Australia passes social media ban for kids under 16 sparking online surveillance concerns

While the official goal of the bill is to protect the mental health of children and adolescents, critics have raised concerns that the bill would establish an online surveillance system for all Australians, similar to Communist China.

Australia has passed a social media ban for children under the age of 16, a seemingly prudent move but one that has raised serious concerns about online surveillance.

On Thursday, November 28, the Australian Senate passed the bill with a 34-19 vote, making it the world’s first social media ban for under-16-year-olds.

The “Online Safety Amendment Bill 2024” threatens social media companies with up to 50 million AUD (32 million USD) if they fail to comply with the requirement of verifying the age of their users.

While the official goal of the bill is to protect the mental health of children and adolescents, critics have raised concerns that the bill would establish an online surveillance system for all Australians, similar to Communist China.

“Seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” Elon Musk wrote on X.

Journalist and free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger said that “this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in ‘Black Mirror,’ and already in place in China.”

The bill, which was rushed through parliament, does not give any details about how age verification will work and will not come into force until the end of next year. On November 26, the Australian Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee approved the bill under the condition that social media platforms must not force their users to give them their personal data, including information from government-issued IDs.

While this provision appears to rule out the use of Digital IDs for now, the question of how it will be enforced remains. The Guardian reports that supporters of the bill have said that platforms may use biometric methods, such as facial scans, to verify the age of its users. This would, of course, mean that social media companies would collect the biometric data of all its users in Australia.

The explanatory memorandum to the bill says that there will be “robust” privacy protections, “including prohibiting platforms from using information collected for age assurance purposes for any other purpose unless explicitly agreed to by the individual.”

However, the memorandum also explains that “compliance with the minimum age obligation” will likely require platforms “to implement systems and procedures to monitor and respond to age-restricted users circumventing age assurance.”

This suggests that social media companies could continually monitor a user while using the platform, for instance, by repeatedly doing face scans to ensure that the user is still the same and at least 16 years old.

The vaguely worded bill also does not specify which companies will be affected by the age restriction. Communications minister Michelle Rowland said that TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit, Facebook, and Snapchat will likely be included, while YouTube will be excluded due to its educational purposes.

In addition to the under-16 social media ban requiring age verification of users, the Australian government also sought to curb speech online via a draconian “Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.” However, the government had to abandon the controversial bill after facing significant cross-party opposition in the Senate. The bill would have forced social media companies to remove information that was “reasonably verifiable as false” or if “misinformation and disinformation” could cause serious harm. The vague definitions of these terms would have allowed social media companies or the government to arbitrarily censor content it deemed unwanted.

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Trudeau government wants to give CBC more money

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Why living in Canada has become impossible

Business

Trudeau government wants to give CBC more money

Published on December 30, 2024

Todayville

From the Canadian Taxpayers Association

By Kris Sims

The CBC used to air The Simpsons after school.

One of the best episodes was the Cape Fear homage where an FBI agent is trying to change Homer’s last name to Thompson.

After hours of explanation, the kids have fallen asleep, Marge has given up and the agent says, “When I step on your foot and say: ‘Hello Mr. Thompson,’ you nod your head! Got it?!”

Homer did not get it.

The Liberal members of Parliament on the heritage committee still don’t get it either.

The committee has sent a report to the House of Commons urging the government to give the CBC even more money.

“That the Government of Canada provide a substantial and lasting increase in the parliamentary appropriations for CBC/Radio-Canada, allowing it to eliminate its paid subscription services and gradually end its reliance on commercial advertising revenues,” reads the report.

Really? More money? The CBC already takes $1.4 billion year from taxpayers. And that’s not enough?

That amount of money could already cover the salaries of about 7,000 police officers and 7,000 paramedics.

If Trudeau’s MPs want to give the CBC more money so that it can get rid of its advertising and subscription funding, that means a huge cost for taxpayers.

According it’s latest annual report, the CBC collected about $493 million in revenue other than government funding in 2023-24, the bulk being subscription fees and advertising.

This means these Trudeau government MPs want taxpayers to fund the CBC to the tune of about $2 billion per year.

This is the opposite of what needs to happen.

The CBC should be defunded for three key reasons.

The CBC is a huge waste of money, nearly nobody is watching it and journalists should not be paid by the government.

The committee knows this.

And we know they know because the Canadian Taxpayers Federation told them to their faces in testimony before the committee.

CBC CEO Catherine Tait repeatedly testified at the committee and each time she inadvertently made a stronger case to defund the CBC, due to her entitlement and lack of accountability.

Tait refused to say if she will take a severance when she leaves the CBC next year, claiming it’s a personal matter.

It’s not personal if it’s taxpayers’ money.

Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation show Tait is paid between $460,000 and $551,000 this year, with a bonus of up to 28 per cent.

That’s a bonus of up to $154,448. That’s more than the average Canadian family earns in a year.

Just before Christmas last year, Tait cried broke to the committee and afterwards the CBC announced lay offs in its newsrooms.

Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC handed out big bonuses that year anyway, costing taxpayers $18 million.

As the CBC fan group Friends of Canadian Media put it: “This decision is deeply out of touch and unbefitting of our national public broadcaster.”

It gets worse because the state broadcaster isn’t even doing a good job.

According to the CBC’s latest quarterly report, CBC News Network’s national audience share is 1.7 per cent.

Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC’s supper hour newscast drawing microscopic audiences, with 0.7 per cent of Toronto watching the six o’clock news on CBC.

Journalists should not be paid by the government because it’s an obvious conflict of interest.

You can’t hold the powerful government to account if you’re counting on that government for your paycheque.

Such government funding of media has contributed to the rapid erosion of trust in the news media, with 61 per cent of Canadians saying they think journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

CBC’s entertainment programming barely fares better. The Murdoch Mysteries, which is not produced by the CBC, pulls in its biggest audience with about 1.9 per cent of the population watching.

The politicians on the committee know all of this, and yet, like Homer Simpson, they are not getting the message.

If the CBC needs money, it should earn that money itself.

Taxpayers can’t afford the state broadcast’s bill now, let alone hundreds of millions more.

It’s time to defund the CBC.

Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.