What about future governments in Australia? This is ripe for abuse and scope creep. It also ties a uniform ID to an account, simplifying tracking and surveillance by corporations and governments.

Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"

> It also ties a uniform ID to an account, simplifying tracking and surveillance by corporations and governments.

That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is happening in the area of cryptographically verified assertions; for example, a government API could provide the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the government never able to tie you to the service requiring the assertion.

> simple tweets against the government

Which tweets do you have in mind? Because it not does not describe any of the high-profile tweet-related arrests I have heard of.

You can't link your government ID to your social media account. The legislation doesn't allow social media companies to gather this data. It's specifically not allowed.

In other words: this legislation is useless, and entirely stupid, and kids will bypass it trivially. Teenagers are exceptionally good at bypassing that which they find stupid, or gets in their way of what they consider to be fun, or a right.

"...simplifying tracking and surveillance by corporations and governments."

Decades ago when the Australia Card—an ID system for Australians—was first proposed there was an almighty outcry from the citizenry and the project was seemingly shelved. What's happened since is that our Governments quietly ramped up their computer systems and collected the data anyway, this Law will only enhance that collection further. Moreover, recently Government introduced what at the moment are voluntary digital IDs which it sold under the guise that having a single ID will make it easier to deal with government services, etc. Unfortunately, most will unquestioningly swallow the official line and miss the fine minutiae.

I've never heard any politician or Government official come out and say "We'll never introduce an Australia Card because we're free people" or such and I'd bet that I never will. Fact is, we Australians already have had an 'Australia Card' for years, it's just that we don't carry it around in our wallets as we do with our credit cards.

Our democracy would be vastly improved if those whose governance we're under would actually tell us the truth.

Edit: Despite my comment about this new law, I agree kids need protection—so we're damned either way. I see no easy solution.

I don't know the details of the implementation, but this sounds like an argument for strong data protection laws (and so no data retention) rather than inaction.

Also, I'm really struggling to think of examples where people have been arrested for "tweets against the government". The Linehan case? Most of the ones I can think of are like that — so basically culture war bullshit and overzealous policing of incitement laws.

In actuality websites just have to do something, not use an id. Most of them currently just want you to upload a story then use ai to guess your age, it's as accurate as you might suspect if you're very sceptical

They don’t need age verification for that. If you ever connect to social media even once without a VPN and a number of other protections, they can link an account back to you.

Sorry, you are crazy if you trust American tech companies (that you have zero control over) rather than your own government which in theory you have a lot of control over, but it does depend on your flavour of democracy.

Until these controls on American tech companies Trump (via all the tech CEOs fawning over him) had more control over Australian society than your own government.

The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media unless we all want to have American bonkers (and increasingly authoritarian) politics fully exported to us.