The government is being pretty coy about the details, so most of the article is necessarily conjecture.
Selected excerpts from the article:
The definition of a social media service, as per the Online Safety Act
An electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
- The sole or primary purpose of the service is to enable online social interaction between two or more end users;
- The service allows end users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end users;
- The service allows end users to post material on the service.
Under the proposed changes, it will be the responsibility of social media companies to take reasonable steps to block people under 16.
How will your age be verified?
The government’s legislation won’t specify the technical method for proving a person’s age.
Several options are on the table, including providing ID and biometrics such as face scanning.
The government’s currently running an age assurance trial to assess all the methods, and it’s scheduled to continue into 2025.
Based on the results of that trial, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant will make recommendations to platforms.
It’s possible that Australians will be asked to provide their IDs or biometric data directly to social media companies in order to use their platforms, but that’s not guaranteed.
Many of the big players, including Meta, have instead argued for the age verification onus to be placed on app stores, rather than individual platforms, as that would mean proving your age once — rather than every time you sign up to a platform.
It’s also possible that a third-party company that specialises in ID verification will act as a go-between between users and social media platforms.
No matter which model is adopted, the prime minister has said privacy protections will be introduced to cover any data people end up providing.
What will this mean for Lemmy instances? XMPP servers? Email servers?
What if a 15 year old runs their own personal Mastodon server? LoL this is gonna be yet another entertaining Australian government shitshow.
No matter which model is adopted, the prime minister has said privacy protections will be introduced to cover any data people end up providing.
Sure. Now stop thinking of ridiculous legal aspects and fight for your privacy.
After hearing about this proposal for three months now, I still believe it’s fucked up, especially the fact they don’t even know what method they’ll use, whether it’s digital IDs (which will take likely at least a decade to become mainstream), facial scanning (authoritarian as fuck), or some other shitty proposal.
There’s also the fact as a child I wasn’t able to go out very much, so social media was useful to me, especially to give me time with friends digitally, and as a time burner, which can be detrimental for a child in a similar place to have it all banned.
In all ways this happens, this will either be extremely authoritarian or would not be necessary as all people set their birth dates to their exact one every time without any variation, like magic, as if that shit would ever happen.
If they want to employ bank-style KYC, then no. >!Fediverse is better.!<
plans to try to
The same way porn and alcohol is banned for those under 18? Mkay mate, I doubt anything will come out of this.
Welp. I think I’ll stick to writing to the local paper if I need to sign in blood to have a public opinion.
I think there needs to be some legislation done in terms of limiting commercial social media platforms although I’m not sure how someone would go about this. Would they ban social media cites that take peoples data? maybe they should ban cites that display ads? What about making all social media cites to support an open protocol like activity pub or similar so your not locked into using there scummy closed source apps.
Anybody know if messengers fall within this definition?
