Australia’s plan to implement age verification on social media is leading to fears of social isolation and disconnection from loved ones.
One of the things I’ve long maintained about age verification laws is that it’s not an end goal, but a stepping stone for government to inflict further speech control on the internet in general. Age gating pornography just so happens to be the path of least resistance for anti free speech advocates with dreams of censoring the internet and further controlling narratives of the day. While it isn’t going to go as well as governments around the world would hope, it’s going to cause a heck of a lot of damage along the way.
Indeed, just a decade ago, all of this seemed like laughable paranoid delusions. Yet, fast forward to today and there are actively examples proving the point. Just a few months ago, supporters of age verification laws fully admitted that this is just a step in the overall goal to fully ban porn. Last month, the Australian government started moving forward with an effort to expand age verification laws to include social media seemingly under the mythological idea that social media is somehow inherently harmful to teenagers and minors.
Now, I know what some of you out there would be thinking at this point. These ideas are silly and things like anonymous tools would easily circumvent all of this. Unfortunately, governments have already been moving to ban all effective encryption and there have already been VPN services targeted. In Brazil, for instance, the Supreme court upheld a ruling saying that users using a VPN should be subject to fines should they use them for accessing Twitter, circumventing the ban on X/Twitter in the process.
Again, though, this is likely going to be a losing battle for governments around the world, but this won’t happen without inflicting a lot of damage in the process. Indeed, that’s the fears in Australia as the government moves forward with it’s efforts to censor social media for minors through their expanding age verification laws. This was recently highlighted in a Reuters article talking about how the age verification laws could cause people to lose their social connections with family and friends:
For Tereza Hussein, a 14-year-old refugee who lives in Darwin, Australia’s planned social media ban would mean losing a direct line to the most important person to her: a grandmother she has never physically met.
“It’s the only way I’ve ever connected to my grandma before, over socials,” said Hussein, who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo but lived in a refugee camp in Malawi before settling in Australia when she was nine.
“It’s going to have a very big change in my life because it’s going to be hard for me to talk to the people that I’ve left behind,” she said.
While Hussein rarely posts on social media, she uses Meta’s (META.O), opens new tab Instagram and Snapchat primarily to view and discuss photos and videos from family and friends.
She represents what experts say is a blind spot in a plan by Australia’s government to put an age minimum on social media in response to concerns about bullying, predatory grooming and physical and mental health.
For teenagers from migrant, LGBTQIA+ and other minority backgrounds, an age block could cut off access to essential social support.
Some 97% of Australian teenagers use social media across an average of four platforms, surveys show, making them among the world’s most connected youth.
This highlights exactly how big of a problem the Australian government is causing. People use social media platforms for vital social connections such as, as highlighted above, communicating with family overseas. The fact that a whopping 97% of teenagers use use social media highlights just how big of an impact banning them from social media in general is going to be. An entire generation of people are going to lose access to something they are using in their daily lives just because the government decided for them that they shouldn’t be using it.
To be clear, research into social media and younger people has long shown that there is no inherent harm to those age groups. The research is quite conclusive that either there is no real difference for people using social media or it actually is beneficial for people to use. The push to say that social media is just dangerous to use has long been the result of a moral panic push similar to the ones pushed about how harmful video games are supposedly to children in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s the result of certain individuals who think they know better than science and try to use techniques like cherry picking and dismissing conflicting information to reach the conclusions that conform with their own personal beliefs on the subject.
What’s more, efforts like these are pushed by those who try to ignore all the benefits of social media and try to forget the harm that these policies are about to cause in the process. As a result, we are seeing, yet again, an evidence free approach where laws and policies are put in place not because of the evidence, but because of the lobbyists and the politician’s who think a certain way about something. As a result, people like us can, yet again, point to all the evidence, then when the evidence get ignored, track the damage the bad law is invariably going to cause.
(Via @Pagmenzies)
