Australia

To be extremely clear: the Government announced that this was an enormous priority that had to be rushed through. They introduced it last Thursday, closed submissions on Friday, and held the inquiry on Monday. Then it was passed by the House on Wednesday and the Senate had a grand total of 1 hour to debate amendments to it on Thursday.

All this incredible haste and lack of due process for a Bill that will not take effect for at least a year. It's optics, pure and simple.

Well done to the Greens, independents, and LNP Senators Canavan and Antic for having some fucking integrity. Regardless of whether the Bill itself may have ended up being agreed to, the process by which it was passed is inexcusable.

Here are some of the things that were proposed as amendments to this Bill, that the Labor and LNP uniparty voted down.

The Minister must, by legislative instrument, formulate guidelines for the taking of reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with age-restricted social media platforms

In other words, before the Bill actually comes into effect, there need to be some guidelines about what the fuck it actually means. But apparently Labor and most of the LNP (Canavan—who moved this amendment—and Antic aside) don't think guidelines matter.

the Minister must be satisfied that the legislative rules would not have the effect, or be likely to have the effect, of substantially lessening competition in the market for that kind of electronic service

Labor and the LNP are specifically aware that small guys...like us here on Lemmy...might be hit harder, and decided to vote not to make sure the rules prevent that from happening.

[Remove:] If an entity...uses or discloses the information otherwise than...with the consent of the individual...the use or disclosure of the information is taken to be an interference with the privacy of the individual

Ok I've summarised this one immensely because the way it's laid out is very technical. I'm referring to amendment 3215 by Canavan if anyone wants to verify it.

But basically, Canavan (and Pocock, who moved a similar amendment) wanted to say "if you collect this data, you must only use it for verifying people's age. Even if you get consent to use it for other reasons, you're not allowed to." This would have absolutely enshrined the protection against things like "oh but we put a tick box to get consent to use it for other purposes and they clicked it."

Labor and the LNP didn't want this.

an individual is not an age-restricted user if...a parent or guardian of the individual consents to the individual not being an age-restricted user

Yup. Parents are not legally allowed to declare that their children can use apps. Because Labor and the LNP voted this amendment down. Now, if a parent helps their child do it anyway, the parent and child can't get in trouble, but the platform can, because platforms cannot knowingly allow children to use the app, even with explicit parental consent and supervision.

The likes of lemmy instances may be either small enough to fly under the radar, or handwaved away by legislators with "don't worry it's not the target of this legislation", or even be given easy access to ministerial exemption ...for now (maybe).

The kicker comes in 10-15 years' time when, say, a government's donor inconvenienced by protests organised using a self-hosted forum then asks the government to crack down on the age verification requirements of that forum, effectively silencing it due to the requirements being too onerous for a small forum, or the userbase being unwilling to submit their IDs/faceprints/whatever.

This may be the doomer in me, but I fear this will spell the end of Aussie.zone - Lemmy fits the definition of social media, but I don't know how it's feasible for @lodion to verify every user's age...

main reason for it - no anonymous account on social media for_everyone_. It just another surveillance imposing law.

That's the neat part

You can't see it, but I have my dubious face on.

It'll be interesting to see the definition of "social media". All I've seen so far is a list of sites/services that will be banned/exempt.

Lemmy doesn't seem to fit into such a law. Lock down a pile of sites running Lemmy, another instance pops up isn't covered by the ban. "Ban Lemmy software, then" I hear you say. Thing is: Lemmy is open source. Someone can fork it, release a new federating service software called TotesNotLemmyLol on their site and get around the ban.

I genuinely can't tell how the government will implement this.

I say this as a dad to a teenager who will be affected by this law, and no - I wouldn't want him unsupervised on Lemmy. He'd be safe enough in Local (you guys are lovely), but it's a dark world out there.

Mediawatch showed something disturbing: Murdoch papers have been actively campaigning for the bill for the last six months. I wonder why? https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/teens/104644976

The legislation does note that some services are “excluded”, but does not name specific platforms. For example, while services providing “online social interaction” would be included in the ban, this would not include “online business interaction”.

Looking forward to watching Facebook claim it's all a business interaction because they're selling the user data or something. Also surely this includes any and all online forums.

Not sure if the legislation is good or bad. Time will tell.

Two things are clear though. The large social media platforms are worth billions of dollars and can afford to self regulate. Also they extensively profile users to sell data and targeted advertising and serve targeted content that will keep people engaged (addicted).

I don't know if they really need age verification when they know all your friends, interests and shopping habits. Their algorithms know you are an Australian teenager as that knowledge is their product.

Hopefully the fediverse and non profit sites don't get caught up in this. Unfortunately our politicians have very low technical literacy.

It’s a mystery for sure. They won’t even tell us what does or doesn’t count to plan accordingly

I don’t see it as a bad thing, if they ask me to verify my age via a driver’s license I’ll just delete my account, none of them are that important that I would give them a copy of my identification.

How does China verify users on all their apps?

When was the last time that politics was concerned with that odd concept called "reality"?