I remember reading an article once that claimed that 12 year old girls had some of the most buying power in western societies due to their influence on their fathers decision making. It suggested that there were whole ad campaigns focused on their demographic for a huge range of things that you wouldn't normally associate with 12 year old girls (eg cars).

The legislation does appear to include requirements for handling of personal data acquired to confirm age of users.

63D outlines the requirement:

A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.

There isn't really a definition of what reasonable steps are but that looks like it's on the commissioner to define them under section 27 of the act. A platform is a service that basically allows interaction between users and a service "includes a website" (does that include gaming servers?) so Lemmy sites would most certainly fit the bill. It really depends how onerous these reasonable steps are as to whether Lemmy sites will be able to implement them.

Not sure how the act implementers plan to deal with servers hosted in other countries. Will they block them? If not then this is mostly a paper tiger, but also an impediment to further development of Australia based platforms.

Yeah I didn't read the article, that sounds fair

I feel like the big one in western Australia is pretty easily explained .. that's a big ole desert and we are moving in to summer ..

That is excellent

Oh yeah sorry I see that now

He could however get around it if he charged his friends $0.0001 per Mb of data transferred between them and the server (business interactions) or made sure that every chat post included an ad and all polygons were skinned in ads (see section 63C(1) and 63C(3) of the act amendment)

The definition of a site that would be affected is in the online safety act. Your son's singaporean Minecraft server would definitely be included and if he had a beef with one of his friends they could report him and he could be fined 30,000 penalty units or $3,300,000.

Hahaha it's in the original act and it's hilarious.

material means material:
(a) whether in the form of text; or
(b) whether in the form of data; or
(c) whether in the form of speech, music or other sounds; or
(d) whether in the form of visual images (moving or otherwise); or
(e) whether in any other form; or
(f) whether in any combination of forms.

The way I see it it would be a struggle for big social media sites to implement. I think they are more likely to shimmy on out of here.

The legislation seems to exclude everything for business purposes, if a child is selling skins on Roblox are they then entitled to an account?

It also excludes advertising, if all a user's interactions are being sold by the provider to advertisers and that being their primary business model, does that mean the account is off the hook?

On another note I love the definition for 'material' in the existing act .. shows a rock solid understanding of the internet.

I'm glad they have put the onus of social media platforms, however I think there is no feasible way to make this work short of requiring 100 points of ID be provided to your social media account to prove age. As much as I'd like to share that information with every platform I think I'll pass.

Further to this, how do you police that on something like the fediverse? Is @Aussie.zone going to shut down because the onus of checking IDs too much for a small social media provider? What about IRC?

I assume there is going to be a series of marches consisting of a million angry children and their parents protesting the loss of Minecraft and Roblox ..