wjs018 PieFedHow will Australia's ban on youth access to social media affect instances hosted in Australia?
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n7gifmdnDo they have any rule that says you need a minimum number of users on a site to fall under the law?
If servers of someinstance.co.au fine if they move to hosting in Finland?
It just feels like a nightmare.
Apparently aussie.zone is asking users to DM evidence of being over 16, and the implication is that of those who don’t - he’ll ban/delete their accounts.
But absurdly enough, 4chan is exempt from this because all activity on there is anonymous. Not through accounts. So if the Fediverse had anonymous, non-account posting on-top of regular account-based posting then people could post anonymously happily, but anyone with an account would have to verify.
Make it make sense.
But I can still access Aussie.zone communities from my pieced.ca account, right?
Yes
Oh, apparently their attempt at following the law is pretty ridiculous. https://aussie.zone/post/27246692
I’d say their attempt is actually better than what the government came up with. I also thought the idea of chatting with a bot that guesses your age was pretty funny.
In the good way, yes. Who was it the admin of a Lemmy instance, I think, who said he would receive alcohol as a form of ID verification because to even acquire it legally in the first place you have to be of age, anyway? That’s pretty much golden and incentivizes the local economy!
Local? They’d be getting alcohol from all around the world :D
Well, they’d be supporting their local businesses for that I’d hope!
Don’t think that’s it, it has no footprint in Australia. Meta, &Google, X etal all do, same as piefed.social, lemmy.world etal have no Australian base. aussie.socal users can just move to another server. I’m an Aussie.
Similarly UK has tried to get 4chan, kiwifarms etc but they have no UK footprint so they just ignore them.
No, that’s a matter of enforcement. UK is still trying to fine 4chan - but failing. Australia has just outright said the law doesn’t apply to them.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/09/4chan-not-blocked-australia-under-16s-social-media-ban
I saw someone earlier say it was on the basis of anonymity…people don’t actually have ‘accounts’, so there’s nothing to verify. How accurate that is I don’t know and I’ve never used 4chan.
So, the politicians’ concern is that kids will say dumb stuff on the internet, and it will haunt them for the rest of their life?
Don’t give them anything, that instance is run by the worst parts of r/australia. They cannot be trusted.
yes you should be very weary of sending someone a photo you took while driving a car that doesn’t inlcue your face /s
To my fellow Aussies:
The social media ban works through DNS, just change your DNS to either 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 in your router settings and browser setting. I’ve had no problems so far, but if that doesn’t work you can always use TOR or another VPN service.
Quad9 is also a great provider for privacy: 9.9.9.9 … In case you want to avoid google and cloudflare.
That’s also a good choice, there are others too. I would suggest to everyone look around for a good generic DNS provider.
privacyguides.org has a list of recommended DNS providers
wait, it actually works through dns?
Yeah.
So far, changing my DNS has worked fine for me. I’ve had no requests of ID from any of the socials.
No, it’s account based, in a lot of cases changing your DNS won’t change the server you end up with at Youtubes or whoever
find existing accounts held by under-16s, and deactivate or remove those accounts
prevent under-16s from opening new accounts
prevent workarounds that may allow under-16s to bypass the restrictions
have processes to correct errors if someone is mistakenly missed by or included in the restrictions, so no one’s account is removed unfairly.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs
Platforms then use a variety of signal’s to detect if someone is under 16:
DNS has nothing to do with it
changing the DNS works when the site has been banned for not complying, is how I understood.
there’s no banning or blocking of social media sites
that is not how the social media ban works…
Then how am I still able to access youtube, facebook and all the others without needing to give them my ID?
Edit: Nice alt accounts, loser.
DNS translates domains like youtube.com into IP’s like 1.1.1.1, this has no bearing when you make a social media account in Australia:
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions
If you have an australian account registered with those websites and they suspect you are under 16 you will have to verify your id
As explained here the platforms will need to check:
https://aussie.zone/post/27246692/20254931
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs
On top of this there are plenty of services that block VPN’s, most famously Netflix.
So yeah, changing one aspect of your account while leaving all the others won’t get around the ban
This is my primary account and always has been? What’s with the loser? Why so cranky?
That’s a lot of text just to say “I’m an idiot who loves bending over for the government”.
How are they going to enforce any of that on a company with no office in Australia? Answer: They can’t.
You think youtube and facebook don’t have offices in Australia?
I’m simply telling you what the government is telling social media companies that allow Australian users to create accounts on their websites
You can change your DNS all you want mate, I’m just saying it won’t make a difference
On reddthat, we got this notice in an announcement back in March 2025:
March? Over 18?
Reddthat presumably was reacting to the Online Safety ACT UK there.
We discussed it in the community posts back in Dec 2024 when the law passed – February is when the sign up change happened and March was when the announcement went up. The UK’s bullshit may be what prompted the announcement happening then though.
Yeah, but what I mean is that wasn’t a reaction to Australia here. Since your threshold here is 18, not 16.
reddthat is an instance hosted in Australia; so the answer to “how will the ban affect it” is “we already have an age limit in place”. That’s my point.
Fair enough.
Doesn’t there have to be a certain number of users for this to apply to them? I could have sworn I saw it had to be over 50,000.
IIRC moving the instance won’t be helpful - the issue is the servicing of minors, not where the service is. And while the server being in a different country might be a bit of a roadblock for legalities, the general consensus is, like with GDPR - if you make your service available in Australia you must comply with Australian laws, therefore need to make your instance unavailable to children.
So how is Australia going to make other sites with no footprint in Australia do it then?
National level site blocking, suspension on any future operations, international courts… Corporations are much easier to persecute over borders than private persons.
Why do you think American companies, even ones with no legal presence in Europe, still went along with GDPR? Same principle applies here.
Australia blocking 4chan in Australia doesn’t compel 4chan to do anything.
They didn’t want to lose custom in Europe.
Yeah sure that’s why major news sites “complied” with GDPR by blocking European visitors…
Some didn’t mind the loss of service in Europe and just cut Europe off. Some did. Bottom line is that the EU wouldn’t have been able to sue them because they had no assets in Europe.
What is it you imagine Australia could do to 4chan, other than blocking 4chan in Australia?
My point is that the threat of legal action was enough that major sites decided not to risk it, and blocked Europe et al.
4chan is hardly a financial/corporate entity (though they do seem to profit off traffic with ads), therefore much harder to go against, but blocking the service is still effective. It will be up to 4chan to see if they want to comply with the law and get unblocked or if they can live without Australian traffic.
Easily circumvented by changing your DNS settings or using TOR or other VPN services
Not when the specific IP addresses of services are blocked on IPS level - which would be mandated by the state.
VPN/Tor, sure, but at that point the service itself can’t confirm where the visitor is from, therefore Australian laws wouldn’t apply.
The second half of your comment is redundant.
Not knowing where the user is from is THE WHOLE POINT of TOR and VPNs in general.
It just proves that this whole internet censorship thing is doomed to fail. It just forces people to find a work-around that the government doesn’t control.
But hey, if the government wants to waste time and money pissing into the wind they can go for it, let’s see where that gets them.
Except they’re wasting tax payer money, which is shitty.
I hope at least it helps reduce pressure on kids that they need social media from their peers, it can be a pretty bad place to be (regardless of age really).
Thats about all the good from it, my fear is everything else that comes after. Mainly that they’ll force devices to be linked to a person, which means you’ll need a way to have approved devices that can access sites etc, which means you can only use a browser that has device attestation, which means no more free and open ecosystems of applications or operating systems (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc)…
Fuck all this.
How does this even work? This is among the stupidest arguments I’ve ever heard on the internet, at about the same level of flat-earthism.
Are you saying if I am in Italy, selling Italian good on an Italian shop set in an Italian street, and an Australian tourist sends an agent to walk the Italian street and buy a thing for them from my Italian stand, I am somehow beholden to Australian law? This but “oN tHE iNtErNeT”?
A better analogy would be ‘Australian buys Italian goods from online store in Australia’. Under your analogy no, because nothing at all is done in Australia, where your online shop would be, therefore it’d be subject to Australian law.
It’s still not a very effective law, though.
The entire point of the analogy is that we are eschewing “online” stuff so that we can see how “bUt On tHE iNTeRnEt” applies, so “but make it an online store” is literally missing the point.
Better analogy in that sense would be still “Australian sends an agent to buy something from a physical store in Italy after finding a printed catalog that a third party imported into Australia from Italy”.
So it looks as if you’ve added ‘this but on the internet’ afterward, is that correct?
Taking that away, no, because my point with using an online store was that some interaction is done in Australia, as is the case with social media sites overseas that Australians interact on, in Australia. Replace online store for ‘mailed catalogue’.
Yeah but the interaction that is done in Australia is not part of the business chain. The catalogue was not mailed by my store. Someone else (an ISP, in this exercise) took it from an available stand in Italy and imported it (on their own) to Australia. (The closest I can think of to the material representation of “mailed catalogue” in this exercise is if I intentionally uploaded a copy of my .it website to an .au hosting)
For another analogy: if I were to post an Italian job offer in Italy, not only I am not subject to Malaysian (or Australian) labour law, but a third party in Malaysia reproducing the job offer there does not change that fact either. It’s their copy, and act-of-copy, of the job offer that is subject to Malaysian law, at best. And this should hold true regardless of the nature of the message: mere emission of the message can not be constituted as consecration of a legal responsibility towards any potential listener. If that was the case, it would be impossible to make any political, religious or scientific speech lawfully, as surely a law is being broken sometime, somewhere and a message can by its nature outlast the act of emission.
Then it’s not subject to our laws, which is why an Australian walking up to an Italian vendor in Italy is a bad analogy…no interaction is done in Australia. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Australian buying something in Italy, our laws don’t apply to your original analogy.
As for your last paragraph I agree and that’s probably one area where it will fail.
This is a complex issue and both of the comments above are way oversimplifying it…
Lots of governments around the world are nowadays claiming that their laws apply to all or many websites that can be accessed in their borders. Whether they can enforce this if the website has no physical assets in the country is a very different question. They could arrest their operators when they enter their countries (as happened to Pavel Durov), or they could geoblock websites, or… here are some starting points for further research: