đź”’ I Sure Hate This Annoying Pandemic of Online Age Restriction Laws
With everyone all focused on Donald Trump and Benny Netanyahu starting World War III out of a mutual desire to stay out of prison, another major war recently began that hasn’t earned the same headlines: Australia’s war on the internet.
Now I know I don’t talk about my home country often, but very occasionally, something interesting does happen here. For my majority Yank audience, worry not, it involves you lot too, because this same issue is currently looming over the United States like a US Tomahawk missile over an Iranian girls’ elementary school.
Starting last year, the Australian government began to roll out a series of new laws that ban anyone under 16 from viewing anything online that even looks like it might not be G-rated. Obviously there is no mechanism known to mankind by which you can tell kids what to do, so the onus has to fall upon every website in the world to ensure that Aussie kids never unwittingly glimpse a boob or a swear word or an offensive Wojak.
This means that an immense number of websites have to lock their content behind age verification, and it has to be something much more robust than clicking “YES” in a dialog that asks if you are an adult. In effect, it means “Papers, please.”
In December of last year, social media was banned for under-16s. Last week, the second wave of laws banned pornography.
Here’s the thing: The type of iron-clad age verification that these laws require from websites is much harder than the crusty old Boomer and Gen X politicians passing these laws understand, and I’ll get back to that point later, don’t you worry. Websites need to either demand a photo of your face (!!), some personally identifying government documentation (!!!!) or your banking details (!!!!!!!) to get a sense of your identity to the extent that the government finds acceptable, to ensure that you are in fact a filthy and degenerate, albeit legal, adult, rather than a sweet, tender, innocent little honey boo-boo child.
People are pretty uncomfortable with this. In Australia, when a bar reaches closing time and they turn the house lights on to entice everyone to leave, the slang for this is “the ugly-lights.” Nobody wants to show their face in full white neon at 2am after 10 standard drinks any more than they want to show it to Elon Musk’s CSAM emporium or fucking Pornhub.
The problem is so difficult that a whole swath of the most popular porn sites have decided to simply go dark in Australia and block us from access. This is actually fascinating to me because Pornhub was the 7th most visited website in Australia at the time that it, plus all of the porn sites owned by the same parent company including RedTube, Tube8, and YouPorn, shut off access from the country—and yet this is the quietest public reaction to a major content block in human history. There was more public outrage when they shut down fucking Club Penguin.
It’s easy to figure out why. Nobody wants to publicly announce that they consume pornography. This is the easiest speech to ban in a nation with ostensibly free speech values, because people just will not go out to the street en masse chanting “We want Spicy Stepsisters back! Give us Pirate Fuck Party 5!”
Despite its phenomenal popularity behind closed doors, it is easier to ban porn than it is to ban phenomenally unpopular things like swastikas and Roman salutes, which, coincidentally, parts of Australia also recently banned. That has nothing to do with the porn and social media stuff, it’s part of a raft of new anti-anti-Semitism laws they introduced as a result of the Bondi terror attack. The laws also ban pro-Palestinian speech, so that’s bad. But the laws were so controversial that they actually triggered an implosion of the Australian mainstream right-wing party, the NLP, our equivalent of the Republicans (which is actually two parties glued together [it’s complicated]).
No such controversy occurred when they passed laws mandating you have to give up your face or credit card number to the shadiest industry in the world whenever you want to look at certain parts of the human body you might not see every day, or to some user-safety agnostic techbros who might be susceptible to data breaches (*COUGH*DISCORD*COUGH*) if they want to talk to other human beings on the interwebz.
Now, if you’re American then you might or might not be aware that a huge chunk of your politicians are desperately fighting to bring this to America. You might be shocked to learn that there are something like 40 bills floating around that propose some kind of age verification to access social media or adult content. You might not know about them because almost all of them are tangled up in the courts. But these regulations are scratching at your door. They’re desperate for them, and they’re going to get them.
This is a preview. Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 20-March
