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 Guardianreports 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.”
“Once the information has been used for age assurance or any other agreed purpose, it must be destroyed by the platform (or any third party contracted by the platform),” the memorandum states.
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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Parents should take precaution this holiday season when it comes to artificial intelligence toys after researchers for the new Trouble in Toyland report found safety concerns.
Illinois Public Interest Research Group Campaign Associate Ellen Hengesbach said some of the toys armed with AI raised red flags ranging from toys that talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics to acting dismayed when the child disengages.
“What they look like are basically stuffed animals or toy robots that have a chatbot like Chat GPT embedded in them and can have conversations with children,” Hengesbach told The Center Square.
The U.S. PIRG Education Fund report also points out that at least three toys have limited to no parental controls and have the capacity to record your child’s voice and collect other sensitive data via facial recognition.
“All three were willing to tell us where to find potentially dangerous objects in the house, such as plastic bags, matches, or knives,” she said. “It seems like dystopian science fiction decades ago is now reality.”
In the face of all the changing landscape and rising concerns, Hengesbach is calling for immediate action.
“The two main things that we’d like to see are more oversight in general and more research so we can see exactly how these toys interact with kids, really just identify what the harms might be and have a lot more transparency from companies around how are these toys designed,” she said. “What are they capable of and what the potential risks or harms might be. I just really want us to take this opportunity to really think through what we’re doing instead of rushing a toy to market.”
As for the here and now, Hengesbach stressed parents would be wise to be thoughtful about their purchases.
“We just have a big open question of what are the long-term impacts of these products on young kids, especially when it comes to their social development,” she said. “The fact is that we just really won’t know what the long-term impacts of AI friends and companion toys might be until the first generation playing with them grows up. For now, I think it’s just really important that parents understand that these AI toys are out there; they’re very new and they’re basically unregulated.”
Since the release of the report, Hengesbach said one AI toymaker temporarily suspended sales of all their products to conduct a safety audit.
This year’s 40th Trouble in Toyland report also focuses on toys that contain toxins, counterfeit toys that haven’t been tested for safety, recalled toys and toys that contain button cell batteries or high-powered magnets, both of which can be deadly if swallowed.
Generous social programs come with trade-offs. Pretending otherwise is political fiction
Nordic societies fund their own benefits through taxes and cost-sharing. Canadians expect someone to foot the bill
Like Donald Trump, one of my favourite words starts with the letter “T.” But where Trump likes the word “tariff,” my choice is “trade-off.” Virtually everything in life is a trade-off, and we’d all be much better off if we instinctively understood that.
Think about it.
If you yield to the immediate pleasure of spending all your money on whatever catches your fancy, you’ll wind up broke. If you regularly enjoy drinking to excess, be prepared to pay the unpleasant price of hangovers and maybe worse. If you don’t bother to acquire some marketable skill or credential, don’t be surprised if your employment prospects are limited. If you succumb to the allure of fooling around, you may well lose your marriage. And so on.
Failing to understand trade-offs also extends into political life. Take, for instance, the current fashion for anti-capitalist democratic socialism. Pushed to explain their vision, proponents will often make reference to the Nordic countries. But they exhibit little or no understanding of how these societies actually work.
As American economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey notes, “Sweden is pretty much as ‘capitalistic’ as is the United States. If ‘socialism’ means government ownership of the means of production, which is the classic definition, Sweden never qualified.” The central planning/government ownership model isn’t the Swedish way.
What the Nordics do have, however, is a robust social safety net. And it’s useful to look at how they pay for it.
J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest is a man who knows his way around data. He puts it this way: “Copy the Nordic model if you like, but understand that it entails a lot of capitalism and pro-business policies, a lot of taxation on middle-class spending and wages, minimal reliance on corporate taxation and plenty of co-pays and deductibles in its health care system.”
For instance, take the kind of taxes that are often derided as undesirably regressive—sales taxes, social security taxes and payroll taxes. In Sweden, they account for a whopping 27 per cent of gross domestic product. And some 15 per cent of health expenditures are out of pocket.
Charles Lane—formerly with the Washington Post, now with The Free Press—is another who pulls no punches: “Nordic countries are generous, but they are not stupid. They understand there is no such thing as ‘free’ health care, and that requiring patients to have at least some skin in the game, in the form of cost-sharing, helps contain costs.”
In effect, Nordic societies have made an internal bargain. Ordinary people are prepared to fork over large chunks of their own money in return for a comprehensive social safety net. They’re not expecting the good stuff to come to them without a personal cost.
Scandinavians obviously understand the concept of trade-offs, a dimension that seems to be absent from much of the North American discussion. Instead of Nordic-style pragmatism, spending ideas on this side of the Atlantic are floated on the premise of having someone else pay. And the electorally prized middle class is to be protected at all costs.
In the aftermath of Zohran Mamdami’s New York City win, journalist Kevin Williamson had a sobering reality check: “Class warfare isn’t how they roll in Scandinavia. Oslo is a terrific place to be a billionaire—Copenhagen and Stockholm, too … what’s radically different about the Scandinavians is not how they tax the very high-income but how they tax the middle.”
Taxation propensities aside, Nordic societies are different from the United States and Canada.
Denmark, for instance, is very much a “high-trust” society, defined as a place “where interpersonal trust is relatively high and ethical values are strongly shared.” It’s often been said that it works the way it does because it’s full of Danes, which is broadly true—albeit less so than it was 40 years ago.
Denmark, though, has no interest in multiculturalism as we’ve come to know it. Although governed from the centre-left, there’s no state-sponsored focus on systemic discrimination or diversity representation. Instead, the emphasis is on social cohesion and conformity. If you want to create a society like Denmark, it helps to understand the dynamics that make it work.
Reality intrudes on all sorts of other issues. For example, there’s the way in which public discourse is disfigured on the question of climate change and the need to pursue aggressive net-zero policies.
Asked in the abstract, people are generally favourable, which is then touted as evidence of strong public support. But when subsequently asked how much they’re personally prepared to pay to accomplish these ambitious goals, the answer is often little or nothing.
If there’s one maxim we should be taught from childhood, it’s this: there are no panaceas, only trade-offs.
Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
