Ireland Pushing to Export Australia’s Failed Age Verification to Europe

Australia’s age verification on social media has failed. Ireland wants that same failure across Europe.

Australia’s age verification scheme to block people under 16 from accessing social media has been an unmitigated disaster. People such as myself warned about why such a thing would be a disaster. Those problems include relentless censorship creep as more websites get censored, is legally problematic, the privacy and security nightmare this whole thing is, and how easily circumvented such technology is in the first place. Australian lawmakers responded to all of these warnings and chose a head in sand approach and just relied shoulder to the wheel on the “just believe hard enough” strategy to win the day.

It didn’t work.

The expansions were constant with the inclusion of video games, search engines, Youtube, AI chatbots, Reddit, and Kick. It really proved the point that once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What’s more, it’s unlikely that the Australian government is finished thinking of which website or service type it intends on targeting next with its mass government internet censorship.

Reddit responded to this law by filing a legal challenge against this. Teenagers also sued the government over this very law as well.

The privacy and security nightmare has already been playing out across the globe. There’s the Discord breach, the AgeGO scandal, data leaks, and even data breaches. If anything, the security of the technology is proving to be about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.

Then there is the effectiveness of the technology which is also, predictably, turning out to be a total disaster. As if to further prove earlier Australian research right, there have been numerous reported incidences of the technology allowing under age people through. At one point, a golden retriever picture found on Google images fooled the tech. Even further, people are flocking to VPNs and alternative platforms to further circumvent the technology.

The punchline to all of this is that supporters of age verification have accused critics of being part of a grand conspiracy to undermine these laws quietly paid for by Big Tech. As it turns out, the opposite was true as an ad agency that creates gambling advertising was busted quietly funding efforts to support age verification on top of it all. So, even on a general level of optics, this law has been a total failure.

As time goes on, it is likely that these laws will only further unravel as the fatal flaws get further exposed. In fact, I am reminded of an old meme in all of this that talks about serving as a warning to others in all of this:

Honestly, when the whole world looks at the experience of Australia’s age verification, it should be held up as a warning sign of what not to do. Australia burned their hand on the stove and other countries should conclude that maybe they shouldn’t put their collective hands on the same said stove.

Apparently, Ireland did not heed those warnings.

In a report that recently surfaced, representatives from Ireland said that they hope to implement Australia’s broken social media age verification on the entirety of Europe, presumably to experience the exact same failures of the law in their own back yards in the process. From Extra.ie:

The Government will use Ireland’s presidency of the EU next year to push for new laws to block anonymous ‘keyboard warriors’ from spreading hate and disinformation online.

In an interview with Extra.ie, Tánaiste Simon Harris said that the Government will lead calls for the introduction of ID-verified social media accounts.

And he revealed that his Fine Gael Cabinet colleague, Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan, is bringing forward ‘very exciting proposals’ to introduce an Australian-style ban on children accessing social media ‘during our presidency of the Council of the European Union next year’.

The moves will likely trigger a showdown with social media giants, many of whose European headquarters are in Ireland, and from Donald Trump’s administration, which this week imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at the heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating US tech companies.

However, Mr Harris believes there is support for moves to clamp down on anonymous accounts and bots from powerful EU leaders such as France president Emmanuel Macron and the UK prime minister Keir Starmer.

So, they’re saying that they are very excited over the prospect of ruining people’s lives en-mass. They saw what a catastrophic failure age verification in Australia was and decided that this is exactly what they want to push for in Europe. Why? Because fuck you all, that’s why.

Now, it goes without saying that anonymous speech is not inherently harmful. In fact, there are people out there who seriously need to be able to speak anonymously. It’s 2025 (almost 2026), there’s no reason for this to not be common knowledge when it comes to the basics of the internet. Making the blanket assumption that anonymous speech is inherently harmful is just plain ignorant on how things work. If you are freaking out about anonymous speech on a platform like Facebook, then you have no clue how Facebook works.

What’s more, assuming that age verification is somehow going to get rid of “harmful” material online further demonstrates how ignorant these officials are in the first place. People will have no problem using their real names and information while still spewing hate. Being forced to self-identify is not an obstacle for people spreading hate. Saying otherwise only further demonstrates the level of cluelessness you are operating on. Even then, as repeatedly demonstrated over and over again, the technology enforcing this completely sucks to identify people in the first place, so these age checks are going to be trivially defeated anyway.

Hopefully, the rest of Europe will resist this terrible idea. It didn’t work in Australia and it won’t work in Europe. All you are doing with these laws is causing unnecessary pain and suffering.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.