Faced With Age Verification Failure, Australia Doubles Fines for Social Media

Age verification was always an impossible to comply with law, but Australia is doubling fines on social media for failing to do the impossible.

Let’s say this right off the top: you can’t perfectly filter out anyone below a certain age on social media while still maintaining people’s privacy at the same time. It’s basically the same ask as demanding that companies safely break encryption or to have warrantless wiretapping of everyone without affecting people’s privacy. You are asking for the impossible.

People did step forward to warn about this. Age verification technology is notoriously ineffective and completely obliterates what little privacy people can expect. Those pointing out this obvious aspect were routinely ignored throughout various legislative processes and dismissed as people who simply don’t understand technology… even though people pointing this out are technology experts to begin with. Instead, snake oil salesmen selling this technology were treated as if they were preaching the gospel as they swore up and down that their technology was “98% effective” and totally respect privacy. Those obviously impossible claims by some of the most questionable people were believed over the experts and laws in places like Australia were passed.

What ensued since was a gradual unravelling of age verification. There was the 2025 study that showed that the vendors had failure rates as high as 87%. People began deploying fake IDs, video game characters, pictures of golden retrievers, or even using sharpies to draw facial hair on themselves.

The privacy side of things wasn’t any better. There was the Discord data breach, the AgeGO scandal, the Yoti privacy scandal, and additional leaks and breaches. If you submitted your personal information to age gates, there’s a good possibility it wound up in the hands of data brokers or black hat hackers at this point.

The mainstream media flipped out when they saw these age verification laws gradually go down in flames. They quickly went to work going into denial as they paper over all of the scandals and problems by arguing that things are going off with “barely a hitch”. The thing is, denial can only get you so far. As these laws spread to other countries, so did the failures. Europe went to the extreme of developing their own app to ensure that there were “no more excuses” only to have their app fail in spectacular fashion. The UK age verification laws didn’t fare much better with the laws failing spectacularly as people circumvent the age gates on a massive scale.

The cherry on top of all of this was a recent study that found that 85% of younger people supposedly “banned” from social media are still on social media. These laws had no shot at ending any other way apart from possibly social media companies blocking whole countries altogether. Well, that latter possibility just got a boost in odds that it could happen.

In Australia, the government is reeling from that study that found that Australia’s age verification laws have failed. The mainstream media is desperately trying to spin this as being all the fault of social media and it seems that the Australian government is adopting the “blame social media” plot. In recent reports, it seems that the Australian government is planning on doubling fines against social media for failing to do the impossible. From EU Today:

Australia has doubled the maximum penalty for systematic failures to enforce its social-media ban for children under 16, intensifying a closely watched experiment that European regulators are likely to study as they tighten age-assurance rules of their own.

The maximum fine will rise from A$49.5 million to A$99 million, while the country’s eSafety Commissioner will receive stronger powers to demand evidence from platforms and collect information from third parties. The regulator is examining compliance by Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok.

The decision follows evidence that formal account removals have not eliminated use. Platforms have deactivated or restricted about five million under-16 accounts, but a study of 408 adolescents found that 85% of 12- to 15-year-olds were still using social media three months after the ban. Two-thirds of those who evaded controls reportedly did so by entering a false age or submitting a selfie that was accepted as showing them to be at least 16.

That gap between compliance figures and actual behaviour is the central policy lesson. Governments can prohibit access and platforms can close accounts, but neither measure proves that children have stopped using the service.

Here’s the thing in all of this: raising the penalties for failing to comply is only sensible if the platforms are demonstrably acting negligently and just consider the fines of the cost of doing business. While the messaging from the Australia government appears to be that, there doesn’t appear to be evidence supporting this narrative. If anything, all of the evidence suggests that the technology to carry out these laws simply doesn’t exist. We’ve had studies, reports, and retroactive studies all pointing to the same thing: the technology is not up to the task. It is my belief that the technology is never going to ever be up to the task and the law is demanding the impossible.

What you are really accomplishing with the doubling of fines is turning this situation into a cash cow. There is no hope for the platforms of ever deploying a system that will ever comply with the law. So, you have a situation where the government basically hits up the platforms every once in a while for money and goes to collect – something similar to a protection racket. This coupled with angry “nerd harder” messaging from the government.

From the platforms perspective, it’s actually a fairly simple question: how much money is the government going to extort out of you before you say “enough is enough”? After all, blocking an entire country altogether is certainly an option. Yes, it’s a nuclear option, but how many hundreds of millions are you willing to just fork over to the government before the cost is greater than whatever money you earn from being in the country in the first place? At least when you deploy the nuclear option, a simple geo-block and shutting down local offices is all that is needed. If the government comes knocking on that front, just point out that you don’t operate in the country any more. If people circumvent the geo-block, is it really something you care about? Not really. It sure beats getting fined billions of dollars for people defeating similar (and much more faulty) age gating.

At any rate, the experts (including us) predicted failure with these laws and that is exactly what we are getting. There’s nothing surprising about this. Now, governments are left scrambling to improvise their way out of the mess they put themselves in. We are entering the era of governmental improvisation where the government tries to think on the fly and throw anything and everything against the wall with the hopes that something will salvage the situation. The only thing government is going to get out of this, however, is disappointment.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.