Australian Age Verification Law Pushed By Gambling Ad Company

Have you ever wondered why Australian age verification set the age to 16? It could be related to gambling ads.

The Australian age verification law that bans everyone under the age of 16 from platforms has been a complete disaster. There’s been mistakes by the technology where it allowed under 16 years of age people through, the technology was fooled by a golden retriever, and it sparked a lawsuit from Reddit. The problems experts had warned about have been coming to fruition and that is only part of the problems with it.

The mainstream media has been working hard to sweep all of that under the rug, arguing that it has all gone off with ‘barely a hitch’ and that other countries are looking to replicate the overwhelming “success” this law has had even though there was really nothing successful about it. This gambit by the mainstream media is nothing new. They are looking at tech policies, figuring out which ones could potentially have a positive influence on their bottom line at the expense of everyone else, then lying their collective asses off to try and make those laws reality. After all, we’ve seen them do this with the link tax law, Big Lie 1.0, and Big Lie 2.0. So, this would be far from the first time they’ve pulled something like that.

In this case, the motivation is quite clear by the mainstream media to lie about this. Viewership has been tanking for years as trust has rapidly dried up among audiences. The quality of programming has been hitting rock bottom as traditional media outlets simply push out whatever programming is the absolute cheapest, expecting blockbuster audiences to come rolling in no matter what they feed audiences. Audiences, however, have been turning away in droves in favour of internet sources where a huge number of people are actively trying to attract audiences with high quality content. The traditional media simply blundered this whole thing by just launching regular hit pieces about social media, pretending that it is basically the work of Satan in a bid to get people to come back to their crappy programming. So, anything they can think of that would drive audiences back to their own programming (except actually producing good quality content of course) is basically being tried – specifically, regulations that sabotages the success of the internet in general. Examples include age verification, online harms legislation, cell phone bans, the Online Streaming Act, and a plethora of other laws.

So, when problems arise regarding things like age verification, link taxes, and whatnot, the media is generally quite reluctant to cover such things. After all, it might make their efforts to try and undermine the internet at large.

One of the stories that cropped up that I don’t recall really seeing very many places has to do with Australian age verification. That is specifically who is pushing for such laws.

One of the accusations by age verification supporters is that people who are against age verification laws are part of some sort of secret network of people bankrolled by “Big Tech” to undermine age verification laws. People like me are apparently secretly being paid under the table to publish articles saying mean things about age verification laws. It’s all part of a grand conspiracy. I’ll say this in response: I wish I was being paid at all to do this, but revenues don’t even pay for the server costs of this site. It’s why I have a Patreon page and a Ko-Fi page, hoping that this would someday change, but that simply hasn’t happened.

The hilarious thing here is that this is well and truly becoming a case of “every accusation is a confession”. Have you ever wondered why Australian age verification is set at 16 years old? Why not 15, 14, or even 17? What makes 16 years of age the ultimate cutoff point? Out of all the coverage I’ve seen on Australia’s age verification laws, there was never really much in the way of explaining why specifically that age outside of how that is the age that was set. Well, as it turns out, there is another law in Australia surrounding gambling ads. Specifically, gambling ads cannot be served to people under the age of 16 online.

So, if everyone under the age of 16 is supposedly “banned” from social media, what can the gambling industry do now that they are gone? Serve ads on social media, of course! So, earlier this month (I’ve been meaning to cover this for a while now, admittedly), it’s probably not a huge surprise that an ad agency that does gambling ads have been quietly bankrolling efforts to implement Australia’s age verification to serve their own interests. From TechDirt:

That’s the latest in this incredible scoop from the Australian publication Crikey.

The big marketing campaign pushing the under-16 social media ban was called “36 Months”—framed (misleadingly) that way because they claimed that raising the social media age from 13 to 16 was keeping kids offline for an additional 36 months.

But, as Crikey details, the entire 36 Months campaign was actually planned out and created by an ad company named FINCH, which just so happened to also be working on a huge gambling ad campaign for TAB, which is a huge online betting operation in Australia. And, it wasn’t their only such campaign:

FINCH has worked on at least five gambling advertisements since 2017, according to public announcements and trade magazine reporting. Its clients include TAB Australia (a 2023 campaign called “Australia’s national sport is…”), Ladbroke, Sportsbet and CrownBet (now BetEasy).

There was staff overlap, too. Attwells’ LinkedIn lists him as both 36 Months’ managing director and FINCH’s head of communications from May to December 2024. FINCH staff worked on the 36 Months campaign.

Now, add to that the missing piece of the puzzle, which is that Australia had been investigating bans on online gambling ads, but just last month (oh, such perfect timing) it decided not to do that citing the under-16 ban as a key reason why they could leave gambling ads online.

The Murphy inquiry suggested bookmakers were grooming children with ads online, but Labor’s new social media ban on under-16s is viewed as a solution because it would, in principle, limit their exposure to such advertising online.

How very, very convenient.

This is exactly the false sense of security many ban critics warned about. Politicians and parents now think kids are magically “safe,” even though kids are trivially bypassing the ban. Meanwhile, the adults who might have educated those kids about online gambling risks—a problem that heavily targets teenage boys—now assume the government has handled it. Gambling ads stay up, kids stay online, and everyone pretends the problem is solved.

Crikey goes out of its way to say that there’s no proof that FINCH did this on behalf of their many gambling clients, but it does note that FINCH has claimed that it funded the 36 Months campaign mainly by itself, which certainly raises some questions as to why an advertising firm would do that if it didn’t have some other reason to do so.

Incredibly, Crikey notes that part of the 36 Months campaign was to attack anyone who called the social media ban into question by calling them big tech shills, even without any proof:

Spokespeople for 36 Months had previously accused an academic and youth mental health group of being bought off by big tech because of their unpaid roles on boards advising social media platforms on youth safety.

When Crikey asked them what proof they had, citing denials from those they accused, Attwells said he “hadn’t looked into it” but that they’d heard of a trend where technology companies would indirectly fund people to support work that supports “their agenda”.

“The money doesn’t go straight to them,” he said.

Yes: an ad agency funded by gambling clients, running a campaign that benefits those gambling clients, accused critics of being secretly funded by tech companies—without evidence—while claiming indirect funding is how these things work. Such projection.

That is one heck of a revelation. I would consider this a massive political scandal, really. After all, this is a pretty big chunk of evidence that the social media ban for people under 16 years of age had nothing to do with protecting children. It was about protecting revenue for industries related to the gambling sector. It’s ironic given the media, at least the media here in Canada, have been long complaining about the prevalence of gambling advertising and how it’s fuelling gambling addiction (while still showing ads for things like Jackpot City and Betano). Yet, here we see an ad agency with gambling clients pushing for these laws so they can serve more gambling ads to people. Outside of TechDirt and a handful Australian sources, I never once saw this mentioned in the news coverage around here.

Still, I hope this revelation does reach others as the debate surrounding age verification continues. It is a very important piece of context that lobbyists would love to see conveniently forgotten.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.