Social media ban passes Australian Senate despite lack of details
Australia’s world-first under-16 year old social media ban has become law, via Sydney Morning Herald:
As expected, Albanese gained Coalition support for the social media package, given Dutton called for the age limit in June, but the debate was marked by warnings from the Greens and crossbenchers, as well as some Coalition MPs, about the lack of detail in how the scheme would work.
With no details on implementation, the world-first angle becomes a lot less impressive. Either the law becomes easy to work around, or Australia becomes one of the first countries with a government internet identification system.
The government will take up to a year to run trials and finalise the regulations to support the law. Tech tycoons, such as X owner Elon Musk, have warned that it will not work.
And with no details on implementation, it’s still yet to be seen whether the same free DNS changes will circumvent the ban, in the same way they make torrent website blocks useless.
With critics worried that the regime would require customers to hand over personal information to social media companies to confirm their age, Labor put an amendment to the package at about 10pm on Thursday to accept calls from the Coalition for tougher privacy protections.
Will Instagram require a myGov login? I guess we’ll find out next year, regardless of who wins the next election.
