Regular viewers of the Topher project will already know that I’m predicting that the under 16’s social media ban is going to turn into an epic legal showdown
between the Australian e-Safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant and the big American social media tech companies including Meta which is Facebook and Instagram, Alphabet, meaning Google and YouTube and of course X meaning well meaning Julie Inman Grant’s arch nemesis Elon Musk. Well, that epic showdown is still only in its warm-up phase, but some of the big tech companies are already making their intentions pretty clear. Earlier this week, the Australian government held a parliamentary hearing for the express purpose of grilling the tech companies and finding out how exactly they were planning to comply with the under 16s ban, which is now less than two months away. Here is the Channel 7 report about that hearing.
[From video]
Representatives from some of the world’s biggest social media companies have failed to show up to a hearing in Canberra. Officials from Google and Microsoft faced a grilling in Parliament yesterday to explain how they’ll boot children from their platforms. There are calls for more clarity on the under 16s ban which starts in December. What is the plan for the 11th of December? What is the plan for the day after this social media ban kicks in? Representatives from Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok failed to attend the hearing. [End video]
Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, as well as Snapchat and TikTok, all decided to give this parliamentary hearing a wide birth, and with good reason.
Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are the platforms who have the highest proportion of young users, and they know a stitch up when they see one. The senator we saw there that was asking the question, “What’s the plan?” Well, that was Senator David Schubert. I’m pretty sure I know exactly what their plan is and the Australian government isn’t going to like it.
More on that in a minute. But first, 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 us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate having an Australian voice of reason talking about Australian issues like this age verification plan, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my best-selling books about government, power, human rights, and civil disobedience. You’ll find both of my books, plus my DVD of my multi-award-winning documentary, Battleground Melbourne, as well as my t-shirts and hoodies in a range of different designs.
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Senator Schubert’s question is a valid one. What’s going to happen on December 10th and 11th and 12th? Well, I think it’s fairly clear and the boycott of this parliamentary hearing by Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok only serves to reinforce my view, but evidently the geniuses in Canberra are playing catch-up. So, let me spell it out for them. The under 16’s ban uses very vague wording. It doesn’t prescribe how these tech companies are going to comply or what exactly they’re expected to do. It requires only that these mega tech platforms take reasonable steps to age verify their users. What’s a reasonable step? Well, that’s anybody’s guess. And therein lies the problem.
Tech companies have an enormous amount of information about their members that the government doesn’t and shouldn’t have.
There’s simple things like when the account was created. For example, in the case of my YouTube account, I created that back in 2009, 16 years ago. Thank you very much. So, I doubt that YouTube are going to invest an enormous amount of their resources trying to figure out if I’m over 16 years of age or not. And let’s not forget that these platforms need their users. That’s how they make their money. Either through financial subscriptions like X with their pay-to-play blue tick or through simple ad revenue serving ads to their users.
These tech companies will be looking to optimize two things. Firstly, minimizing the cost of the compliance on their side. So minimizing the amount of resources they have to invest into taking reasonable steps to figure out who’s under 16, but also minimizing the number of accounts that they remove incorrectly because every incorrectly removed account is going to cost them revenue. So yes, I absolutely expect that if an account is already 16 years old or older, or to be honest, probably if an account is more than about 5 years old, they’re going to say that that’s good enough. They’ve checked the age of the account itself, and that’s a reasonable step to ensuring that the account user is now over 16 years of age.
For newer accounts, they can look at your entire viewing history on their platform. What you’ve watched, what you’ve followed, what you’ve liked or commented on, what your comments have said. AI tools will very quickly be able to determine whether or not a user’s history looks like a 15-year-old or more like a 43-year-old. So again, I don’t think these platforms are going to be forcing each and every user to go through an arduous high friction process to verify their age using invasive facial recognition tech. They will use those technologies, but they’ll reserve those sorts of intrusive high friction methods for accounts which based on an AI-driven survey of the account, well, it looks like maybe it might be someone who isn’t 16 years of age.
That’s not to say that these tech companies will do nothing. And I’ve no doubt that this is going to negatively affect some accounts of adult members. That is pretty much inevitable. But these companies are going to try and make sure that that happens as little as possible. And they will insist that they have now taken reasonable steps and they have therefore complied with the legislation. But the e-Safety commissioner is almost certainly going to disagree. I think in her imagination she really believed that she could force every one of these companies to use privacy invading methods to individually verify the age of each and every user.
And so my prediction for the day after the ban comes into effect is that’s when the lawsuits will begin. I’d be willing to bet my life savings all $4.68 cents worth that these tech companies already have teams of lawyers preparing for the lawsuits that they know are coming and that’s why they haven’t bothered to show up to the parliamentary hearing. There’s nothing for them to gain by showing up and having a few MPs grandstand and ask gotcha type questions. I think that the tech companies have just made their intentions entirely clear. They are not going to gravel or bow down or kiss the ring. They will take what they consider to be reasonable steps in order to comply with the legislation and then they’re going to let the lawyers take it from there.
After that, well, anything could happen. I wouldn’t put it past the e-Karen to start making absurd demands like saying the government should block access to these platforms through any Australian ISP if they refuse to play ball. But such a block would be political poison for the Albanese government. So, I doubt that they would support such an idea. And if they did, these tech giants will just go straight to the courts, get an injunction, and let the lawsuits play out over the following few years.
And I’m sorry to regular viewers that have heard this before, but I would be remiss not to mention in this video the fact that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not to mention the vice president, JD Vance, have both made it very clear that they will back their tech companies, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and to privacy. I’ve covered that in detail before. I’m not going to bore you with a repeat. Just check out Topher Project episodes 180 and 159. If you’d like to understand more of that history that makes me so confident that not only are these tech companies are going to stand their ground, but also that the highest levels of the US government are going to back them all the way.
And that’s not to say that these tech companies will win in the Australian courts in the end.
Frankly, there’s no knowing what an Australian court might decide. But that process to get to a decision, that will be a process that will take years to play out with probably multiple appeals and things along the way. And in the meantime, this under 16’s social media ban and the battle that Julie Inman Grant is creating will be a thorn in Anthony Albanese’s side with a lot of unhappy Australians and an enormous amount of diplomatic pressure from the US to just drop the whole thing.
I don’t know who’s going to win this showdown, but I do know that it is going to be a big one. And I know that by choosing not to show up to this parliamentary hearing earlier this week, Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat have confirmed my view that no matter how big this battle gets, they are up for it.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap, to make sense of the nonsense, and to keep up with the world as it changes around us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And perhaps more importantly, please join my email list while you’re there so that we can keep in touch regardless of what may happen in December.
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