On 10 December this year, the Albanese government’s social media age verification laws will go into effect:
“The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 amends the Online Safety Act 2021 and requires ‘age-restricted social media platforms’ to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years from having accounts on their platforms.”
Regular readers know my views on this legislation. But if you fancy a peek into Australia’s future under Albo’s law, look no further than Britain, where the Online Safety Act (OSA) went live in March 2025. It has been a mess of bugs and workarounds, with the end result being a much more frustrating and less safe internet for everyone.
Take this story from the New Yorker:
“It is up to publishers to enforce these rules and determine what counts as ‘harmful.’ Reddit has been particularly aggressive in complying with OSA in the U.K., requiring age verification for access to subforums on subjects including Alcoholics Anonymous, medical cannabis, and menstruation. The chat app Discord requires U.K. users to verify their age if they want to make certain changes to their moderation settings such as turning off message requests. X, Grindr, and Bluesky are rolling out forms of verification, too. Users, meanwhile, are devising ways to get around the barriers without giving up their identities. Virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, can make it appear as though someone is browsing from another country; one V.P.N. provider reported an eighteen-hundred-per-cent increase in daily sign-ups from the U.K. after OSA age-verification rules went into effect. Other people are using A.I.-generated images or video-game screenshots to falsify their identities.”
Or the EFF on some of the unintended consequences:
“Even when the workarounds inevitably cease to function and the age-checking procedures calcify, age verification measures still will not achieve their singular goal of protecting kids from so-called ‘harmful’ online content. Teenagers will, uh, find a way to access the content they want. Instead of going to a vetted site for explicit material, curious young people (and anyone else who does not or cannot submit to age checks) will be pushed to the sketchier corners of the internet—where there is less moderation, more safety risk, and no regulation to prevent things like CSAM or non-consensual sexual content. In effect, the OSA and other age verification mandates like it will increase the risk of harm, not reduce it.”
Or a paper published in the Stanford Technology Law Review earlier this year, which singled out the Albanese government for adopting a “pass and pray” approach to lawmaking:
“Passing a segregate-and-suppress law, without ensuring that publishers have reasonable and non-harmful ways of implementing the age authentication requirement, is irresponsible policymaking. If legislatures can’t understand the authentication mechanics and properly account for its pitfalls, they aren’t ready to impose the mandate.
…
It’s tempting to assume that proponents of segregate-and-suppress laws genuinely believe that the laws are the best way to protect children. The problem with this assumption is that regulators repeatedly demonstrate that they don’t understand, or care about, the many downsides of segregate-and-suppress laws discussed in Parts I and II. Instead, regulators are embracing simplistic one-note solutions to complex, multifaceted social problems. As a result, segregate-and-suppress laws are unlikely to accomplish their purported goals—and are guaranteed to make the Internet worse for everyone, including minors.”
Such laws tend to result in “surprising and counterproductive outcomes”:
“Requiring readers to authenticate their age exposes minors (and adults) to significant privacy and security risks, and it dramatically reshapes the Internet’s functioning to the detriment of almost everyone. Further, due to the inherent tradeoffs involved, segregate-and-suppress laws inevitably harm some minors.”
I get that governments always seem to want more censorship and control over the population, and that Australia has a dismal record of protecting free speech; for whatever reason, it’s just not in our culture. But the real world experience in Britain has demonstrated that Albo’s age verification laws will change the way we use the internet forever, and not in a good way.
If you don’t already have a reliable VPN, you may want to consider getting one to beat the rush that will inevitably arrive post-10 December, when Aussies will start being confronted by their favourite apps or websites demanding a selfie to continue.