The question actually asked "Has your child ever watched or seen any content online that was meant for or rated for someone older than they were?"

That could mean letting a 14 year old watch a movie rated M15+. That's not the same question as "have they seen something inappropriate".

The report editorialises here, and we should look out for people taking that rhetorical sleight-of-hand and running with it. #tljr

88% of parents reported that their child had not experienced cyberbullying, image-based abuse, or extortion.

11% of kids did, which is something that deserves attention, but let us keep things in perspective when we are looking at interventions that will affect *everyone*.

And importantly, don't conflate "watched a movie a bit too young" with "was extorted into sending nude pics of themselves to a pedophile that was, for once, not their uncle Jeff".

#tljr

If a bad thing does happen (that 11%), parents talk to their kids (85%), and maybe the kid's school (60%). Given it might not always be something related to school, it's unsurprising that the school figure would be lower.

Police/eSafety/Other is 26-27%. There's nothing here about why that might be, so we should be careful not to infer too much. #tljr

This may alarm some: "there was broad agreement that YouTube was suitable for younger users, with 85.04% of children and 68.59% of parents indicating it was appropriate for those aged 15 years and under.

In contrast, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Facebook Messenger were considered suitable for slightly older age groups."

I'm sure Google/YouTube will be noting that whenever they're negotiating on this topic. Especially when Tiktok and Snapchat get salty. #tljr

Figure 16 on the age appropriateness of various platforms is interesting and I will include it here.

LinkedIn is seen as less appropriate for kids than Twitter/X and honestly, what sort of weird child would want to voluntarily expose themselves to LinkedIn brainworms? Apart from whoever is the new Caleb Bond, I mean. #tljr

"Understanding related strongly with willingness to engage with age verification systems"

What the report means by "understanding" appears to be whether or not they know the difference between "various age assurance methods, such as age verification, age estimation, age inference, age gating, and identity verification, by analysing their ability to match these methods to their description."

More on that in a moment.

#tljr

"Online age assurance was perceived to be of great importance across all participants, commonly seen as part of a societal obligation to protect children and their development through regulation of age-appropriate content and harm minimisation."

It is interesting to see how the report frames this "harm minimisation" thing. #tljr

"Participants were asked to review an article about the introduction of age assurance technology to bar children from online pornography in Australia."

I am unable to find a citation for the specific article that was used. It does not appear to be included in the report.

"All three groups were alarmed by the statistics presented in the article on the high percentage of children exposed to online pornography, especially in pre-teen years."

It is difficult to interrogate how reliable these statistics might be, or the context in which they were presented. #tljr

People actually have broader concerns. "Participants commented on a wide range of possible harms that children could be exposed to online including exposure to violence, grooming, bullying, harassment, disinformation, discrimination, and scams. Many linked these harms to unmoderated social media content and children having less maturity to make informed decisions."

I note that these issues are not limited to children. Knowing you proved you are an adult with a credit card would be handy if I was a scammer, for example. #tljr

"Participants expressed a need to improve content moderation on social media and limit possible exposure to harmful, violent or mature content with considered impacts on mental health and development for minors."

It is unclear how that will happen when one looks at, for example, the news right at the moment. #tljr

Note that people aren't willing to just go all out to "protect the children".

"There was collective concern across participants about data security and privacy, particularly in relation to online identity verification measures. Participants expressed trepidation to provide personal data online, citing recent data breaches in major banks and telecommunication companies in Australia." #tljr

Here are the descriptions:

Age verification: When a website asks you to show an ID document like your passport or driver’s licence to prove how old you are.
Age estimation: When a website uses a technology to guess how old you are based on things like your face or behaviour.
Age inference: When a website asks you to provide information that you must be a certain age to possess, such as a marriage certificate or credit card, to check how old you are.
Age gating: When a website asks you to enter your date of birth, or asks whether you are 18 years old or above.
Identity verification: When a website asks for proof of who you are, like showing your ID, to confirm your identity. We sometimes refer to this as ‘100 points of ID’.

People were asked to match up the description with the method name. 56% of people got "identity verification" right.

"The least correctly identified age assurance method was age inference (25.35%)."
#tljr

"Analysis of support for age assurance methods revealed mixed backing. While around nine in ten adults expressed support for age assurance to some extent, only 55.84% were very supportive of using age assurance methods."

People agree that it's a nice idea in theory, but when theory meets practice everything falls apart.

I, too, would like to be an omnipotent supermodel, but I am unwilling to go to the gym that much.

#tljr

"While most respondents (75.84% of adults) believed these methods were at least somewhat effective, willingness to use them varied by platform type, with higher acceptance for adult-oriented services (47.91% for dating apps) than general services (28.83% for online shopping)."

Yes, but people don't think they'll have to do the age assurance thing themselves. They think it'll only apply to other people. #tljr

"Importantly, however, the research showed minimal negative impact on intended usage, with 80.29% of adults indicating age assurance methods (presumably if acceptable to users) would either not affect or positively influence their likelihood to use websites, suggesting broad acceptability of these measures across most demographic groups."

I don't think this data suggests that *at all*. I think it suggests that people mostly don't think they'll have to personally show ID to access Facebook.
#tljr

Okay, and now a bit about the research that really bugs me. The question asked was "To what extent are each of the following groups responsible or not responsible or ensuring access to adult content (i.e. pornography / violence) complies with age related guidelines?"

But, there was apparently a hovertext thing that expanded the definition of "adult content (i.e. pornography / violence)" to mean "Adult content and age restricted online services’ can include online pornography and violence, alcohol and gambling, or services that may pose harm to children, including social media.”

Not the same thing at all. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand, in fact. #tljr

Most people think responsibility rests with multiple parties, with most responsibility on individuals themselves (should you access content yourself), parents, the websites themselves before we get to the government.

Though "fully responsible" is an option, and I'd like to ask the people who say ISPs or police should be "fully responsible" for whether or not people access adult content how that would work, exactly?

Do they think Dan Murphy's should be nationalised and cops should do home delivery of gin? Vodka to the Node? #tljr

In the qualitative research "‘parents/carers’ were commonly perceived as predominantly responsible across participants, as they were ‘best placed’ to protect and inform their own children in online safety and able to supervise and manage access to devices"

Consist with other research on such things throughout the years. #tljr

But then we get into "will it work" and "will it make things worse".

"Results also showed that a consistently greater proportion of adults who had their personal information exposed in a data breach perceived age assurance methods to be ineffective (27.43%) compared to those who had not had their information exposed (19.96%). This suggested a general lack of faith in the efficacy of technology to keep users safe online."

Well yeah. There is plenty of hard evidence of why this idea is bad. #tljr

And here we have the data that shows people don't really want to use age assurance themselves. Support is pretty soft overall outside of things to do with sex. I note that "online gaming" doesn't appear to be specifically about gambling, and sales of alcohol aren't called out here either. The focus on sex is… weird.

"Fewer respondents were very willing to use age assurance methods for personal use of social media (33.36%), content streaming services (31.67%), online shopping (28.83%) and messaging apps (28.05%)." #tljr

"Figure 30 showed [sic] that eight in ten adults (80.29%) felt that the use of age assurance methods would not impact them (59.00% reporting a neutral response) or that they would actually be much more likely (8.14%) or more likely (13.15%) to use those websites. By comparison, 19.13% indicated they would be less likely to use these websites if age assurance methods were used."

The question asked was "To what extent would the use of age assurance methods on websites with ‘adult content and age restricted online services’ impact your likelihood to use those websites?"

I suggest that people don't think it'll apply to them, and that's why they're largely not bothered. #tljr

Because "Analysis of age assurance methods in practice revealed consistent trust and security concerns, with only 4.43% of adults fully trusting online platforms to store personal information securely, and 52.44% having experienced data breaches."

You are going to annoy people with something they didn't expect they'd have to do, and then there'll be a data breach and it will be your fault. #tljr

"Analysis revealed a clear lack of trust in how Australians viewed online platforms' ability to securely store personal information, as almost half (47.41%) said that they had no trust at all in online platforms to do this, while a similar proportion have partial trust only (47.96%)"

No one trusts Facebook. And governments have done a shithouse job of doing anything about privacy or data security for 10+ years. #tljr

"partial or full trust among those aged 8-17 was 25 percentage points greater than adults and reinforced that children can be particularly vulnerable in terms of online security due to higher levels of trust.

Nonetheless, 81.75% of children were still worried to some extent that websites might not keep their information safe when checking their age"

Why not betray the trust of the children you're allegedly trying to protect? that sounds like a great bit of public policy. #tljr

"The scepticism of online platforms to keep information safe coupled with negative experiences of data exposure has a natural downstream impact on adults’ willingness to provide personal information to organisations for age assurance purposes. That said, willingness to engage to some extent with national identity systems provided by the government to check age was high with 46.39% somewhat willing and 41.12% to state that they were very willing (refer Figure 34) to provide their personal information."

Obviously the answer here is an Australia Card to access Facebook. #tljr

"As shown Figure 37, security (29.98%) and privacy (25.97%) were clearly the two most important factors, accounting for more than half (55.95%) of the ratings, for government to consider when implementing age assurance methods. Much lower importance scores were attributed to the remaining factors."

Dunno how often we have to point this out. It's been the same evidence for decades. #tljr

"Adults who indicated that they had multiple areas of concern were asked to identify the most concerning matter when using age assurance methods. Figure 40 clearly shows that privacy (44.11%) and security (36.89%) were the most concerning matters identified by these respondents with multiple concerns. Much smaller proportions were concerned about accuracy (6.92%), government oversight and accountability (5.53%), personal usage cost (2.78%), usability (1.63%), development costs (1.04%), and being free from bias (1.04%)."

People don't care if it works because we don't believe it will be secure or private. #tljr

"Research released today shows Australians strongly support the Albanese Government’s world leading age restrictions on social media for under 16s."

Bollocks. It says nothing of the sort. People broadly think the idea of some age restrictions to some kinds of content is acceptable in principle, but that is a long way from "90% of people support this specific method of banning under-16s from social media" which is *not* supported by the report.

#tljr

The question was "The question was "To what extent are you supportive or not supportive of using age assurance methods to access online services where ‘adult content and age restricted online services’ is likely to be encountered?"

The way the question was framed made it sound like "adult content" means porn sites, not Facebook. #tljr

"This is unsurprising, given nearly half of all young people aged 8-17 had been exposed to inappropriate content and expressed safety concerns with content on their feeds."

No they weren't. They didn't ask about "inappropriate content" they asked "Has your child ever watched or seen any content online that was meant for or rated for someone older than they were?" #tljr