Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"
That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is happening in the area of cryptographically verified assertions; for example, a government API could provide the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the government never able to tie you to the service requiring the assertion.
Yes, it could, but we don't have that, do we? They launched the ban without implementing a zero-knowledge proof scheme as you described. In a very short amount of time the providers will have associated millions of people's accounts to their biometric information and/or their government issued IDs.
It will always be cheaper to go with a vendor that forces you to scan your face and ID, because they will either be packaging that data for targeted advertising, selling the data to brokers, or making bank off of using it as population-wide training datasets.
Governments will want the data and cost savings, as well.
Both corporations and governments will want to use the platforms to tie online activity to real human beings.
Arguments like these end up like arguments for PGP in email: yes, in a perfect world we'd be using it, and platforms would make it easy, but the incentives aren't aligned for that perfect world to exist.
If the API asks for a users minimum age at a certain time, how can the government not know which data set it has to check?
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
It should even possible to construct a protocol where you can prove that you're over 18 without revealing your birthdate.
Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/430
"Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval."
Umm, no. That is not how a scheme like this would work.
When implemented correctly, yes. I've edited my wording slightly to indicate that.
I just don't have faith in most countries, including Australia, to implement it with protecting the privacy of their residents in mind.
I disagree. I can't think of an implementation mistake that would allow just the government to see what services you sign up for.
You could of course screw it up so everybody could see. If the government put a keylogger on your device then they could see. However broadly speaking this is not something that can be screwed up in such a way that just the government would be able to see.
The protocol wouldn't even involve any communication with the government.
Not just theoretically posdible, people have done it: https://zkpassport.id/
"This is experimental software. While it has undergone external review, it has not yet received a formal security audit. Please use with caution and at your own risk in production environments."
Until these controls on American tech companies Trump (via all the tech CEOs fawning over him) had more control over Australian society than your own government.
The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media unless we all want to have American bonkers (and increasingly authoritarian) politics fully exported to us.
Yes, it does but don't kid yourself, all of Big Tech will cooperate with governments for mutual benefit. Big Tech collects data that governments would otherwise have difficulty collecting, if Big Tech is refrained from collecting data because of regulation and privacy laws then both lose out.
We should never expect governments to maintain our privacy or protect us from Big Tech leaching our data. In short, we're fighting different enemies on two fronts and that's a difficult and invidious position to be in.
In other words: this legislation is useless, and entirely stupid, and kids will bypass it trivially. Teenagers are exceptionally good at bypassing that which they find stupid, or gets in their way of what they consider to be fun, or a right.
Which tweets do you have in mind? Because it not does not describe any of the high-profile tweet-related arrests I have heard of.
Decades ago when the Australia Card—an ID system for Australians—was first proposed there was an almighty outcry from the citizenry and the project was seemingly shelved. What's happened since is that our Governments quietly ramped up their computer systems and collected the data anyway, this Law will only enhance that collection further. Moreover, recently Government introduced what at the moment are voluntary digital IDs which it sold under the guise that having a single ID will make it easier to deal with government services, etc. Unfortunately, most will unquestioningly swallow the official line and miss the fine minutiae.
I've never heard any politician or Government official come out and say "We'll never introduce an Australia Card because we're free people" or such and I'd bet that I never will. Fact is, we Australians already have had an 'Australia Card' for years, it's just that we don't carry it around in our wallets as we do with our credit cards.
Our democracy would be vastly improved if those whose governance we're under would actually tell us the truth.
Edit: Despite my comment about this new law, I agree kids need protection—so we're damned either way. I see no easy solution.
Also, I'm really struggling to think of examples where people have been arrested for "tweets against the government". The Linehan case? Most of the ones I can think of are like that — so basically culture war bullshit and overzealous policing of incitement laws.
There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.
Lawmakers in the US have said this explicitly[1] concerning laws like KOSA[2]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
> In a video recently published by the conservative group Family Policy Alliance, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture” should be among the top priorities of conservative lawmakers.
A bill that implements mass surveillance, chilling of free speech and the hurting of marginalized kids is really killing two birds with one stone for some legislators.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
The sticking point is that it's politically controversial to point this out because of progressive beliefs about gender identity as an unquestionable facet of someone's being.
And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324768316_Sex_Ratio...
"Social contagion" is social science terminology. It's meant as an analogy not a pejorative.
Some social scientists say the analogy is misleading, the term is poorly defined, and contagion has a pejorative connotation irrespective of intent. They are correct.
If that's the one and only paper you have, then it's a single UK paper that covers seven years of GIDS referrals from numbers that are near zero in 2009 to 1800 referrals in 2016.
Statistically, looking at the last graphic in the paper, it's less a case of "becoming so heavily skewed" and likely more a case of "taking several years to reveal the pattern and weights".
There's scarce numbers to begin with to make a strong claim as to the "natural balance" of referrals being evident at the start and this "being skewed toward" the later clearer pattern.
As the commenter upthread noted, the adult demographic is more weighted towards men who want to be women. Why would childhood referrals have become shifted in the opposite direction, much more towards girls who want to be boys?
> There's not really any plausible explanation as to [..] other than social contagion.
is a leap.
> Why would childhood referrals have become shifted
\1 Have they really shifted, or have the stats on a relatively new thing in a few countries firmed up from nothing, to bugger all, to enough to see a pattern?
\2 As to the pattern now seen - a few boys question whether they like being boys at an earlier age than a few more girls then question whether they like being girls ..
there are other factors, eg: I heard there's a "big change" in the lives of young girls that coincides with a 'surge' (small numbers in a country the size of the UK) in girls exploring whether they want to be girls after all.
Social patterns, depth of communication about places existing where gender question can be asked, word of mouth, etc are factors that play a role - but they are not the sole factors at play in these very low incident observations.
My suggestion to yourself, looking at the questions you've raised and how you've framed them, is to perhaps study some epidemiology and find a mentor with first hand real world experience with low frequency data that gradually comes to light as social norms about reporting evolve - eg: SIDS data in the 1970s / 1980s.
You seem to be making a great many mistakes based on preconceptions and "feels".
If only the Dutch hadn't destroyed quite so many records in "their" East Indies .. there might be other gender frequency records to draw on <shrug>.
It is doctors who first drew attention to this phenomenon. See for example Tavistock whistleblower David Bell.
Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.
Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.
I have no interest in your JAQing off[1].
At one end of the scale is very little data that gives an unreliable picture with a high degree of variability, at the other end of the not very long in time scale is somewhat more data that provides a better picture.
To make such a fuss about " this demographic change " indicates a lack of exposure to such statistics.
Why are you attempting to make such a big deal of bad data here?
I think some people have backed themselves into an ideological corner on this one.
I'm indifferent to the social issues here, I care about the <gasp> statistics presented.
With the linked and peer reports there's a short time span, limited populations, and a run of yearly statistics that start with very few numbers and end up with less than 2,000.
The initial numbers make the guesstimation of an inital demographic ratio extremely dodgy - it's not sound.
Despite this there's been someone with .. an idealogy(?) .. making numerous comments about "Look at the demographic shift, eh", "What's that all about", "nudge nudge".
The dull numerial reality is there's no strong evidence for a shift .. if anything it's more a "time and increasing sample sizes make for a clearer picture".
When my parents were kids, there were no left-handed kids. Social contagion is the only explanation for as to why there are suddenly so many left-handed kids today, especially since many of them are boys and not girls.
It’s about the social safety of transitioning. The paper you referenced is from the UK, which is famously a TERF island (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). In the TERF island, it’s much less safe to be a trans woman than a trans man. Adolescents can sense the risk of being a trans woman is much higher, so many trans women stay in the closet and don’t come out.
The radical feminist movement in the UK has existed much longer than this, since around the late 1960s to early 1970s.
2015-2016 is when rhetoric online and globally shifted towards villainizing trans women that weren't on the public's radar before. This was exported to UK politics and has been an incredible political success.
It's actually quite the contrary, the rest of the LGB looks at gay transphobes as the hypocrites and useful idiots they are.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
If it's about monetizing child attention not about speech control why isn't every single toy ad, food ad, movie ad, also banned?
Kids are not banned from communicating and posting with each other; the ban exempts a number of direct messing apps, as well as community apps like Discord:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/dec/10/social-media-b...
If I had to over-simplify it, then the ban appears to mostly target doom-scrolling apps. I say mostly, since I'm not sure why Twitch and Kick are included
We do ban the things that consume children the way social media does.
Alcohol, addictive drugs, etc.
This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
True, but let me remind you that we didn't have conclusive data on smoke harm until the 50s, but this doesn't mean that smoking was not harmful before, nor that we were lacking any clue before coming to a conclusive study.
At the moment we don't have any conclusive study about e-cigarettes, but I'm sure you would never give kids e-cigarettes just because we don't have 30/40 years worth of data.
> This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
This is a bit more complex than this. Kids and adolescents online are targeted with all sort of techniques to leverage their attention in order to make money. I understand the speech control worry, and I agree up to a certain point, but I don't see how ignoring the problem makes it any better. What are the alternatives we have? I'm genuinely asking, not advocating for TINA. I have two kids and I see the effects of social media on them and on their friends.
Keep in mind that this cannot be offloaded to families, for multiple reasons: - many family just don't have enough data or knowledge to make informed decisions - until the network effect is in place, banning your kid from social media while all of their friend are online can be impractical and cruel - parent decisions can affect kids health and overall society outcome; allowing a wrong decision by the parents (because the society doesn't want to handle the problem) would be unfair for the kids and no wise for the society.
As in many aspects of life the best solution is neither white nor black, but a shade of grey, and is far from being perfect. Looking for a perfect solution is a waste of time, resources and unfair for those that are affected in the meanwhile.
I understand the concerns, and probably Australia approach is not the best, but it's also the first. We probably will need a period of adjustments to reach a sound solution.
I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small number will go through fringe social media even less policed or normalised than the big American ones and have much higher risk on some of these issues than before.
What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.