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Australia’s “Social Media Ban” is Digital ID via the backdoor

Kit Knightly

Earlier this month Australia’s government announced plans to ban anyone under the age of sixteen from using social media.

Social media companies aren’t happy about it, predictably, and the kind of people conditioned to oppose everything social media-related are proudly cheering it on.

That’s how the issue is being framed. Social media/big business vs protecting children.

But that’s not what it’s really about. It’s really about digital identity and removal of anonymity.

Think about it – how do you enforce banning anyone under 16 from social media?

Well, you need everyone to prove their age before starting an account.

How do they prove their age?

Why, with a new Australian government backed digital identity of course.

Perhaps the one that was created by an Act of Parliament in May and is due to come online on December 1st.

This isn’t me spouting hypotheticals, they’re openly saying it. From Reuters [emphasis added]:

Australia plans to trial an age-verification system that may include biometrics or government identification to enforce a social media age cut-off, some of the toughest controls imposed by any country to date.

The plan couldn’t be more obvious.

Step 1 – Create digital ID.
Step 2 – Enforce its use via “think of the children” messaging.

…that’s it. It’s a two step plan.

To give them some credit, they might be playing a slightly longer game here. It’s possible the sweeping “no children on facebook or twitter” stance (which has come in for some criticism in mainstream papers) is a deliberately extreme policy intended to sell their true goal as some kind of “compromise measure”.

For example, maybe they’ll relent and say “fine, children can use social media, but everyone has to use Digital ID to end anonymity so we can monitor predators”…or something.

However it plays out, Australia is getting digital ID because oh won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children.

Meanwhile, in the US we can look forward to Trump putting digital biometric ID in place to “secure the border” and “protect the integrity of our elections”.

In the UK it will be about controlling immigration.

The EU is getting digital id to promote “efficiency and safety”.

And New Zealand is getting their own…just because they’re New Zealand and that’s what they do now.

It’s like that medicine in Mary Poppins. It might be different colours and flavours depending on whose taking it, but in the end it’s the same stuff coming out of the same bottle.

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