Mainstream Media Sweeps Australian Age Verification Disaster Under the Rug

Australia’s age verification experiment has been a disaster. Mainstream media is sweeping the problems under the rug and declaring victory.

The push for age verification, going so far as to outright ban certain demographics from social media entirely, has long been based on disinformation and personal vibes of certain lawmakers and technophobes. Naturally, the mainstream media, who have been at war with the internet for decades (with the long shot hope of having the internet as a whole shut down so people would somehow jump to the conclusion that all of their media consumption should all just go through their organizations again), has helped push the moral panic that social media is this ominous threat to everyone and the more people are outlawed from the platforms, the better.

In many of these debates, governments, such as in Canada and Australia, have opened the doors for experts to weigh in on this. The overwhelming conclusion from experts is that these efforts to implement age verification, whether that is to target the original intended target of pornographic material or banning people of certain age groups from social media, would be an absolute disaster on a number of fronts.

If you are talking about the legal standpoint, in many jurisdictions, the government censoring the speech of people on these platforms would be completely unconstitutional. As such, such laws are very open to legal challenges.

From a technological perspective, the technology to safeguard people’s privacy while still accurately filtering out certain users simply doesn’t exist. No matter how much you try and paint over the problems with buzzwords like “AI” and “facial recognition”, it doesn’t change how critically flawed the technology is. Whether that is the use of VPNs, users going to non-compliant websites, using fake IDs, using video game characters, or even using the comments section of old podcasts, there is an endless number of ways that the technology can be circumvented. There is zero hope of a technological solution that is up to the task of deterring access to certain kinds of content or platforms in general.

From a privacy standpoint, such efforts are also a complete disaster. If anything, governments should be looking at laws that discourages the use of sensitive personal information being passed around on the internet. These laws moves things in the exact opposite direction by mandating that even more highly sensitive personal information get put on the internet. Even worse, it centralizes that personal information into a single source, making it highly attractive to black hat hackers to just swing by and swipe the data afterwards for a massive handsome profit. It’s pretty much the worst thing you can do from a privacy standpoint for all involved.

These are some of the major arguments being made by experts and people who know how technology really works. Their words were backed by study after study after study which concludes that, at minimum, age verification technology is not ready for prime time. More likely, it’ll never be ready for prime time and all age verification laws is create a massive privacy, security, and social disaster.

Unfortunately, the response from many lawmakers is to dismiss all the warnings and reject all the evidence. This while dismissing experts as somehow co-conspirators of some kind of grand conspiracy perpetrated by “Big Tech” to actively harm teenagers because reasons and like such as. This left experts dismayed at how the government was in the process of making a monumental lawmaking mistake all because those lawmakers chose to disconnect themselves from reality and rely on “just trust us, bro” reasoning to pass these laws. This includes buzzwords like “industry standard”, “double blind”, “facial recognition”, and “AI” as if any of that somehow made a damned difference on the situation.

As these laws started getting passed, the very things us experts have been warning about are, well, happening. This includes the discord data breach, the AgeGo scandal, the data leaks, and the breaches, the hacks. Then there’s the technology itself failing to properly flag people, even going so far as to be fooled by a freaking golden retriever. All of this to make it absolutely abundantly clear that age verification laws sucks because the technology sucks.

While the experts and research was right all along, the only response from age verification apologists to all of this is to dismiss all of the long warned about problems as little more than the platforms incorrectly implementing the technology. For them, the technology is perfect in every way shape and form. So, any problems faced by the technology is clearly the fault of the multi-billion dollar platforms because they are clearly just not nerding hard enough. Some even go so far as to push the conspiracy theory that platforms are somehow intentionally undermining the technology to make the age verification companies look bad (is there even a reason to try to explain how stupid that sounds?). We’re talking about weapons grade levels of delusion at this point.

Of course, the stupid thing in all of this is that the mainstream media has been one of the biggest cheerleaders in all of this. So much of the reporting has a tendency of sweeping problems like social harms, technology, privacy, and security under the rug to pretend that this is clearly the way to move forward. That is exactly the kind of reaction I’ve been seeing as of late. Seriously, I wish I was making this up, but one source, the Guardian, declared that the launch happened with “barely a hitch”. Go ahead, read the article headline yourself:

Australia’s social media ban launched with barely a hitch – but the real test is still to come

It’s difficult to even begin to describe just how asinine that headline is. The headline is a straight up bald-faced lie. There’s no way the author wrote that with a straight face if he had a remote clue at how things are going in Australia. The problems have been as plentiful as they were predictable. Already, Reddit is suing the Australian government over this. This along with the numerous problems I’ve mentioned above.

Yet, the author pushes this narrative of everything being absolutely bright and peachy in the country:

On the lawns of the prime minister’s Kirribilli residence in Sydney, overlooking the harbour, Anthony Albanese said he had never been prouder.

“This is a day in which my pride to be prime minister of Australia has never been greater. This is world-leading. This is Australia showing enough is enough,” he said as the country’s under-16s social media ban came into effect on Wednesday.

Albanese pointed to gathered media including those from the BBC, CNN and from Japan. He said the world was watching.

“But Australia is leading.”

The news has indeed turned heads globally.

Some countries have already announced an intention to follow suit, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Denmark and Norway.

Others have been watching with keen interest to answer the question, as Albanese put it: “If Australia can do it, why can’t we?”

The policy to cut off the social media access of more than 2 million under-16s has remained popular with Australians in the 12 months since the legislation was passed, with almost two-thirds of voters in favour of the ban. It has also enjoyed support among the major political parties.

I mean, yeah, if you ignore all the opposition towards the legislation including the teenagers suing to put a stop to this madness, yeah, everyone is totally supportive of this law. All you need to do is to live in a completely alternate reality and all the controversy goes away.

Of course, it’s not just The Guardian pushing these laws and openly lobbying to implement similar censorship measures in other countries. For example, Canadian mainstream media outlet, Global News, pushed the moral panic about how social media is inherently harmful to people and that maybe Canada should follow suit with this ban. Never mind all of that pesky research that points out time and time and time again that the narrative that social media is inherently harmful is a completely bullshit claim. The science simply doesn’t back it. Of course, mainstream media generally doesn’t give a damn about evidence, only pushing moral panics that contributes to greater harm in society.

Another example is France24 which seems to be actively lobbying to implement these mass government internet censorship measures:

The measure is a bid to protect minors from exposure to violent and sexual content, cyberbullying and screen addiction – and it could soon be replicated in France.

MPs mostly from French President Emmanual Macron’s Ensemble pour la République (EPR) party put forward a bill on November 18 that would ban under-15s from most social media platforms.

The proposal, which also includes a digital curfew for 15- to 18-year-olds, will be debated by parliament on January 19, 2026.

The bill was inspired by the conclusions of a parliamentary inquiry into “the psychological effects of TikTok on minors”, set up in Spring 2025 to respond to growing concerns about the harmful effects of the video-sharing platform.

The inquiry’s conclusions, released in early September, raised the alarm over dangerous content shared on TikTok including videos inciting self-harm, suicide and eating disorders, all of which were visible to young users.

It highlighted techniques used to reinforce the addictive nature of the platform such as infinite scrolling and personalised recommendations.

The report also found a link between excessive use of the platform and mental health problems among users such as anxiety, trouble sleeping, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.

Yes, speech is a terrible plague afflicting society and only government can save us from the tyranny of human rights and expression. If only the government can finally just get to the business of censoring the ever living fuck out of us so we can finally be free from the things that people actually want.

The disconnect from reality here is staggering, but if they lied about where the technology is at before the legislative process, why stop there? Why not lie about the end results on top of it all? So, while the moral panic, misleading statements, and lying is disappointing, I don’t think it’s particularly surprising either. Given their track record of low quality journalism on certain issues, it’s no surprise that so few people even trust them. The stunts they are pulling right now to try and lobby for even more government censorship laws, it wouldn’t be surprising if that trust remains at rock bottom as well.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.