Australian social media age verification laws: you might need to prove your age

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Australian social media age verification laws: you might need to prove your age

20 September 2025

The Australian government has issued guidelines regarding proposed age verification regulations that come into effect this December.

While social networks will be required to “detect and deactivate or remove” the accounts of members under the age of sixteen, they will not need to verify the age of every last user. This would no doubt apply to instances where someone has been a long-time user of a social media channel, or it is apparent they are over the age of sixteen.

It sounds reassuring, at least on the surface, but the devil will be in the detail. It will be down to individual platforms to decide how they go about ascertaining a member’s age, rather than there being a standard, universal, process they must adhere to. Expect to see some under-sixteens fall through cracks, while a few over-sixteens get caught in the net.

The last days of social media, or wishful thinking?

19 September 2025

James O’Sullivan, writing for Noema:

While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

When social media is used to be social, it is useful. When deployed (in an attempt) to garner influence, especially through re-posting slop, not so much.

Despite the low quality content, and apparent lack of engagement, I don’t see social media, as we presently know it, going anywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that social media is dead, and presently exists in a zombie like state instead, dead but undead.

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social media, social networks, trends

Threads to allow extra long posts, does this really mean blogging is back?

9 September 2025

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Meta is adding a new feature to let you add a bunch of extra text to Threads posts — no screenshots of text blocks required. Starting today, Meta is rolling out a tool that lets you attach up to 10,000 characters of text to Threads posts, giving you a way to build upon the 500-character text limit already available when making a post.

The feature will certainly appeal to people looking for a platform that allows them to publish blog-like posts with ease.

What really caught my eye though was the “blogging is back” byline appended to the Verge article. I’m not sure who would have written that, Peters, or an editor. Is blogging really back? Did blogging ever really go away? Is the Verge trying to suggest this new Threads feature will bring about a blogging resurgence? Surely the Verge, and their writers, are aware of Indie/Small/Open web?

Blogging has been back for sometime, if it even went away.

Mark Zuckerberg and why personal websites trump social networks

8 September 2025

Mark Zuckerberg, a lawyer based in the US state of Indiana, has been banned from Facebook (FB) numerous times because the social network thinks he’s impersonating co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Someone has the same name as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and therefore they are up to no good. You would think a social network the size of FB would understand people do share the same first and last names. It’s hardly a rare occurrence either.

Soon after I signed up for FB, back in the days when I used to be active on the platform, I had a friend request from someone with the same name as mine. Looking at the person’s FB page, I could see he had connected with a number of other people with the same name.

It didn’t seem much unusual in the early days, there was a bit of people-sharing-the-same-names friending each other going on. A bit of harmless fun, back in the days when FB used to be fun.

Having the same name as the Meta CEO is sometimes far from fun though, as Zuckerberg the lawyer can attest to. He often receives massages from people who believe he is the FB co-founder, some of which are threatening. But Zuckerberg the lawyer now has his own website.

This is a smart move as anyone in the Indie/Small/Open web space can tell you. While a social media company can delete an account more or less because they feel like it, doing away with an independently hosted personal website is a little more difficult.

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.

Young Australians not banned from social media, just delayed using it

26 August 2025

Australians under the age of sixteen will not be banned from having social media accounts, when laws change later this year. Instead, as the Australian eSafety commission points out, they’ll merely have to wait until their sixteenth birthday before being able to sign up for social media access:

It’s not a ban, it’s a delay to having accounts.

The incoming social media age-restriction laws will make students of semantics out of us all.

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.

Foto Walk by Foto App: making social media… social

24 July 2025

New from photo-sharing app Foto, Foto Walk:

A Foto Walk is a casual, inclusive gathering of photographers who meet up to walk, shoot, and connect in real life. There are no rules, no competitions, and no pressure — just people who love photography coming together to explore their local area with fresh eyes.

Walks can be small or large, quiet or social, digital or analog — everyone is welcome. Whether you’re shooting film, phone, or digital, Foto Walks are about slowing down, being present, and building community through shared creative energy.

Imagine that, a socials app facilitating in person socialising, instead of binding members to screens and algorithms. Otherwise, what a great idea.

Anyone who wishes to can register to become a walk host in their area, organise gatherings, then get together for a few hours of photo-taking with local Foto members.

I joined Foto a few weeks ago, and this news arrived by newsletter on Monday. They have a quite a bit in the pipeline at the moment, and are certainly positioning themselves as a serious alternative to certain of the other photo-sharing apps around.

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photography, photos, social media

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.

Social media platforms, AI summaries, how we consume news in 2025

2 July 2025

Running since 2015, the Digital News Report, published annually by the University of Canberra, surveyed nearly one-hundred-thousand people globally, including about two-thousand Australians.

The key findings of the 2025 report are probably of no surprise to many of us. About twenty-five percent of people now source their news from social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok are the go-to platforms for news seekers aged eighteen to twenty-four.

AI is also making in-roads into the way people consume news, with nearly thirty-percent saying they like the idea of AI prepared news summaries.

When it comes to misinformation, seventy-five percent of Australians — the highest number in the world — expressed concerned about misinformation. Many are sceptical of influencers as a result.

Facebook and TikTok were identified as the biggest purveyors of misinformation. Encouragingly though, about forty-percent of people will turn to a “trusted news brand” should they be suspicious as to the veracity of a news story.

Here’s something else that’s interesting. Only about a quarter of Australians say they have received news literacy education. That is, being informed in how to use and understand news.

I have to say, it’s the first time I’ve heard the term. Is news literacy taught at school? Maybe I was absent the day that class was held.

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