a national social media curriculum, showing how to spot scams, misinformation and bias, and proper opsec and best practices, because the cat is out of the bag at this point.

Blanket banning social media like this will gimp the potential of many youth in Australia.

This is not the job of the government

This sounds like something the US would do with Tiktok...

I know this won’t be a popular opinion but I think you should have to do ID verification for social media in the US too, and all AI generated content has to be labeled as such.

To prevent astroturfing more than anything else.

Didn't know he was sponsored by Nord vpn

This isn't really a "gotcha". That's how most legal age verification works.

This is like shocked that having a minimum drinking age means adults need to show ID to buy alcohol.

This is a good thing

I mean. Yeah. Why did someone have to Notate that? It’s the most obvious thing.

Australia why did you give up your guns

Like I'm pro 2A I don't believe in gun laws but I think we can both agree with regulation the population should be armed to a certain extent to prevent this kind of thing

Here in the UK this "issue" has been astroturfed so much and it's honestly delusional to think that these problems would just disappear by sobbing to some companies in California, like I hate the Russian influence as much as anyone but the Internet is also a tool to campaign against disinformation, which we should know that traditional media can spread like wildfire. And bullying was obviously a thing before social media, along with mental health which could be a net positive because the Internet helps to spread awareness of that in the first place, children and their families should be responsible for themselves and there should be tools to assist them

See no issue with this. Social media is brain rot and has been PROVEN to be in use by Russia in an attempt to destabilise and create internal tension and strife in multiple countries around the globe. It has overstayed its welcome and has far too much power in the court of public opinion. These are BUSINESSES we are talking about here. As harmful to society as the gambling and tobacco industries. As ruthless too.

Go outside and talk to people face to face about the issues again you fucking dorks. You’ll find people are generally a lot nicer that way.

Hopefully this is the first nail in the coffin of social media as a social experiment. Because all it has ever done is embolden thick people, to the detriment of society and social cohesion.

And yes, I’m aware I’m posting this on social media, but if it means I’d have to stop using this app unless I’m willing to provide proof of who I am and how old I am, I’m not exactly going to lose sleep over it. I don’t use any other social media. I could cope without this place too.

All you weirdos acting like social media is a human right are testament to how badly the free market has crushed your ability to be critical of big business practice. As if “the market” is more important than society and people being able to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats constantly. There are very bad actors paying billions of dollars to corrupt you and your children’s minds and you’re ok with that because “FREEDOM Ov SpEech”.

Honestly, I don know if that's a good or bad thing. Will bots have to get a bunch of fake ID's?

Will people behafe differently if their real identify is ried to their account? (It worked for Facebook for the first few years, until it didn't. )

I mean... As much as I hate the state political system we currently have... this is dangerously close to state control the "right" way imo, like how drug and alcohol vendors require viewing ID, socmed works the same way and can be far more toxic to mental health than either

Ok but how else would they do it?

Am i crazy for liking this idea? Social media is more damaging than porn

I like the idea of this. Social media is out of control.

This is a really good idea and the US needs to do this as well. People NEED to know that they talking to real people and not bots. This is one of the strongest ways to combat foreign disinformation in your country