Australia Pushing Age Verification Laws… On Social Media

The efforts to crack down on expression continues with Australia pushing for age verification laws on social media.

I’ve long argued that we are living in an era where governments from around the world have decided that cracking down on freedom of expression and human rights is their top priority. They have taken aim at several mediums, but the big medium they are going after is social media. In the process, they are taking the line of “damn the consequences, we’re doing it anyway” along the way.

In a number of these cases, the excuse they use is the tired and long debunked claim that it is “for the children”. In the example of age verification laws, supporters of such laws have fully admitted that “protecting the children” was never really the point of such laws. Instead, it is about instilling their beliefs in morality on others and forcing everyone to adhere to their own personal standards of morality. Specifically, they want to ban pornography entirely even in the many numerous cases where such content is actually protected by freedom of expression protections. Project 2025 goes even further and demands that those who produce pornography of any kind should be thrown in jail.

In an adjacent debate, lawmakers from around the world are also pushing to crack down on social media and all the expression that is available on there. This while pushing the long since debunked claims that social media is hazardous to mental health or the claims that social media is little more than a vector for non-sense peddlers and criminals despite widespread evidence that social media has long had many benefits to modern society and people in general.

I’ve been critical of both approaches because, as I’ve repeatedly said already, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Earlier this year, Australian lawmakers were looking into the possibility of expanding their age verification laws to include video games. Earlier this month, the Irish Health Minister called for a crackdown of, I kid you not, Roblox, along with social media.

This perfectly demonstrates in very vivid detail why I don’t like these efforts to censor the internet. Not only is it legally and morally questionable on the face of it, but lawmakers with their own personal beliefs (not scientific fact) decide that the laws don’t go far enough and they push to further the crackdown on freedom of expression into other areas as well.

Well, today, we were graced with yet another example of this phenomenon. Australia is pushing for legislation that would expand age verification laws to include social media in general. From CTV:

The Australian government on Tuesday promised to legislate this year to enforce a minimum age for children to access social media, but it has yet to announce how ages will be verified.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government would soon trial age verification technology with a view to banning children from opening social media accounts. The line would be drawn between the ages of 14 and 16.

This is a shocking and dangerous attempt at expanding government censorship powers on the internet. Children do use social media to keep in touch with other friends and to communicate with their parents and family. What’s more, they form communities of like minded people to support each other online. Taking that tool away from them would prove to be enormously damaging to children. Unfortunately, the Australian government is trotting out the same old tired talking points that social media is inherently harmful:

The Australian move comes as parents increasing call for their children to be protected online and with the opposition party promising a social media ban for children under 16 if it wins elections due by May next year.

“We’ve committed to introducing legislation before the end of this year for age verification to make sure that we get young people away from this social harm,” Albanese told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with. The bullying that can occur online, the access to material which causes social harm, and parents are wanting a response,” Albanese added.

The problem here is that while there is the threat of causing immense social harm by pushing such laws by separating users from their communities, older users have plenty to fear from such a system. This is because the age verification systems today are not only unreliable, but also a massive privacy nightmare as well. That was proven earlier this year when Australia’s age verification for bars got hacked and exposed the personal information of patrons earlier this year. There’s been plenty of research into whether any age verification out there is both adequately protective of users personal information and is also accurate as well. Governmental organizations such as Frances CNIL as well as the Australian government concluded that no such system exists and that age verification systems that exist today are a privacy and security nightmare.

Techdirt is also noting the absurdity of the wild claims that social media is an across the board problem in society:

Again, there’s a lot of nuance in the research that suggests this is not a simple issue of “if we cut kids off of social media, they’ll spend more time outside.” Some kids use social media to build up their social life which can lead to more outdoor activity, while some don’t. It’s not nearly as simple as saying that they’ll magically go outdoors and play sports if they don’t have social media.

Then you combine that with the fact that the Australian government knows that age verification is inherently unsafe, and this whole plan seems especially dangerous.

But, of course, politicians love to play into the latest moral panic.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said getting kids off social media required urgent leadership.

“The evidence shows early access to addictive social media is causing our kids harm,” he said.

“This is no different to cigarettes or alcohol. When a product or service hurts children, governments must act.”

Except, it’s extremely different than cigarettes and alcohol, both of which are actually consumed by the body and insert literal toxins into the bloodstream. Social media is speech. Speech can influence, but you can’t call it inherently a toxin or inherently good or bad.

The statement that “addictive social media is causing our kids harm” is literally false. The evidence is way more nuanced, and there remain no studies showing an actual causal relationship here. As we’ve discussed at length (backed up by multiple studies), if anything the relationship may go the other way, with kids who are already dealing with mental health problems resorting to spending more time on social media because of failures by the government to provide resources to help.

In other words, this rush to ban social media for kids is, in effect, an attempt by government officials to cover up their own failures.

The government could be doing all sorts of things to actually help kids. It could invest in better digital literacy, training kids how to use the technology more appropriately. It could provide better mental health resources for people of all ages. It could provide more space and opportunities for kids to freely spend time outdoors. These are all good uses of the government’s powers that tackle the issues they claim matter here.

Surveilling kids and collecting private data on them which everyone knows will eventually leak, and then banning them from spaces that many, many kids have said make their lives and mental health better, seems unlikely to help.

Indeed, this really does smack of being a case of pretending to help all the while solving nothing and causing enormous problems in the process. It’s certainly possible that children will start getting taught on how to use a VPN at an even earlier age, rendering whatever censorship wall the Australian government erects for children useless. What’s more, the last thing we need to be doing right about now is putting even more personal information on the open web. It’s bad enough that so much personal information is just randomly floating around the open web – whether stolen or just leaked to the public. Add in even more personal information is just a further invitation for bad actors to steal even more.

I know people out there are looking at some of these proposals and arguing that, well, this is different, this is the kind of government control we do need. No, I can assure you, it is not. Did you really think that the government was going to stop at, say, porn sites? Don’t make me laugh. Did you really think that the government was only going to go after, say, the Russian rage farming bots? Ell to the oh to the ell. Governments around the world are actively proving that these are just the initial first stages of cracking down on expression online. What some people don’t understand is that once the government they support has the censorship ban hammer, what happens when a political party they don’t like gets in power and takes control of that same censorship hammer?

The bottom line is this, these are all dangerous proposals that threaten freedom of expression that we all know and enjoy today. I’ve said repeatedly that things like age verification laws and “online harms” legislative efforts are just a first step and not a one off effort to make society better. These are all just thin wedges to make people believe that internet censorship is not only acceptable, but a moral responsibility for the government. We know because government keeps proving this point. From there, it becomes open season for the government to take a wrecking ball to the internet as a whole. That is a situation where everyone loses.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.