Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

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Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

19 January 2026

Clare Armstrong writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

More than 4.7 million accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat were deactivated in the first two days of the ban that started on December 10, according to new data released by the federal government.

The social media ban, supposedly to stop Australians under the age of sixteen accessing numerous such platforms, has seen nearly five million accounts closed in the last five weeks.

Here’s hoping the lockout is having the desired impact, whatever exactly that was, though it may be a while before we know one way or the other.

Former police officer warned of potential Bondi Beach mass shooting ten years ago

20 December 2025

Steve Buttel, a former NSW police officer, speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporters Lia Harris and Pablo Vinales:

A former NSW Police sergeant claims he repeatedly warned his superiors years ago that local officers would not be equipped to respond to an active-shooter attack in Bondi.

Between 2008 and 2016 Steve Buttel was based at Waverley police station, which was responsible for patrolling Bondi Beach as part of the Eastern Suburbs Police Area Command.

Mr Buttel told the ABC he informed his bosses “it was only a matter of time” before there would be a terror attack targeting the local Jewish community.

It’s horrifying to think, despite strict gun control laws in Australia, there were some police officers concerned a mass shooting event might occur one day at Bondi Beach.

Australian gun laws set to be tightened following Bondi Beach shooting

16 December 2025

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has flagged more restrictions on gun ownership. At present, to legally possess a gun, a person must, among other things, be “fit and proper”, have a genuine reason for ownership, belong to a gun club, and undertake to store the weapons securely.

Chris Minns, the Premier of the Australian state New South Wales (NSW), where Sunday’s shooting took place, is considering recalling the state parliament, which is currently in recess for the year-end holidays, to enact further gun control measures in NSW.

One of the Bondi Beach perpetrators had held a gun licence, allowing him to own the weapons, for ten years. The person in question had six guns in his possession.

Reddit: the Australian social media ban is unconstitutional, in a way

15 December 2025

Social news aggregator Reddit has filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Australia, claiming the ban preventing Australians aged under sixteen using social media intrudes on free political discourse.

The Australian Constitution does not protect free speech as such. In fact, the document seems more concerned with matters pertaining to the Australian government, parliament, and judiciary. However, in 1992, the High Court found that an implied freedom of political communication exists.

The thing is, the social media ban doesn’t curtail this freedom for young Australian as such, it merely means they have to find other channels to express themselves. A personal website, or blog, is of course an option. But let’s see what the High Court of Australia has to say about the Reddit filing.

Verify the age of adult websites users via their device operating system

22 November 2025

A provider of adult video content — I’ll refrain from naming them, in the hope of stopping network content filters getting upset — is suggesting the age of their audience be verified through the operating system (OS) of their device. Note: the link is to a blog post by the provider, not to any NSFW content. I can’t speak for what happens if you start clicking other links on the page though.

More of these laws are coming, and the safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. However, the best and most effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to identify users at the source: by their device, or account on the device, and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. This means users would only get verified once, through their operating system, not on each age-restricted site. This dramatically reduces privacy risks and creates a very simple process for regulators to enforce.

The idea certainly makes sense, and would save having to go through a separate age verification process on every website, social network, and other online service that requires it.

To date though I don’t recall ever supplying any of the OS’s I use with my date of birth, let alone verifying that information. It seems to me to make age verification possible this way might require some OS suppliers to make changes to allow this.

Update: on checking, I see my date of birth details are entered into my smartphone’s OS, iOS. I expect those details were verified when I obtained my first iPhone, as I needed to present photo identification on signing up with my then phone company.

Assume then my age is verified as far as my smartphone goes. As for my computer OS, Linux Mint, I’m pretty sure I didn’t supply any such info. Couldn’t even be certain I entered my full name. This I will need to check on.

A train station comes to Woollahra NSW: there goes the neighbourhood

3 September 2025

Woollahra, a suburb in Sydney’s east, is soon to have a train station. At first pass that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But the story is as long as the rail line is winding. Proposals to build a station in the affluent suburb are over a century old.

Then, in the 1970’s, as the Eastern Suburbs train line, AKA the T4, was being constructed, foundations for a station were laid. But work came to an abrupt halt when residents, unhappy at the prospect of a train station in their backyard, succeeded in stopping construction.

The partly built station sits between the stations at Edgecliff, and Bondi Junction, where the T4 line presently* terminates, a kilometre or two from the beach at Bondi. But with the housing situation in Sydney reaching dire proportions, the NSW State Government has revived plans to build the station, and then construct much needed high-density residences in the vicinity.

News of the station, and apartment blocks, has no doubt come as a double blow to locals.

Woollahra is far from apartment building free — an array of beautiful art deco style medium-density residences span Edgecliff Road — and the prospect of high density blocks will be causing alarm to some. But the reality is Sydney needs more residences, and it is unreasonable to expect all of these be built “somewhere” in the west of the city.

Or “the western side of ANZAC Parade”, a quip sometimes uttered by those residing on the eastern side of ANZAC Parade. ANZAC Parade being a major roadway running from inner Sydney through to La Perouse, at the southern end of the eastern suburbs.

Some Woollahra residents will argue the presence of high-rise dwellings will be at odds with the “character” of the suburb. Woollahra is possessed of houses built in the nineteenth century, quiet tree-lined streets (one or two rather steep), boutique shops, and a village-like ambience. It is a place many people would like to call home. The building proposals will bring significant changes.

Bondi Junction street scene at dusk featuring modern buildings, traffic lights, and trees. Cars are seen on the road alongside pedestrians, with a pharmacy sign illuminated. The sky displays shades of blue as the sun sets.

Spring Street, Bondi Junction, NSW, at dusk. Photo taken June 2021. Note the construction crane in the top right hand corner.

But such is life in the big city. Change is constant. Bondi Junction — where we stay when not on the NSW Central Coast — situated right next to Woollahra, has undergone a tremendous transformation in the last decade, particularly along parts of Oxford Street. While always a mixed commercial/retail and residential precinct, numerous high-density apartment blocks now line Oxford street.

Of course Bondi Junction, being a retail centre, and public transport hub, with the aforementioned T4 train line, and numerous bus services, seems an ideal place to build residences. That’s not to say everyone in Bondi Junction is happy with the prospect. Many feel the suburb has been over-developed. But again, housing shortages in the region have compelled governments to act.

Yet the “residential-isation” of Oxford Street, and surrounds, has not always been a bad thing. Bondi Junction is at once a quiet residential suburb, after the shops close, in the midst of a bustling commercial centre. People walk their dogs along Oxford Street in the evenings, a sight that would not have been seen ten years ago.

Despite this metamorphosis, perceptions of Bondi Junction have not changed.

Either within the eastern suburbs, or elsewhere in Sydney. As far as other residents of the eastern suburbs are concerned, the junction is “ugly”. Meanwhile people outside the eastern suburbs think Bondi Junction is full of rich snobs. But nahsayers of the junction are looking at the wrong suburb when identifying ugly, or seeking to point out “rich snobs”.

But I digress. I’m not saying high-density residential blocks in Woollahra, full of dog owners, will bring about any sort of catharsis to existing residents who are going to be subject to possibly decades of disruptive construction work. They had all of that in Bondi Junction, and will probably continue to, but the world did not end.

Whether we like it or not, high-density accommodation is one of the solutions to the shortage of housing, and is something everyone in Sydney needs to get used to.

* there were proposals to extend the train line to Bondi Beach, but residents rallied to oppose the idea.

Mastodon might struggle to comply with social media age verification laws

1 September 2025

Sarah Perez, writing for Techcrunch:

The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users’ ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored. That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.

Mastodon is a decentralised social network that allows anyone with the inclination, and access to a reasonably robust server, to establish their own instance, or chapter.

Mastodon is the sum of its many parts, and is not structured like X or Threads, whose operations are run from a single, centralised, point. I have no idea how many Mastodon instances there are, but the number would not be insignificant.

Compliance with age verification laws will be down to individual instance administrators. It’s not something the Mastodon head office could do, because there isn’t one, as such.

This doesn’t mean members of Mastodon instances operating in jurisdictions where age verification laws apply, will be able to forgo confirming their age. Indeed, age verification will be a necessity if the instance they belong to is to continue operating.

Australians aged under sixteen banned from using YouTube

31 July 2025

The Australian government has decided YouTube will be made inaccessible to people under the age of sixteen. There had been thoughts the video platform might be spared, after the government decided to restrict access to the likes of TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram to younger Australians.

YouTube has recently been running a publicity campaign locally extolling their family-friendly credentials, in the hope they would not be effected.

I’m not in complete agreement with this decision. Obviously there’s all sorts of material on YouTube, but a certain amount has educational merit.

Australians will soon need to verify their age to use search engines

12 July 2025

Ange Lavoipierre, writing for The Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography. But experts have warned the move could compromise Australians’ privacy online and may not do much to protect young people.

We’re all for protecting children going online, but this initiative, as it stands, may be way too easy to circumvent. For instance, search engine users could remain logged out of their account, or make use of a VPN, to trick search engines into believing they are outside the country.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if ways to shutdown these options are eventually introduced. In the same way, say, Netflix can make using VPNs difficult. In addition, anyone accessing a search engine in Australia may be forced to actually login to their (age verified) account before they can do searches.

The search engine companies, after all, surely will not want to be in contravention of Australian laws. It seems at some point then, Australian search engine users will need to verify their age. Privacy advocates however are rightly concerned. Certain of the search engines already know enough about our activity online; do we want them knowing our personal details as well?

A sensible solution would be to use a digital identity service. These are independent of search engines, and any other tech companies, who might be required to confirm the age of their users.

One such service I use to both verify my identity, and I imagine age, when dealing with Australian government departments online, is Digital iD, which was developed by Australia Post. (Don’t you be saying the post office is incapable of innovation…)

MyID, created by the Australian Tax Office (ATO), serves a similar purpose.

Of course, we’re having to tell someone our age, and supply a verifying document — an Australian passport, or drivers licence — to do so, but at least the process is handled by an Australian government agency. Perhaps you don’t particularly trust those entities either, but I think they’re a far safer option than an offshore tech company.

In short, identity services such as MyID, or Digital iD, are saying the user is aged eighteen or over. They are not divulging actual ages, or dates of birth.

If the Australian government is so insistent we verify our age to access search engines, and who knows what other apps in the future, then the least they can do is allow us to use an Australian digital identity service to do so.

Australian political leaders who refuse TDA interviews lose elections

5 May 2025

Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time.

The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Both leaders refused to speak to TDA, both leaders went on to lose elections they subsequently faced, Dutton over the weekend, and Morrison in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meanwhile sat down with Billi FitzSimons, TDA’s editor-in-chief, in early February. Angus Taylor, the Opposition’s shadow treasurer, did however speak with FitzSimons in April (Instagram link). He was, I believe, the most senior Liberal Party/Opposition member to be interviewed by TDA.

FitzSimons, and TDA co-founder Zara Seidler, recounted the experience (palaver?) of attempting to invite Dutton to speak with them, in a recent podcast. Spoiler: Dutton seemed pretty obstinate, an attitude in general that probably cost him the 2025 election.

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