AU age verification rant

18 Nov, 2025

As of writing, there's less than one month left before Australia's under-16s social media ban goes into effect on December 10th. I am not against the idea of the ban itself (my high school experience as a person who stays away from most social media tells me that this generation could use some time off), but I am against how it's going to be implemented, namely through age verification, which I went over briefly in my blog post on why I left GitHub (for personal project development). The gist of it is age verification in Australia will most likely require some form of face or government ID to guess your age (both of which you shouldn't be giving out willy-nilly, and the former of which has margins wide enough to estimate a certain YouTuber as 15 years younger than they actually were, flagging them as a child).

For once, some good news.

Last time, I linked this article, which listed platforms that could be included in the ban, but were not confirmed to be yet. One of these platforms is GitHub, which while I don't use anymore for my own projects, the vast majority of other open-source projects I use do, so I need an account to make issues and pull requests on those projects.

I am pleased to announce that GitHub is no longer on the banned social media list (source: this news article), and so I can continue using it for the purposes described above. Other platforms no longer being included in the ban include Discord (somehow), Roblox (but it will still implement age verification to use any form of chat within their platform), Steam (because you don't need to show your ID to enter a physical game store, right???), and LEGO Play (which is already a kids' platform!)

How the ban will affect me now

Noww that I shouldn't have to worry about suddenly not being able to publish source code for my apps, I now only use two services that are affected by the ban: YouTube (because it has a monopoly over the video sharing market - if you're a YouTuber, please upload to Odysee (or other platforms), so I can get away altogether), and Reddit (they have a lot of answers to my programming/self-hosting questions, and more!). I do not use either of these two service signed in (for YouTube, I stopped using it signed in starting September 13, and Reddit I use exclusively through an alternative frontend), but I still don't know if the age verification law means you'll need to suddenly always need an account in Australia to use either of these services (which would suck for freedom of information - even more than the social media ban on its own).

The beginning of something bigger.

I swear, I'm not a conspiracy theorist...

Of course, this is just the beginning of more age/face ID verification. For example, there are already cars being sold that have face recognition, currently being used to make sure you're "not driving distracted" (but it goes off if you do so much as look at your fucking side mirrors - you know, normal driving activities), but can definitely be updated in the future to be used more privacy-invasive purposes. That's outside the scope of this blog post though - go watch the video I linked before, and some of that YouTuber's other videos to find out more about why Australia's government is cooked.

That's all for now. YAMDCC development will resume Soon™.