The failure of the Australian age verification laws has left advocates with the only tool left in the chest: denial.
It was long warned that social media censorship and surveillance laws collectively known as “age verification” laws was a disaster in waiting. The warnings were that age verification systems were notoriously insecure with personal information, prone to getting hacked and information getting stolen, blatantly unconstitutional, and completely ineffective on top of it all. There is really no upside to any of this. Yet, for supporters of these disastrous laws, they relied on conspiracy theories and misinformation to sell their snake oil solutions. The claims, among other things, is that people who are opposed to these are just part of some grand conspiracy pushed by “Big Tech” to avoid responsibility. In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that we saw this scenario play out because lies and moral panic were about the only thing that supporters had at their disposal when trying to sell their terrible laws.
The outcomes were completely predictable. Teens were using sharpies and pictures of golden retrievers to defeat the age verification systems. Others utilized the more reliable VPN technology to defeat the censor walls. The technology became an absolute security and privacy nightmare following the Discord breach, the AgeGO scandal, and additional data leaks and breaches to boot.
While age verification laws and technology were always destined for an outcome like we ultimately ended up seeing, the push to screw over the population never really stopped. Mainstream media decided to completely rewrite history by arguing that these age verification laws are going off with ‘barely a hitch’. This as they try and convince lawmakers in other countries to implement similar disastrous age verification laws. To a degree, the mainstream media propaganda is working with countries like Ireland and France pushing similarly disastrous laws.
In Canada, one media outlet hoping for similar laws is the CBC. They recently published an article suggesting that Canada should implement similar laws. From the CBC:
Michael Wipfli, a vocal advocate of Australia’s new social media ban for youth under 16, says he understands the frustration some tweens and younger teens have felt since it came into effect — but he is not losing sleep over the hate mail or criticism, including from his kids’ classmates.
“If people want to vent like that, then so be it,” said Wipfli, a radio broadcaster known to Australians as Wippa, speaking from his home in Sydney.
“There’s kids between the ages of 13 and 16 now that are screaming because they can’t be on it…. The behaviour change will take time.”
The ban has not been perfect. Some kids found ways around age verification, he says, but Wipfli wants the country to stay the course.
“There’s a place for social media; it’s just not in the vulnerable minds of kids under the age of 16,” he said.
The CBC would later admit that teens are circumventing the laws, but apparently, you should totally just ignore all of that:
Focusing on kids who evade Australia’s ban misses the policy’s intent — to pressure tech companies to reduce online harms, not to vilify teens — and is not, on its own, evidence of whether the policy is working, says Timothy Koskie, a media and communications researcher at the University of Sydney.
Koskie said determining the impact will take time and careful analysis of wide-ranging data, from standardized test scores to reports of cyberbullying.
“The policy was made to address certain risks and if we see those risks go down over the longer term, then we can start to say this might be having a good influence,” he said.
Koskie said long-term success will also require that multiple nations — including Canada — to keep pressure on social media companies to adhere to their commitments.
“It needs to not be just Australia, right? Australia needs to have the backing of its friends internationally,” he said.
He added that Canada will need “policy that’s different from ours, that fits the Canadian context,” balancing international coordination with measures that are “specific enough to be effective … in that environment.”
That really is the argument they are going with here. Yes, the age verification laws have been a complete disaster. It failed to keep peoples information safe and failed to keep the targeted demographic off of the platforms over some vague and unscientific reason. No, the reality is that they feel like they “did something” and that’s what truly matters here. See, warm fuzzy feelings overrides pretty much everything else and that’s what truly counts at the end of the day. So, we are just going to let this complete disaster ride in hopes that someday, somehow, somewhere, something positive can be found in the research afterwards. What is it we are looking for? Who the hell knows! They’re just desperately looking for some sort of excuse to justify all the damage they are causing and as long as that answer remains elusive, then the excuse is that it is all just very inconclusive.
The reality, however, is that all these age verification laws are doing is teaching people how to circumvent government censorship. It isn’t just one or two teenagers managing to evade the censorship, but rather, a good portion of the population doing that. An experiment on this highlighted this in a pretty dramatic fashion. From the Christian Science Monitor:
Jimmy Kakanis surprised his Australian classroom with an unusual pop quiz. He posed a single yes-or-no question to his teenage students: Are you still using social media?
In December, the Australian Parliament banned popular apps such as TikTok, X, and Instagram from hosting users under the age of 16. It was the first such law in the world. Legislative bodies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas are now actively pursuing similar action.
But in the shire town of Murwillumbah, just a kangaroo hop from the Gold Coast on Australia’s eastern edge, Mr. Kakanis’ students had shrugged off the social media ban. Only three teens out of 25 had any of their accounts disabled. Two were on Snapchat and the other was on Instagram.
“The rest had found workarounds,” says Mr. Kakanis, a proponent of the ban, via email. “The students who had their accounts disabled waited a while, then made new accounts with ease.”
News reports suggest that this particular group of 14- and 15-year-olds are hardly the only ones to rebel.
This paints a very stark reality of just how things are going. All these laws were doing from the teens perspective is teaching them how to defeat mass government internet censorship. From the sounds of things, the teenagers are winning in this battle with their own government. This aspect has long been a known silver lining in all of this. Indeed, for a number of years, younger internet users really only had the fear of some random DMCA notice popping up in their parents inboxes one day. The odds of that were slim, but not impossible. Still, the threat of that was enough for some users to adopt more secure methods of file-sharing such as the usage of VPNs, premium Usenet subscriptions, private BitTorrent trackers, and additional methods that exists to this day.
Today, that added layer of security is more importantly focused on how to evade the government censors. It’s a move that, for the government, is only going to serve to backfire on the government in pretty spectacular ways. After all, if the government thought it was difficult to control the flow of information before, it’s only going to get worse when a whole generation of users adopt a routine of implementing anti-censorship methods before even accessing the web in the first place.
The thing is, pushing Canada to adopt similar laws is going to be a heck of an uphill battle at this point. The Liberal party is basically on the verge of a majority government and they have long expressed skepticism over this style of internet censorship. There is the possibility that the current age verification bill in Canada, Bill S-209, is being watered down to only cover paid pornographic material instead of targeting the wider open internet. If that can be confirmed, it seems that the Canadian government, barring some sort of major flip-flop, isn’t exactly willing to entertain this idea in the first place – at least for now. The mainstream media may be hoping for more government censorship on social media, but the political landscape, for the time being, isn’t looking too good for that. This will no doubt come as a relief for internet users in Canada at the very least.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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