[justsee]

It's very hard not to see the whole marketing of the legislation as an exercise in misdirection.

The media campaign was led by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd (who see a commercial opportunity in cutting a demographic from their competitors audience for advertisers), and the government's marketing of it entirely focused on children being restricted, avoiding until the last weeks an admission it actually meant all adults would have to undertake verification processes to use social media.

The gulf between the practical effect of the legislation (all adults are impacted) and the claimed intent (only children under 16 are the focus), is so large the claims shouldn't really be accepted at face value.

Combine that with the abuse of democratic process: what would usually be weeks of public feedback was shortened to 24 hours, and after passing the lower house the government attempted to force the legislation through in the senate with no debate, finally conceding to a brief 1 hour debate before passing it in the final hours of the last sitting day of the year.

When opposition arose earlier in the week to the idea this is about a backdoor mechanism to force the government's recently rebranded myId (from myGovId), the government hastily made changes to the bill and loudly said social media companies would not be allowed to ask for government id, in physical or digital form.

But that itself was misdirection. A clause was added saying this does not apply if an alternative option is also provided.

But age assurance based on biometrics from webcams has poor accuracy, as one senator argued in the final debate. Fresh-faced youths will have no option but to go for the myID solution on their 16th birthday - which as that same senator pointed out is the age at which you can apply for a myID account.

On the topic of digital id and myID: it was also apparent that the Government seemingly feigned ignorance that this system, designed specifically for this purpose, would be the ideal and primary solution.

Yet we know just how much focus and energy has been going into designing these systems and working out how to get the public to accept them: witness this piece from 2018 [1].

It's of course fine to argue pros and cons of digital id, both philosophically, and in terms of specific implementation details, but that's not what happened here.

Everything clearly indicates the legislation was designed to sidestep any substantial debates on this topic.

What was also sidestepped was any reasonable discussion of specific implementation options. Instead we have vague details of an age assurance trial being run for many more months, with no specifics that help us understand how this legislation may work, or fail to work.

[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/preventing-another-australia-...

[bdzr]

But didn't you know that social media is causing all of the problems we have right now? Haven't you seen the graph that shows society with no problems until social media, and now we have all the problems?