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.

> 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).

> 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

> 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.

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.”

I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation.

That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...

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.

This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group.

This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.

> 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.

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified

Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...

Australia was already fucked more than the U.S. before that regarding Police state status... But all world states are walking toward this

Australians with dual citizenship have an out at least.

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

[dead]

> 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.

Bad for business, and arguably, the world.