{"id":101958,"date":"2026-04-18T04:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101958"},"modified":"2026-04-17T15:57:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T19:57:58","slug":"australias-age-verification-scheme-a-great-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/04\/18\/australias-age-verification-scheme-a-great-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia’s age verification scheme – a great success!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to open the child-proof caps for them. In other words, it’s not going to work out quite how the politicians expect<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Kid-notebook-computer-learns-159533” by LuidmilaKot<\/a> is marked with CC0 1.0 <\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges \u2014 and they’re debatable \u2014 politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids’ online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

“There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban”, reports the U.K.’s Molly Rose Foundation<\/a>, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. “Three fifths (61%) of 12\u201315 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts.”<\/p>\n

The group adds that “70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was ‘easy’ to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts.”<\/p>\n

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that “a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms’ age assurance systems”.<\/p>\n

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.<\/p>\n

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, “around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account”. Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every time a politician gets up on hind legs to propose yet another brilliant scheme to ensure little Jaden and little Daenerys don’t access adult content on the internet, I remind myself that it’s going to be pitting the tech know-how of people who need help opening child-proof caps against the youngsters they get to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[331,84,28,15],"tags":[459,374,58,322,201,504],"class_list":["post-101958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-government","category-media","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-children","tag-internet","tag-nannystate","tag-securitytheatre","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qwu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101960,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101958\/revisions\/101960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}