The for profit social media companies profile users and know their demographics in great detail. Kids are obviously watching different content to adults. They are in an equivalent position to a bottleshop employee letting a 12 year old walk out with a carton of premixes and claiming not only that they didn’t know (false) but they want to keep not knowing because it is good for business. The industry only cares about money and has proven they can’t self regulate.

The only question is how to react. Not whether to react.

The social media companies are obviously scare mongering and spreading misinformation to protect their financial interests. We need to balance peoples very reasonable demands for privacy with holding predatory corporate behaviour to account. The most likely outcome will be a requirement to use a third party age verification service subject to Australian privacy laws to verify a new user to a service so that there is no need to provide that informtion to the social media companies. People willingly, enthusiastically give their entire life history to Meta along with all their friends, colleagues and family along with photos that allow biometric fingerprinting of their children for life. Giving them a simple yes/no to the question of if you are legal age based on a trusted third party seems a very reasonable request in comparison.

The policy is predicated on protecting children for their mental health and development when they are at a very vulnerable age. Not all kids have responsible and capable parents. Lots of kids live in abusive circumstances, with absent/negligent parents and some kids are forced by circumstances to effectively be the the care givers/providers in their household as their parents guardians may be incapable. The world is really fucking sad sometimes.

When you go into a pub or supermarket and ask for beer or smokes they don’t give them to anyone who doesn’t have a child lock on them. They ask for proof of age. You can defeat that in various ways but they too are illegal and create risks for those involved. It isn’t perfect but it works well enough to reduce harms.

You want something available only to adults, then the convention is you provide proof you are an adult. That is a privacy nightmare if poorly implemented but then so is the entire digital realm right now.

I think we are missing the big opportunity as a society. The social media platforms are making shitloads of money through predatory manipulation of user habits because they get shitloads from advertising. Just ban the fucking advertising. Most of the bad shit goes away overnight for kids and adults because without the advertising the incentives to keep people trapped in a dopamine loop is mostly gone. The big platforms either learn how to produce viable paid services or people move to community run alternatives like this one.

My kids run Arch linux on their desktops. I won’t let them use a closed source foreign adware/spyware operating system that doesn’t give full control of hardware on principle while they live under my roof and expect me to provide tech support. So operating system restrictions are out of the question for me.

My kids have zero curiosity or interest in social media outside of youtube where they mostly watch really cool creative, education or gaming content which I support or if I think content is low quality brain rot it is something we discuss.

I am very content not to engage in social media if age verification proves too intrusive. Its a time waster for me and increasingly I feel like I am responding to prompts to train corporate AIs to replace employees, creatives etc. The human aspect of it all is getting lost. I think we need to learn how to live offline more. It could be our national competitive advantage. We are half way there already with our shit Internet.