As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.

Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.

Apropos social media and age, I have some relatives with the last name of Aam. (Åm or Aam is an old farm in the Volda area of Sunnmøre, Norway).

If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it does.

This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed it. Go and try if you want.

So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media friends to notice.

I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.

All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.

I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.

Nothing has changed for my 15 year old either. It’s business as usual today for her.

She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection check on her behalf.

> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this

I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.

>Pretty well executed - I'm impressed.

It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over. Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for older people was the only metric.

Pretty much aligns with how I have felt it here in Aus as well

> Pretty well executed

There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.