Is the actual discussed measure available somewhere ? Looking around none of the articles discussing this had references to official documents.
Judging from the info in the article:
- kids will have one year to see which platforms are not categorized as SNS, yet can be used as such.
- kids stuck with brainwashing parents, especially in remote rural areas, will have it a bit more tougher I guess.
This was rushed through with a public comment period of 24 hours.
It's going to be a mess, while the spirit is well intentioned it has edge cases up the wazoo, foot guns galore, and stinks of back door government ID for adults.
Pretty much the only media outlet in Australia that stood up with questions and non fawning commentary was Crikey:
eg: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/11/26/teen-social-media-ban-s...
and: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrikey.com.au+social+...
This was deeply rooted in traditional media ( Murdoch News et al ) in AU putting pressure on the Government in AU to take action against Facebook & Co. after the ceasation of payments for linking to news media.
for-profit media unapologetically uses what little influence they have left to smear their competitors, hence all the drivel: "think of the children / fear the evil russians!" about social media and "think of the copyright holders / fear the evil terminators!" about AI.
God wills it, ten years from now they will all be out of job. The publications will still be there, of course, but the shilling will be delegated to LLMs prompted by Bangladeshi youths for $5 a day, with a few meatsack editors to set the tone.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... (explanatory memorandum here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/em...)
And the amendment to the first reading which was agreed to today which has the bits about ID verification being disallowed: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am... (supplementary explanatory memorandum here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/em...)
Not disallowed, just they also have to offer an alternative.
Question is why hasn't Australia created a Digital ID system that can prove you're >= 16 years old without giving away other info?
In the spirit of "Falsehoods programmers believe in"[1] for human ages:
* Not all people know their age.[2]
* Even if people do know their age they may not have any means to prove their age.[2]
* Even if people know their age, they may know their age only in a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, the documentation may provide an approximate age or use a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, they may know it to be incorrect.
* People may have multiple documents each nominating a different age.
* People may be reissued with new documents changing their recognised age.
* Even if the government tries to guess someone's unknown age, it's an inexact science and could be revised later.
[1] https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
[2] https://www.racgp.org.au/getattachment/fe71891a-aafe-453f-a3...
[3] Example calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_calendar
It's vibes based - the definitions could cover almost any online service, but the Minister of Communications gets to decide who will be targeted.
They have zero detail on how to verify anybody's age. But massive fines if the tech companies fail. Basically the only reliable way to do it would be to ID everyone, but then they had to sort of mostly rule that out in a rushed amendment yesterday to get it past the Conservatives (Liberal/National Party) because they neeed their votes in the Senate.
So basically they're asking tech companies to come up with magical technology to perfectly know how old someone is without any identification.