Australian House passes bill to ban children under 16 from social media | Hacker News Reader

Australian House passes bill to ban children under 16 from social media

apnews.com

51 pointsanigbrowl52 comments

The gripe many have against this legislation is that it is being rushed for no good reason.

It hasn't been clear how they intend to enforce this. Will it just be an "By using this service, I confirm I am 16 or older" clause like the current system? Will we be required to submit ID to social media companies (it's claimed not)? Will the government be making verification through the updated 'MyGov' portal or the newly renamed 'myID' 'digital passport'?

Nobody is sure, and nobody is sure who is sure. There is tons of conflicting information out there.

NewsCorp have been pushing for it as well, which, as a rule, isn't a good thing, and the rest of our media seem just as confused as the populace.

Why does that matter? That’s a question about the implementation of the law.

You can’t go “I support the law if it’s implemented poorly so I can circumvent it, but I don’t support it if it’s implemented effectively and I can’t circumvent it”

The question of if it should be the law should assume that it’s implemented effectively, if people will only support an ineffective easily circumventable implementation then they don’t actually support the law and should vote against it.

It mostly matters because like all good laws it will likely be used to erode privacy in an effort to enforce it.

In context with the assistance and access act 2018 this is just another step towards the encryption with government backdoors future ASIO have been calling for in order to "protect us"

But what is "effective" in this case? My kids use huge Whatsapp groups as a form of social media, will Whatsapp be banned? Using a VPN to access TikTok from outside Australia is not beyond the skills of a determined kid, will VPNs be banned?

Those details matter to say whether or not this is a good idea, why not wait until you have the answer to those questions before enacting the law? (I think there are no good answers too this, and it's probably better to say this is a job for the parent, not for the government)

But that’s my point exactly. You saying “I only support the law if it’s implemented ineffectigely and my kids can circumvent it”. So what you should just be saying is that you don’t support the law.

You can be saying you support it on the condition that it’s implemented poorly enough that it should be circumventable. That just doesn’t make sense.

No, what I'm saying is, that if you think about it for more than a few minutes you realize there is no way to implement this effectively. If there was a way to do it effectively, I might consider this.

The government doesn't have to specify how, they just need to specify the consequences of failure to comply.

It's like not selling alcohol to minors, if the merchant (Facebook & co) does so they get heavily fined. If they repeatedly offend they are barred from operating as a business.

Induce sufficient fear in big tech and they will pivot to applying their profit optimizing to legal compliance instead.

"It hasn't been clear how they intend to enforce this."

Haven't read the Bill yet but usually when governments aren't sure of the fine minutiae and or the details are too complex there are often enabling clauses in the legislation that allow regulations to be enacted. This allows ministers and departments to set regulations without the Act being amended.

Has anyone checked the Bill for this?

Best guess, NewsCorp is pushing for it as Meta is a direct competitor.

Albeit, many 16 year olds are not using social media for news, but it does get them used to social media as there go to site early on.

I can hold complex, antagonistic ideas in my head at the same time. So I am reconciled to thinking both they were right to try (noting all the reasons why they might be wrong) and that it won't work (noting that it may work in an 80/20 sense)

Same, though mostly I'm mad we had to get here in the first place by Zuckerberg and Co being so awful that this is where we ended up.

Most people are concerned about privacy on a social networks that farm your data, they already know who you are the moment you upload a photo, write something mildly descriptive, or do just about anything else on social media.

If you want to remain anonymous, use forums like reddit, HN amongst others.

I see this as a brilliant step in the right direction of curbing teen depression and suicides. It's sad to see so much hate on something with so much potential, people are just bashing this proposal instead of offering alternatives, like having a centralised governamental services that informs social media platforms whether a person is eligible to create an account on social media without giving away any more personal information; instead, it's all just hate and bad mouthing, it saddens me.

>teen depression and suicides How many children are bullied in school, completely socially isolated, with their only outlet online? Who is going to help them? Why do people think they can solve deep, complex social issues - with a single piece of paper that dictates the law?

You'll need to use a throwaway email to remain anonymous with reddit. They're a public company now it would be a bold assumption to think they don't resell user profile info and or buy data about the user's profile.

Facebook requires users to be at least 13 (or 14) years old while signing up. So, Australia is just extending that ceiling by a couple years. No big deal!

It'll just mean every Australian will have to provide ID and lose the ability to remain anonymous online - no biggie!

I think it's necessary. Bots and trolls are already ruining online conversations.

I envision a state run identity provider which provides a limited number of non-resolvable identires to you. E.g. you log in with your personal identification card, then the website knows you as <some guid>. Your identity can only be resolved on court, e.g. if you commit online fraud.

> Bots and trolls are already ruining online conversations.

Requiring everyone to give up their rights to online privacy is an incredibly drastic solution to this problem, and it's not clear that it would even work very well.

Nobody is giving up any right. There is no right to be anonymous in a social network for billions of people

You don't give up any right for privacy - your identity is opaque to all except the state agency running the identity service.

You must be mistaken, these bots and trolls are largely run by the very states that you trust to protect your communications.

> Bots and trolls are already ruining online conversations.

They have always been?

What kind of moron is elected in the parlement of Australia?

On one side social media can have huge fines if they don't prevent "teenagers" to use social networks, but on the other side the platforms will be banned to require documents to check identity of users...

There are other ways to verify this without uploading id

E.g sign in with bank/gov

It's basically the same, your social account will now be identified/linked to your legal identity and I'm not sure if it not covered by the same amendment.

Verifying someone’s age doesn’t require tying their account to their government identity.

It pretty much does. Or are they aupposed to look at dental x-rays? How else would you know.

The question isn’t how you determine someone’s age it’s how you verify it. You can verify information without any need to tie the identity in client services to the identity in the verifying authority.

It doesnt have to

Social media can just query gov service with question: is this user above 16 - yes no

How do you define "this user" in this interaction?

The same way we do with "sign with google/apple/fb/github"

I'm at risk of saying something very ill informed here but my gut feeling is the difficulty lies in linking the person who is currently accessing the service with the person who did the age check.

Taking your example: people may have multiple Google accounts. And one Google account could be shared between multiple people (inadvisedly, obviously, but lots of real users do things like this).

Same idea but I would not say it like you:

- social network site will ask Google if the use is old enough with any random I'd that can be used to match Google response.

- but Google will now have a record of your Google account requesting age verification to access a social network / porn website...

- also, if anyone can open a Google account with the name John doe, the age verification will not have any sense.

- so Google will be required to check your identity, and so will require a government issued id in the end.

You can say that Google will just rely on some other third party, like a bank or phone provider, but in the end of a chain there will still be the gov id to be used.

Related Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16 (525 points, 20 days ago, 567 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071310

Good articulation of some of the potential issues with an approach like this from an independent who originally supported the bill but voted against it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/27/why-iv...

The implicit privacy intrusions, claims of harm and other very dubious moral and legal arguments favoring this law reek through and through.

The most obvious among the problems is the obviously indicated move towards making ID verification a default part of whether people access content or not. Even if it's only used "for children" at first, it's normalization will spread, leading to widespread overt de-anonymization.

Yes, some of you here might argue (not unreasonably) that most of what most of us do online is in any case thoroughly de-anonymized by all sorts of commercially motivated surveillance and tracking mechanisms that governments can latch on to, but at least the process is not a legal requirement, and you're not breaking laws by willfully circumventing it.

Malicious bills like this will normalize identifying yourself legally as a regulatory requirement and will make it much easier to criminalize tools and efforts for keeping one's privacy.

What an excellent disguised entry point for doing just! Now being implemented by western governments claiming to respect personal freedom while slavering ever more at the contrary examples already set by overtly authoritarian states.

Grotesque, dangerous and another authority grab under the tediously stupid old guise of protecting the children from old boogeymen like pornography and newer but equally bloated, loaded boogeymen like "misinformation" and mental health.

Also, I call absolute bullshit on this claim:

Opposition lawmaker Dan Tehan told Parliament the government had agreed to accept amendments in the Senate that would bolster privacy protections. Platforms would not be allowed to compel users to provide government-issued identity documents including passports or driver’s licenses, nor could they demand digital identification through a government system.

I absolutely see the point, but I also see how politically negligent the world has been in regulating social media. The companies that run the platforms are well aware of the risks and psychological harm their product causes, but will never ever do anything that is driven by those worries instead of profit. Hence, we need regulations. Unfortunately it is quite hard to impose anything within the legal framework that would help with the main issue. ID requests are a wrong answer to a real problem.

I am a longtime proposer of a big tobacco style set of policies. The banning and sanctioning of a harmful digital product is unfortunately exponentially harder than regulating a physical one like cigarettes. Nonetheless, the imposition of health advice, labels, and mandatory limits on usage to be built in the apps should be viable, just like imposing pictures of cancer patients and “smoking kills” on cigarette packages.

One thing I don't understand about aggressive anti-regulation arguments is they don't actually provide a solution. Supposedly the negative outcomes from social media are to be ignored because of privacy? Like you can ignore any societal issue with this blanket argument of privacy... Ok, shall we have no laws because fundamentally we should be free to do anything? Why is it acceptable for the government to stop me pouring crude oil into [name redacted], but not to stop current status quo "acceptable" (but probably very harmful) behaviours like social media?

> Why is it acceptable for the government to stop me pouring crude oil into Sydney Harbour, but not to stop current status quo "acceptable" (but probably very harmful) behaviours like social media?

Kind of obvious why - the scale of harm.

Think for a second, smoking is still legal. Smoking literally gives cancer and has insane societal cost. But somehow it's acceptable.

Thus yes, privacy argument is a very reasonable argument 'on the Internet'.

Laws asking digital ID are worse than the problem they are supposed to solve.

>I also see how politically negligent the world has been in regulating social media. The companies that run the platforms are well aware of the risks and psychological harm their product causes, but will never ever do anything that is driven by those worries instead of profit. Hence, we need regulations.

I'm sorry, how about some evidence? I'd like to see clear, causal, measured and well structured evidence of all this supposed massive social harm, in excess of the social harm that often happens to adolescents for just being hormone-loaded adolescents. HN is (ironically given the employment status of many readers here) loaded with breathless harping about the psychological evils of social media, but I see little concrete data being presented.

Your tobacco example is about a product for which evidence fulfills all of the above I mentioned. It's a known, very dangerous quality that's measurable and replicable.

Where is the same for social media? I see a lot of hand-wringing hysteria about regulating social networks without any specific and concrete examples of why.

I dislike many aspects of today's social media companies, most notably their disgusting treatment of users as a vast data trove to be goaded via dark patterns and squeezed for as many bits of personal info as possible. But, the solution to this is in regulating the companies themselves, and setting much harder data privacy regulations.

It does not need to be with government instead regulating average people condescendingly to force certain types of behavior about personal digital choices, particularly not via bills that screamingly imply de-anonymization.

At least anecdotally, of the nearly dozen adolescent family members of mine with who i'm close enough to somewhat gauge mental health, I see no real signs that their access to TikTok, Facebook (barely used by adolescents in my country anyhow) or other social platforms is anything close to a major cause of problems in their lives, at least not in terms of anything they do while using it.

The problems I do see existing are those of all those photos, text posts and videos of them being stored, and possibly used in the future to judge their character. However again, as I said above, this is a thing for regulations against these fucking companies' practices, by a government that doesn't do it because it also loves so much data. The regulations are entirely misguided being applied against kids and their parents, especially in such invasive ways.

>Malicious bills like this will normalize identifying yourself legally as a regulatory requirement and will make it much easier to criminalize tools and efforts for keeping one's privacy.

What if it will not normalize anything and youre just overreacting?

If compliance requires that every user provide some form of ID, this policy will be a catastrophe for privacy and a major downgrade in terms of usability. Much more annoying than the pop-ups asking me to acknowledge cookies.

Related later:

Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264733

Sounds useful from a mental health perspective .. am I right in thinking detractors are concerned about the loss of privacy needed to enforce the bill, or is it something else?

Knowing Australia this is just a ploy to enforce people having to link their personal ID with their social media accounts later down the line.

Or give them an option to delete their account.

The dumbest decision that stupid government can make. And it’s not a partisan issue, as when this causes the current party to fail, the “malignant tuber” will ratchet it further. Cooked either way.

Australia has always been run by technologically iterate petty tyrants. They have wanted to deanonymize Internet users, and now they will try to force the internet to give them their wish. Resist.

Ultimately, Australia will be further isolated. Internet properties will decide to block Australian IPs rather than complying with eKaren and co. Elon cancels starlink in Australia.

we will see a rise of bootleg socialmedia plattforms hosted under the radar.

Probably safer for democracy if they ban adults of voting age from social media.

Half measure because Australia is afraid to outright ban Tiktok?

Old men shout at the sky.

Except this time they wield power

For those not familiar with Australian parliamentary processes, the original bill was introduced on the 21st of November 2024 and today the 27th of November 2024 was endorsed by the House of Representatives with no amendments agreed to. The final time the Senate is in session is tomorrow the 28th of November 2024, then returning in February 2025 if the Senate cannot agree on the bill tomorrow.

For consideration tomorrow by the senate are 13 proposed amendments to this bill. One amendment comes from the government proposing the bill (34% of Senate vote) and other amendments mostly come from a political coalition with ~40-45% of the vote who passed the bill today through the House of Representatives, and minor parties and independents with ~15-20% of the vote and whom opposed the bill today from being ready for Senate consideration.

The government wanting to pass the bill has only 34% of the vote in the Senate so they will likely have to agree with some amendments tomorrow if they want to get the bill enacted.

The following amendments with significant changes and significant Senate support are due for consideration:

(A) Social media services can not "collect" government-issued identity documents and can not use an "accredited service" (Digital ID system that the Australian government is trying to roll out some time after 2026).[1] The minister can also regulate at any time additional information and verification methods that social media services are not allowed to collect. (amendment of the government proposing this bill with >34% of Senate support)

(B) Parents can approve for their children to have social media accounts.[2] (>~40-45% of Senate support)

(C) Social media services narrowed in definition such that it attempts (still very poorly) to describe Facebook feeds without also banning 15 year olds from Facebook Messenger, comments sections of a news website, chat in online games, etc.[3] It also appears to allow the government to demand ISPs, DNS providers, VPN providers, application store operators, etc hand over unspecified types of information if it may reveal compliance status of a social media service. (>~40-45% of Senate support)

(D) Not mandate social media media services use an Australian government online identity system.[4] But a social media service is not prohibited from volunteering to use an Australian government online identity system. And they probably will use it in preference to other age verification schemes because it presents the least risk to them (risk transfers to government providing the identity system). Social media services are still allowed to ask users to email or upload their identity documents or go through any other identity verification hoops the social media service may invent. (>~40-45% of Senate support)

(E) Add risk assessment and transparency reporting obligations for "large" social media services.[5] Appears to allow a minister (not parliament) to maintain a standard for the risk assessment which has mandatory mitigation methods specified within that social media services must implement. The risk assessments of social media services are required to be published to the public. (>15-20% of Senate support)

[1] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am...

[2] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am...

[3] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am...

[4] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am...

[5] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am...

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