Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age).
Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
Reminds of the 'chilling effect' of measures of bygone decades.
My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening.
Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use?
Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.
> stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content.
Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
That's exactly why there's a suggestion legacy media are driving this.
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup.
As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example).
Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).
This comes up on every single HN thread about the topic, but I don’t understand how people aren’t seeing the obvious abuse angle:
Create a market for anonymous age verification tokens. People pay $5 to someone to create an age authorization for them. 17 year old kid (who is old enough under this law) spends all day creating anonymous age auth tokens to sell to people who want them.
Entire system subverted with profit motive.
The next phase of the argument is to argue for rate limiting or extra logging, but the more you force that the more you degrade privacy or introduce unreasonable restrictions. “Sorry, I can’t sign up for the wiki today because I already used my quota of 2 government age checks today”. Still leaves plenty of room for 17 year old kids to earn $10 a day farming out their age checks.
The entire argument that anonymous crypto primitive will solve this problem is tiresome.
The same applies to effectively all possible solutions for age verification, no?
Even if you have a perfect mechanism, 17 years old can create real age-verified accounts and then sell the username and password afterwards. Selling age-verification tokens directly would likely be harder than just swapping those login details, since it's very easy to make the tokens time-limited (in practice normal use would probably be some kind of oauth-style redirect flow, so they'd really only have to be valid for a few seconds).
This same argument applies to adults buying alcohol for teenagers too. The determined teenager with money can definitely find a way to get alcohol, but it doesn't mean the age restrictions on purchases are pointless.
Imo it's a bit pointless to worry about high-speed black markets trading in signed tokens when the current most common alternative is a popup with an "I promise I am over 18" button. If society agrees some things should be difficult to access if you're underage, then we can definitely do better than that as a solution.
this is the same argument as "why have government id cards, someone could just use a fake beard and use their older classmates id". Any system allows for some gaps, similar to how creditcard transactions make transactions safer but on either side of that transaction there some "insurance" and some leeway if someone really wanted to.
Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.
Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.
This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.
You’re right that it’s possible, absolutely. The problem is the government would first have to want to do that. If they’re planning to hoover up social media usage data then they probably won’t.
> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts
This isn't necessarily true.
It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3].
I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5].
With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license.
Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age.
And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app.
Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be.
EDIT:
I see now from the article the following:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [4] https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/... [5] https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile
Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it
Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school
every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
This seems like a different and fraudulent category of problem.
The point is that it's possible to create third-party authentication systems that require proving your age and the only extra thing the third-party learns is a verifiable age and the government does not get any information at all.
All this being said, I took a look at the article in question and saw this:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
So what could have been achieved with no invasion or privacy now seems like it must be achieved with an invasion of privacy.
aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name.
There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.
I don’t get it so you’re gonna do what to a 15-year-old who is an ‘identity thief’ so that he can go on TikTok? What’s the punishment please?
Put them in chains and onto a stinky sail vessel enroute to Australia... oh wait
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business.
I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this.
EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.
Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law:
- Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt
- Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal
- Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch)
BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously.
It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat
For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them).
Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch.
Utterly lost the plot.
Goals
Seriously though. While I don't like him even slightly, Murdoch is legit a business genius.
Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.
Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease
And in microstates too
A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities
A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time
It doesn’t say that?
“Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”
So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends?
Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.
I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this
So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc
To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”.
They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.
Legacy media are indeed lazy and stupid, but all that's stopping them is the Australian parliament, who are lazier and stupider.
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this
The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this?
Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.
Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians.
From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952
Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia).
Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
> voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids.
But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?
Australian news is fairly concentrated and is mostly owned by one family. A family that got a law passed forcing only Google and Facebook to pay pretty much only them.
The conspiracy isn't that far fetched.
> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned?
From real life? I know parents of middle school and up kids and they have first hand experience of the effects of social media and I’ve heard very little that’s positive.
I’m not saying the media aren’t trying to influence people but again, Occam’s razor: I really don’t think these parents need Rupert Murdoch whispering in their ear to be concerned about social media and kids.
> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?
Their friends who have kids?
People still talk to other people.
One thing I don't understand: if you and other parents are so concerned about this... why let your children use those sites?
This feels equivalent to “if you don’t like smoking, just don’t smoke”.
Like I said in my original post I don’t think this stuff is specific to kids. I think social media has an equivalent to “second hand smoke” that poisons society whether or not we individually engage with it. And yes, classrooms are full of it.
You'd presumably advocate for banning it for everyone, then? If so, might I ask how you'd define 'social media'? Presumably Facebook counts. Does HN, or Discord?
No, I wouldn’t:
I'm assuming you don't have kids? It's impossible to stop them, both on a technical and social level. You'd guarantee a destroyed relationship with your kids if trying to do so without their consent.
I'd think forcing the kids to turn off the light at 11pm or eat fish or whatever is worse than dns blocking Facebook, from the kids perspective.
This describes the exact purpose of the law: to stop letting kids use those sites.
My very strict uncle was adamant that my cousins stay off Facebook when they were kids. They got on anyway. When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation. If he couldn't stop his kids from getting on, only the websites themselves can.
> My very strict uncle was adamant ... When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation.
These might be related. Of course kids will respond that way to severe strictness - it tends to happen with anything a parent acts that way about, whether it's social media, smoking, or simply hanging out with a particular group of people.
This is, still, the fault of the parent.