The final standards for the e-Karen’s under 16’s social media ban have now been released publicly.

And as always, the devil really is in the details. Honestly, we already knew that the e safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had no idea what she was doing. But ah, this is this is next level bad. And it’s great news for those of us who are opposed to online censorship and the end of online privacy because the e safety office has put itself on a head-on collision course with President Donald Trump personally for reasons that I’ll explain in a moment.

The best outcome would have been for the under 16 social media ban to be scrapped entirely, but sadly that’s not going to happen.

The next best outcome is what’s happening. For it to be so poorly implemented and based on standards that are so ill-defined that it inevitably leads to lawsuits between the Australian e-safety office and the big US tech companies like Meta and Google. Remember that Google has already threatened to sue if YouTube was included in the age verification and under 16s ban. And you guessed it, YouTube most definitely are included. Now, I suspect that Google have been waiting for these now released final standards to come out before launching their lawsuit. And if they haven’t sued the e-safety commissioner before the December 10 deadline when this under 16’s ban comes into effect, uh well then I predict that the e-safety commissioner will soon thereafter be suing them because the one thing that is now guaranteed is that the big tech companies and the e safety office are going to have wildly different ideas about what it means to be compliant with these very nebulous regulations what reasonable steps means. And I say bring on the lawfare because President Trump has in a few different ways proved beyond doubt that he is willing to use the economic might of the USA to protect free speech and online privacy for Americans.

More on that in a minute. But also he’s proved that he’s willing to back American tech companies when they stand up for the rights and privacy of their users, which is exactly what President Trump did when Apple stood up to the UK government earlier this year. Now, we’re going to cover all of that in this video. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and this is what I do. Brutal breakdowns of the issues that matter. Making sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. If you’d like to help me to keep doing what I do, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my style with my videos, then you’re going to love my style with my books. There’s my first best-selling book, Good People Break Bad Laws, all about government, power, human rights, and when and how to break the law when push comes to shove. Then there’s my second book, Good Christians Break Bad Laws. This is all about the theology of civil disobedience and how and why Christians must obey God even when it means disobeying the government.

You’ll find both of these books on Amazon, which is probably best for viewers who are overseas. But if you’re in Australia, or if you just don’t mind paying shipping from Australia, then you’ll find both of those books, plus my DVD documentary, Battleground Melbourne, all about the co lockdowns and the madness that followed them in Melbourne, Australia. And also you’ll find my t-shirts and my hoodies all available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And every purchase goes directly to helping me keep the Topher project going.

I’m going to go through this article by the ABC and show you why I believe the Australian e-safety office is now on a collision course with President Donald Trump. To quote from the article, “Social media companies will not need to verify the age of every user or meet a minimum standard for how many teenagers they boot off their platforms with the federal government confirming a lighter touch approach to enforcing its under 16’s ban.” Now, let me pause here and say that is something of a relief. As someone who does pretty much all of my work on social media, I’ve been hopeful that the e Karen wouldn’t go completely crazy and try and enforce a strict full age verification for everybody type of program. But until now, we really didn’t know any of the details. So, it is good news that most people will be able to be automatically age verified as being over 16 without any actual intrusion on their use of social media platforms, maybe without even knowing it’s happening. And so, this ban probably won’t affect most people at all, except that we still can’t rule out the use of facial scanning or other privacy violating techniques to do the age verification where they decide they want it. So, as always, the devil’s in the detail, and we’re going to have to wait and see.

But let’s go back to the article because in the next paragraph is the detail that I believe has set up the e-Karen for an epic collision. While the platforms must satisfy the e safety watchdog that they have taken reasonable steps to remove the accounts of those under 16, there will be no legally enforceable standard for accuracy. Now the first question is what’s a reasonable step? And the second question is if there’s no legally enforceable standard for accuracy, then who decides if these tech companies are actually compliant or not? This could go one of two ways. It could result in the under 16s ban becoming kind of watered down to the point that it’s practically meaningless and the tech companies can kind of just do whatever they want, tick the box, and the e safety office doesn’t bother to enforce it. But I find that outcome highly unlikely.

What is far more likely in my opinion is that the tech companies will do what they think is reasonable and the e Safety office will disagree.

And then what? If there’s no legally enforceable standard for accuracy and if there’s no definition of what constitutes reasonable steps, well then there’s no target for the tech companies to aim at to comply with to hit and there’s no measure for the e safety office to use to consistently determine whether they are compliant or not. So if the tech companies say they’ve complied, they’ve taken reasonable steps and the e safety commissioner Julian Mcgrath says, “And no, you have not,” then what? Well, that’s when we head off to the courts. Because just because there’s no legally enforceable standard for accuracy doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be lawsuits. And in my opinion, in this case, I think that’s actually ideal.

Let’s dive back into the article one more time. E safety will be able to launch a legal action if platforms cannot demonstrate that they have taken the required reasonable steps whatever they are which may differ from platform to platform with a court able to impose fines of up to $49.5 million for breaches. So there is an unseeable target which they can never quite be sure whether they’re hitting it or not. And if they haven’t hit it, then e safety will sue them over their non-legally enforceable standards or something. And there’s only $50 million at stake. So really, no big deal. It’s a mess, the whole thing.

But to understand why I think it’s a good thing that this will end up in the courts, we need to look at the other side of the planet, all the way over at the UK. Specifically, we need to look at what happened when Apple refused to give the UK government a backdoor into their end-to-end encryption. Now, I covered this in detail in episode 159 of the Topher project, and you can find that on my YouTube channel, but I need to touch on it briefly again here in this video because, as I did say in that video, the way Trump handled the UK government when they tried to bully Apple, well, that’s exactly the way that Trump is going to handle the Australian government if the Australian government tries to bully Google or tries to bully Meta.

So, what happened between the UK government and Apple? Well, I’ll bet that unless you’ve already seen episode 159 of the Topher project, you probably have no idea that all of what I’m about to tell you went down. The UK government released a technical requirement that was supposed to force Apple to give the UK government a backdoor to break their end-to-end encryption that Apple offers to its users. Now, there’s two key details here. The first is that it’s not possible for Apple to provide a backdoor only for some users, its UK customers, without also creating the same security breach for all of its customers everywhere. And this is important because Trump won’t get involved until it affects Americans or American companies. And rightly so. He’s the president of America, not the president of the entire planet. But hold that thought because the other important detail here was that the UK government also released a gag order banning the UK media from even talking about the fact that the UK government had demanded that Apple give them a backdoor through their encryption.

Now just stop and think about that. The UK government presumed not only to have the power to give itself a global backdoor into Apple’s encryption for every Apple customer globally, but also to have the power to silence the media so that they were not even allowed to talk about what they were doing. Now, where it went wrong for the UK government was that in February of this year, Apple took the nuclear option. Instead of meekly complying with the UK government’s demands and forever destroying their trust with their loyal customer base, they decided instead to withdraw their end-to-end encryption services from the UK. Now this meant that they had technically complied with the directive from the UK government but they hadn’t given the UK government that back door that they wanted but also by not giving UK people the end-to-end encryption that they provided to the rest of the world.

But what they also did was they announced the change. They announced to their customers worldwide that they were withdrawing end-to-end encryption in the UK without explaining why. Because if that explained why, that would have breached the gag order and the UK division would have gotten into trouble with the UK government. But there were some journalists in the US who saw that announcement and thought, hm, I wonder why that is. I wonder why Apple have withdrawn their end-to-end encryption services in the UK specifically. They went and did their jobs and they found out exactly what had happened. And being US journalists, they were protected by the US First Amendment. So they went ahead and published the whole story in American media, telling the world that the UK government had tried to give itself a backdoor into Apple’s encryption globally without telling anyone.

Now, this was February this year. Donald Trump had been sworn back in for his second term as president only about a month before this news broke.

And by all accounts, when it broke, he was not a happy camper. Now, we don’t know the details of what happened between then and a few weeks ago when everything changed, but what we do know is that all of a sudden, Tulsi Gaba, the US Director of National Intelligence, announced, and her announcement was later confirmed by the UK government, that the UK government were withdrawing their technical directive and that Apple were free to offer their encryption services to their UK customers without having to create that backdoor that the UK government had been demanding.

What changed? Well, we don’t really know. All we know is that according to Tulsi Gabbard, the effort to force the UK to back down had personally involved both President Trump and Vice President Vance. Now, this tells American tech companies two very important things. First is that they’d better take the rights of their American users pretty seriously. Because if this is what Trump will do when he goes up against the UK government because the UK government has pissed him off, you can only imagine what he might do to them if they pissed him off. But secondly, it tells them that he’s got their back if they do the right thing. Just because a foreign government is bullying them and going after them and telling them what to do doesn’t automatically mean that they should just roll over and do as they’re told.

And it’s against that backdrop that we have the e-Karen with comedically bad timing thinking that she can step in and bully US tech companies in the name of the Australian government and force them to carry out government-mandated censorship in Australia. But again, the details matter here because for as long as what the e-Karen is doing only affects Australians, Trump’s not going to get involved and these tech companies will play along with whatever the e-Karen wants them to do. But there are two main scenarios where Trump might get involved because Americans might start being affected. The first is if US citizens start to be affected by the ban directly. This could happen in a range of ways. For example, if the e safety office, well, they’ve insisted that these tech and social media companies have to require verification of accounts that are posting about Australia, even if their IP addresses are not necessarily in Australia. And that’s because people can just use a VPN to appear to be outside of Australia. And the e-Karen doesn’t want us dodging her age verification pet project so easily. But if Americans or even dual citizen American Australians start to be censored, start to be banned or required to provide identifying information, then Trump might start to take an interest because that’s a violation of their First Amendment rights, amendment rights of Americans.

Now, I don’t think that’s likely. I don’t think that’s going to happen that way to be honest. But the second scenario that I think is far more likely to get Trump involved is if the e Karen decides that the tech companies are not taking reasonable steps in her opinion, but they believe that they are. The moment the lawyers get involved, I think Trump will get involved too. And he won’t be calling the e-Karen to talk to her. He’ll be calling Ambassador Rudd, a man he deeply dislikes. And with good reason given the things that Rudd has said about President Trump in the past. And that phone call, well, that’s not going to be a fun one. I believe that Donald Trump places the free speech, online privacy, and online security of American citizens, as well as the integrity of American tech companies very high on his list of priorities. And I’m of the view, for reasons that I’ve discussed many times in my past videos, that Trump is willing to engage in tariff diplomacy, using the economic might of the USA to force other governments to back down on things like censorship and freedom of speech if it affects Americans or American tech companies.

Now, I don’t know exactly what leverage Trump used against Kamala and against the UK government, but I know that whatever it was, it worked. And I’m of the opinion that the best possible thing that could happen to us here in Australia is for the e-Karen to have the arrogance to try and sue US tech companies for failing to take reasonable steps because I believe that that will bring Trump in to deal with her personally. I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not saying that this is definitely going to happen, but if it was going to happen, well, the groundwork’s in place. It could happen. The e safety office has created these imprecise, nebulous, non-legally enforceable standards that create an invisible, unknowable target. And it’s all in pursuit of an under 16 social media ban that is being overseen by, in my opinion, an egotistical, out of her depth. Again, in my opinion, former American Twitter executive, let’s not forget, who has an axe to grind against Elon Musk and against Donald Trump and against anyone who dares to question my authority.

Now, I’m not a financial adviser, but if you see the e-Karen starting to get uptight about these tech companies not doing enough, I suggest you buy some popcorn shares because a showdown between the e-Karen and the American president would be the greatest and most entertaining show on earth. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported.

So, please support the Topher project by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. Thank you for watching to the end. The algorithm loves you and so do I. Please like, subscribe, comment, and let me know how you think all of this is going to play out.

And as always, think free.