Australia has a new plan to keep kids safe online. On the surface, it sounds simple, maybe even sensible. The government is banning anyone under sixteen from having a social media account. From December, platforms like Instagram and TikTok will have to kick the kids off in an effort to stop social harm. It’s a nice idea. But when you pull back the curtain, you find a privacy disaster waiting to happen. It’s a plan that won’t work, and it will end up hurting the very people it’s supposed to protect.
To find all the fifteen-year-olds, the platforms have to be assured of everyone’s age. Everyone. You, your friends, your parents. To keep using social media in Australia, you’ll almost certainly have to prove you’re old enough.
The law is conveniently vague on how they plan on doing that… saying only that platforms must take “reasonable steps”. In practice, this will likely mean handing over a photo of your driver’s licence or passport. Or, even “better”, taking a selfie and letting some “artificial intelligence” take a guess at how old you are.
So, we’re being asked to give our most sensitive, personal information to the same companies we already don’t trust, in a world where massive data breaches are practically a weekly occurrence. This plan legislates the creation of a giant, juicy target for every hacker on the planet. A breach that leaks your face or your passport details isn’t like losing a password you can just reset. If your biometric data is stolen, it’s compromised forever. You can’t just get a new face. This exposes people to a lifetime of risk from identity theft and fraud. I had my passport compromised when Optus was incompetent a few years back, and thanks to the government automatically disabling it where it’s already required for ID verification purposes (such as banks), I couldn’t open new bank accounts for a while, and had to wait until I could bully Optus into paying for a new passport (which they only did because my local member, Andrew Wilkie, stepped in and contacted them for me after they refused).
Yet, we’re expected to trust “social media” companies.
The most frustrating part is that this colossal invasion of privacy won’t even work. Kids have been lying about their age online since the internet was invented, and it’s practically a rite of passage. They’ll find a way around this, too.
For anyone who does get blocked, the fix is likely ridiculously simple: a VPN lets you pretend you’re in another country, and just like that, the ban will probably disappear. We don’t even have to guess if this will happen, because the UK already tried a nearly identical law, and there was an immediate and massive surge in people using VPNs to get around it. The websites that followed the rules saw their traffic collapse, while the sites that ignored the law were rewarded with a flood of new users. This law won’t stop kids from being online. It will just push them into darker, less moderated corners of the internet where they are far less safe.
And it’s not just that the law is unworkable. It’s that it will actively cause harm. While the government talks about protecting children, this ban will cut off essential lifelines for the most vulnerable kids.
For so many queer or trans young people, social media is where they find their community. It’s where they get support and vital mental health resources, especially when they can’t find them offline. The statistics are clear: a huge number of LGBTQIA+ youth rely on these platforms for support, and this ban will cut them off and leave them dangerously isolated. What happens to the kid in a small town who’s questioning their identity and has nowhere else to turn?
It also hurts young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds, who use social media to stay connected to family and culture overseas and who might not even have the level of Australian ID needed to get past the new digital gates. To top it all off, the technology itself is notoriously biased. The AI used to guess your age is well-documented to be less accurate for non-white and non-male faces, meaning this law will build discrimination right into everything. Even more than it already is.
This whole thing is a mess. But the problem it’s trying to solve is real. No one is saying we shouldn’t protect kids. We just need a better, smarter way to do it.
Instead of banning kids, we could force the platforms to be safer by design. Making companies fix their addictive algorithms and harmful features, and forcing them to uphold a duty of care is important. It’s about holding corporations accountable, not punishing users.
We could also invest properly in real digital literacy education. We could teach kids how to navigate the online world safely, instead of trying to lock them out of it until they turn sixteen, leaving them completely unprepared for what they’ll find.
This law isn’t a smart solution. It’s a clumsy, rushed plan that sacrifices everyone’s privacy for a system that is guaranteed to fail. It punishes vulnerable kids and wilfully ignores better, more effective alternatives. It’s a truly terrible idea, and we need to say so before our open internet becomes a walled-off garden of state-sanctioned surveillance.
Header image is An Unwelcome Visitor.