fucking australia’s trying to get everyone to link their government id to their social media accounts else you cant use them anymore, the actual fuck is wrong with this country
please, actually, get fucking mad over this, the entirety of australia basically just banned all social media for anyone who doesnt want to give up their privacy to the government, there was no vote on this, no nothing, they just went ahead and fucking passed this ridiculously privy law and barely anybody’s talking about it the actual fuck
okay so to actually explain what exactly is happening, it’s an age thing. theyve used ‘protect the children’ and ‘let kids be kids’ as a weapon again. anyone under 16 is banned from social media, but to enforce this they have openly admitted everyone will need to link their government id to their social media. this whole ‘protect the kids’ thing was a very obvious trojan horse for getting ppl to give up their privacy.
and yknow, that alone is a very shitty law even without the whole surrendering your private information to the government thing.
theyve made outside uninhabitable, there’s nowhere left to go. public areas have degenerated, theyve turned hanging out into a crime with loitering, streets feel unwalkable sometimes, parents are more wary of letting their kids walk around on their own than they used to be, and now theyre trying to ban one of the main ways kids manage to distract themselves inside the house.
when i was 15 i was depressed and lonely, unable to leave the house very far, no friends, nobody. the one place that helped me feel less alone was online communities. i wouldve killed myself if it werent for the support i recieved on there. and now theyre trying to ban that for future generations, in a world that hates them being both outside and inside.
and even still, this is still a fucking trojan horse to get you to give up your privacy.
Not just kids: Everyone to be age verified for social media
some proper info on this bullshit
Right, let me debunk some of this.
- This isn’t a law, this isn’t even a bill. It’s a proposal to pass legislation. (See the official media release from government here. and the full news conference is available here.) It’s not in effect.
There has been no vote on it because it hasn’t been passed into law.
The proposed legislation is expected to be put to the parliament during the first week of the next parliamentary sittings, which means we can expect to see the full text somewhere between November 24-27. Feel free to @ me after that date and I’ll pull up the bill for you, but if you want to do it yourself here’s where you can find the full text of every single bill before the parliament at any given time.- Secondly, the method of determining people’s ages is currently under debate.
Many have been proposed, including building further on the previously proposed age assurance trial.
By the way, if anyone wants to throw the Senate Committee hearing with Greens senator David Shoebridge questioning Jenny McAllister at me, then no, what he was implying is not right. The e-safety commissioner’s 2023 roadmap for age verification supports a double-blind approach using tokens. People would verify their ages with a third party who already has their age data (e.g. bank, phone company) who then issues a token that gets used as a digital confirmation of users being of age. This is to ensure that age-restricted websites do not know the identity of a user, and the age assurance service provider does not record which sites a user visits. That’s the theory and a tender was awarded to ACCS on November 15, 2024 to test the process and see if it will work.- Finally, this is a proposal with no teeth:
‘There would be no penalties for users who managed to access social media under the age of 16, or their parents, but Rowland said there would be penalties for platforms that did not heed the new laws.’ (quote taken from an article by the Guardian.)
If this proposal was passed into law as it stands now - you could break the law and no one would do anything apart from tut at you.
Because it’s unenforceable.So yeah, don’t worry that this is a problem now because it’s not.
This entire proposal is a signal flag for the 2025 federal election by both Labor and the Coalition parties to tell the voting public that they take parental concerns seriously… without doing anything to actually alleviate those concerns.
Concentrate instead on contacting your federal MPs and telling them exactly how you’d like the original problem - kids being exposed to unsuitable material on social media and the mental health consequences.
tl:dr - Don’t get side tracked by this furphy, do your research and go tell your MP what YOU want.
sorry, im really not sure i buy all this.
but yeah, i did get a lot of things wrong here. some that i cleared up in other reblogs, but the version you reblogged was the one that got the most popular unfortunately. i wish people would reblog the other version more.
first off i want to say, this was never intended to be a massive informational post. this was originally random venting i did while half asleep, not even tagged if i remember right. my blog’s not exactly popular, i never expected it to be this big. ive managed to clear some things up in the comments and reblogs tho.
my use of the word ‘basically’ was pretty poor here, i never intended to imply it had already been passed, just that it was very likely to be passed and everybody besides the greens is on board with it. it is very likely to pass. but no, it has not passed. only more reason to get angry about it in my opinion, means there’s time.
secondly, yes, the method has not been fully decided on yet, that was included in the article i limked, and i hope it wouldnt be giving companies your id, but that’s a very real possibility, and the other methods ive seen i just dont feel would hold up well. id has been the main method that’s been talked about here, im not super comforted by ‘but they could use this other thing’. and i couldnt see corporations giving up the chance to collect more personal data unless they had good reason not to, and everything ive seen on it says the burden will be on the corporations. so unless that info’s wrong, that sounds like something to panic about. but yes, it does feel wrong to be making it out as if it could only been that, i shouldve mentioned that in the original post.
look, i like you doing all this, these are some good resources, my original post was a half asleep vent, it was bound to have inaccuracies or misinformation, and im sorry about that, i really am.
but where i really stop following you is when you say this proposal has no teeth.
especially because ive felt the exact same way for a while, and even in my original post, i knew it had ‘no teeth’ in a way, but i didnt say anything on it because i didnt see it as important enough. yes, i shouldve still mentioned it anyway, that there will be ways to get around it. but i didnt mention it bc it’s still dangerous.
there would be no penalties for users who managed to access social media without going through the check, i know, i was never expecting that, only someone who has little idea on how the internet works would expect that. even if the burden werent on the platforms, nobody’s going to take notice of a single under 16 year old slipping into social media. if they managed to do that id be wondering why im not locked up for pirating all the shit i have.
no, anybody tech savvy enough could find ways around this law, if not a vpn then something else.
i was never afraid of the law because i truly thought id have to hand over my id to social media or stop using it. that’s not the fucking problem. the fear i have for myself is the inconvenience of having to setup a vpn just to browse tumblr, but not everyone is tech savvy enough to find ways around these laws, most people arent, most social media users would probably just end up giving up their id or stop using it. and that could be a fucking problem. maybe a cybersecurity nightmare, but also just blatantly allowing and normalising more absurd data collection, more privacy invasion. even without all that, the bandaid solution of locking children out of social media instead of tackling the actual problem infuriates me.
and the biggest thing im worried about is the precedent. this law is fucking absurd, even if it can be easily broken without punishment. weilding kids’ safety as a weapon, banning an entire group of people from one of the largest ways of communicating today, allowing companies to force id collection if they so wish, even if they all go a different way those other ways dont sound very good either. a law like being considered and especially passing isnt a good sign for the future.
the best i can hope for besides the law not passing at all is that the companies will fail to enforce it so badly that it causes something awful, like, idk, the system being unsustainable somehow, some massive data breach. which no, wouldnt be a good thing, but itd hopefully set the precedent not to try anymore laws like this, instead of being a precedent to keep going.
look, pull me up on my mistakes all you like. other people have done what youve done here and i appreciate it, actually. i never expected this to get as big as it did, i made mistakes here.
but dont bloody well tell me this law isnt worth anybody’s attention and we should all just ignore it and ‘not get side tracked’. i think i have every right to be worried about this, and your reasoning for why i shouldnt be worried was just telling me things i already knew.
course this law is still a fuckin problem, a portion of the population knowing how to bypass it and not get punished doesnt change anything.
and look, im genuinely sorry about this but im not gonna be replying to whatever response you’ve already been planning out as you read this, im probably not even gonna see it considering the amount of notifications i get every minute. correct me if i got any objective information wrong, but im bloody tired of all this, ive been hearing so much depressing shit these past couple weeks about the goings on of this miserable fucking planet and it’s making me miserable. and being told information i already know about some stupid law i vented about one night doesnt really make me feel much better about it, this law still looks depressing to me, it all does. i dont want a debate even if this is worded like the beginning of one, i only replied because i cant help myself sometimes and i probably shouldnt have been looking at my notifications seeing how bad i already feel.