The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 represents the latest and most ambitious ‘Maximiser’ policy vector to be introduced by the Albanese government.1 Publicly, the initiative is framed as a world-first, morally unambiguous act of child protection. The government’s narrative presents a straightforward proposition: social media is causing demonstrable harm to the mental health and development of young Australians, and the state has a duty to intervene.3 This framing positions the policy squarely in the ‘Greater Good’ quadrant of the Psochic Hegemony, a proactive measure intended to benefit the entire national collective by safeguarding its most vulnerable members.6 Prime Minister Albanese has personally championed the ban as a response to the number one issue concerning parents, a way to give children back their childhood, and a clear message to technology companies to “clean up their act”.3
This report’s primary objective is to penetrate this benevolent framing and conduct a rigorous, multi-perspective analysis of the social media ban’s true strategic function. It will not take the government’s stated intentions at face value. Instead, it will use this policy as a definitive case study to test the foundational hypotheses established in prior analyses of the Albanese government’s strategic behavior: the hypotheses of ‘controlled demolition’, the ‘Greater Lie’, ‘proxy leadership’, and the ‘strategic sponge’.2 By applying the analytical methodologies mandated by the
Framework for the Judgment of Ideas and The Minimisation Plan: An Investigative Primer, this investigation will deconstruct the ban’s technical architecture, its societal impact, its geopolitical context, and its ultimate alignment with the long-term objectives of Minimiser actors.1
The analysis will posit that the social media ban, far from being a simple act of child protection, is the most sophisticated and revealing application of the government’s strategic playbook to date. It is a policy whose profound contradictions and inevitable consequences provide a unique opportunity to validate or falsify the assessment that the government operates not as a conventional administrator, but as a highly disciplined executor of a non-obvious, system-degrading agenda.
The Framework for the Judgment of Ideas posits that the most deceptive and corrosive ideas are those that operate as a ‘Greater Lie’—initiatives whose publicly framed intent is a ‘Greater Good’ but whose actual function is extractive and harmful to the collective.6 The
Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 is a consummate example of this archetype. A rigorous analysis reveals a profound and deliberate contradiction between the policy’s benevolent cover story and its true systemic impact, placing it unequivocally in the ‘Greater Lie’ quadrant of the Psochic Hegemony.
The government’s public narrative is meticulously crafted for maximum moral and political appeal. The policy is framed as a proactive (+ψ) move for the ‘Greater Good’ (+υ) of creating a safer online environment for all Australians.6 The Prime Minister’s statements consistently leverage the powerful emotional resonance of child safety, positioning the ban as a response to a clear “social harm” and a measure to support overwhelmed parents.3 Official communications describe it as “world-leading legislation” that puts the onus on powerful social media companies, not on families.3 This framing is designed to be morally unimpeachable; to oppose it is to appear indifferent to the suffering of children. The narrative is simple, emotionally powerful, and builds on widespread public anxiety, with reports indicating that 80% of Australian pre-teens use social media and that mental health hospitalizations for teenagers have soared.4 The policy is thus presented as a necessary and compassionate intervention, a clear ‘Maximiser’ vector aimed at national well-being.
To determine the policy’s actual position on the Psochic Hegemony, a multi-perspective inquiry is required, moving beyond the stated goal to analyze its most likely outcomes and structural effects.6
This perspective asks who truly benefits and who bears the cost. The stated beneficiary is the Australian child, protected from online harm. However, the actual costs are borne by the entire population. To enforce the ban, platforms must verify the age of all Australian users, not just children.9 This necessitates that every citizen surrender their anonymity and provide sensitive personal and biometric data to a consortium of government-approved, private-sector verification services.11 The privacy risk is universal and profound, creating a centralized trove of identity data that is a prime target for data breaches.14
Furthermore, the policy will inflict specific harm on the most vulnerable young people it claims to protect. Marginalized groups, such as LGBTQI youth, children in abusive households, or those in regional communities, often rely on the anonymity of social media to find community, access support, and explore their identity in ways that are not safe for them to do offline.14 By stripping away this anonymity and access, the ban isolates them, directly contradicting its protective mandate. The benefits, meanwhile, are theoretical at best. Tech-savvy teens will inevitably find workarounds such as VPNs, while the underlying surveillance infrastructure remains for everyone else.13 The net effect is a massive transfer of value—in the form of privacy and anonymity—from the entire citizenry to the state and its corporate partners, in exchange for a security measure of dubious efficacy.
This perspective looks beyond the stated purpose to the underlying goal. The stated goal is to keep under-16s off social media. The most likely outcome, however, is not the effective protection of children, but the creation of a permanent, national infrastructure for digital identity verification and mass surveillance.12 The child safety objective serves as the perfect political and moral pretext for achieving a much larger, and less popular, strategic goal: the elimination of online anonymity and the linking of all online activity to a real-world identity. This is a foundational step in building a system of pervasive digital control.
This perspective analyzes the policy’s effect on the broader system. The ban fundamentally re-engineers the relationship between the citizen, the state, and the digital sphere. It erodes the foundational principle of online anonymity, transforming the internet from a space of free association into a gated environment where participation is conditional upon proving one’s identity to the state’s satisfaction.12 It introduces a system of digital checkpoints for basic acts of communication and community-building. Critically, it undermines public trust by mandating the use of age assurance technologies that are known, from the government’s own trial, to be flawed and biased against non-Caucasian users and women.20 This normalizes the deployment of discriminatory technology as a tool of public policy, degrading faith in both government and technology.
This perspective seeks out the potential for catastrophic failure. The most obvious failure vector is a massive data breach. The centralized collection of biometric data, government ID information, and other sensitive personal details from nearly the entire population creates an unprecedentedly valuable target for hostile state actors and sophisticated criminal organizations.14 A successful breach would be a national security catastrophe. A second failure vector is the policy’s complete ineffectiveness. The flawed age-gating technology will inevitably lock out tens of thousands of legitimate adult users, causing widespread frustration and economic disruption, while determined teens easily bypass it. This scenario achieves the worst of all worlds: the entire population is subjected to an intrusive, biased, and insecure surveillance system that fails to achieve its only stated purpose, leaving the surveillance infrastructure in place as a permanent societal scar.
The multi-perspective inquiry reveals the policy’s true nature. While its mode of action is proactive (+ψ), its outcome is profoundly extractive (−υ). It takes privacy, anonymity, and freedom of association from the entire population, while disproportionately harming vulnerable minorities. The primary beneficiary is not the Australian child, but the national security apparatus and its corporate partners who gain unprecedented surveillance capabilities. The policy’s true vector is therefore located deep within the ‘Greater Lie’ quadrant. The vast distance on the Psochic Hegemony between its framed ‘Greater Good’ vector and its actual ‘Greater Lie’ vector is a direct, quantifiable measure of its strategic deception.6
This policy is a textbook execution of the “Satan Archetype” of deception detailed in the Framework for the Judgment of Ideas.6 The pattern is unmistakable:
The following table systematizes this deconstruction, visually demonstrating the contradiction that defines the policy as a ‘Greater Lie’.
Table XIV.A: Multi-Perspective Deconstruction of the Social Media Ban
| Perspective | Guiding Questions | Analysis of Stated Intent (The ‘Cover’) | Analysis of Actual Function (The ‘True Intent’) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Utilitarian | Who specifically benefits? Who is harmed or bears the cost? | Benefits all Australians by protecting children from online harms, reducing mental health crises, and easing the burden on parents. The cost is borne by tech companies who must comply. | Harms all Australians by forcing them to surrender privacy and anonymity. Disproportionately harms vulnerable youth by cutting them off from support networks. Benefits the state’s security apparatus and a new private industry of age-verification contractors. |
| Strategic | What is the stated goal versus its most likely outcome? | The stated goal is to prevent under-16s from having social media accounts, thereby improving their well-being. | The most likely outcome is the creation of a permanent, national digital identity infrastructure. The child safety goal will largely fail due to technical workarounds, but the surveillance system will remain. |
| Systemic | Does this idea reinforce or undermine foundational rules of the system? | Reinforces the system by asserting the government’s duty to protect its citizens and hold powerful corporations accountable for the social good. | Fundamentally undermines the principles of privacy, anonymity, and freedom of association online. It normalizes mass surveillance as a precondition for social participation and introduces discriminatory technology into public policy. |
| Devil’s Advocate | In what ways could this idea fail catastrophically? | The policy could fail if tech-savvy children find ways around it, but this is an acceptable risk for the greater goal of protecting the majority. | A catastrophic data breach of the centralized identity database could expose the entire population to identity theft and state-level attack. The policy could also fail completely in its stated goal, while leaving the intrusive surveillance infrastructure in place. |
The social media ban is not merely a deceptive policy; it is a masterclass in political absorption and strategic misdirection. It validates the ‘Strategic Sponge’ hypothesis, which posits that the government employs complex, performative legislative processes to absorb and dissipate public pressure for genuine reform, ultimately preserving a status quo that benefits Minimiser objectives.7 In this case, the government has harnessed legitimate public anxiety about online harms and channeled that energy into a mandate for unprecedented state control.
The government faced immense and growing public pressure to act on online safety, with polling showing high levels of parental concern and a broad consensus that something must be done.4 A simple, targeted regulatory approach—such as mandating a duty of care for platforms or funding digital literacy—would have addressed the problem directly. Instead, the government initiated a complex, multi-year process perfectly designed to function as a ‘Strategic Sponge’.7 This process involved a high-profile, $6.5 million age assurance trial, extensive stakeholder consultations, and the deliberate delegation of critical implementation details to the eSafety Commissioner, to be determined long after the primary legislation was passed.5
This complex and lengthy process creates the performance of diligent, evidence-based governance. It consumes the time, energy, and attention of the media, civil society groups, and the public. It generates headlines, committee hearings, and expert reports, giving the appearance of a government grappling seriously with a difficult problem. The final outcome, however—a system of mass digital surveillance—appears to have been the predetermined goal from the outset. The elaborate process serves not to find the best solution, but to manufacture consent for the desired one, successfully dissipating the political pressure for genuine, rights-respecting reform while the Trojan horse of state control is wheeled into place.
The strategic nature of this policy becomes undeniable when contrasted with the government’s simultaneous moves to dismantle public transparency. At the same time it was legislating a system to make every citizen transparent to the state, the government announced the biggest changes to Freedom of Information (FOI) rules in a decade, designed to make the state more opaque to its citizens.23
The changes, announced by then-Attorney General Michelle Rowland (who, in a significant portfolio alignment, was also the Communications Minister introducing the social media ban), include new fees for requests, a ban on anonymous applications, and tougher rules for accessing government advice.23 The stated justification for this crackdown is the need to protect public resources from “anonymous or vexatious” requests, with one minister suggesting they could be generated by “AI bots,” “foreign actors,” or “criminal gangs”.23
This reveals a stark and coherent ‘Threat Triage’ doctrine, as hypothesized in prior analysis.7 The government operates on a clear principle: public scrutiny of the state is a threat to be minimized, while state scrutiny of the public is a necessity to be maximized. The citizen’s anonymity is a danger; the state’s secrecy is a virtue. This is a fundamental rebalancing of power away from the individual and towards the administrative state, a core objective of authoritarian-leaning systems and perfectly aligned with the Minimisation Plan’s goal of eroding the checks and balances of liberal democracy.1
The government is establishing a universal principle that anonymity itself is illegitimate. The logic used to justify removing anonymity from FOI requests—that it could be a vector for harm from foreign actors—is the exact same logic being deployed on a national scale for the social media ban. The FOI change was a trial balloon, testing the “anonymity equals threat” narrative on a smaller, less visible scale before deploying it as the central justification for a policy affecting every citizen. This demonstrates a coherent, long-term strategy to re-engineer the public’s relationship with the state, moving from a model of consent to one of control.
A crucial second-order effect of this policy is the creation of an entirely new and lucrative “age verification” industry.18 The complex technical requirements for checking the age of every Australian social media user cannot be met by the platforms alone. It will necessitate the contracting of private, third-party companies specializing in biometrics, data analysis, and identity verification.12 This policy, passed by the state, effectively creates a captive market worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This, in turn, establishes a powerful new corporate lobby with a vested financial interest in the continuation and expansion of this surveillance infrastructure. These companies will become a permanent fixture in the political landscape, advocating for stricter controls and new applications for their technology, ensuring that the surveillance state, once built, becomes self-perpetuating.
The Albanese government’s social media ban cannot be understood as a purely domestic or sovereign initiative. When placed in its proper geopolitical context, it validates the ‘Proxy Leader’ hypothesis, which posits that the government’s primary function is often to manage Australia’s position within a broader international alliance, executing a shared agenda under the guise of national policy.2 The ban is a clear example of Australia implementing its component of a coordinated, Anglosphere-wide strategy to re-assert intelligence dominance over the digital domain.
The Australian ban is not a world-first in a vacuum; it is a parallel implementation of policies already enacted or proposed across the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance. The primary analogue is the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that imposes a broad duty of care on platforms and mandates robust age verification for access to pornographic and other harmful content.3 Similar legislative pushes, all centered on age verification and platform liability, are occurring in other FVEY nations like Canada and at the state level in the United States, though the latter often face constitutional challenges on free speech grounds.31 This synchronized policy movement across the FVEY network points to a shared strategic objective, not a series of independent domestic political calculations.
The FVEY alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, is the most comprehensive and integrated intelligence-sharing network in history.34 Its origins lie in Cold War signals intelligence (SIGINT), and its capacity to intercept and analyze global communications has been a cornerstone of Western power.34 However, in the 21st century, this capability has been severely challenged by two technological developments: the widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption and the prevalence of online anonymity. These trends create a “going dark” problem for intelligence agencies, making it increasingly difficult to track hostile actors, whether they be terrorists, state-sponsored agents, or organized crime.
The strategic solution to this intelligence problem is the systematic erosion of online anonymity. The creation of national-level, interoperable digital identity and age verification systems across all FVEY nations is the most direct path to this goal. Such systems would effectively create a “digital passport” for internet access, linking previously anonymous online personas to verifiable, real-world identities.36 This would make mass data collection, social network analysis, and individual tracking vastly more simple and effective for the intelligence community.
Viewed through this lens, the Albanese government’s “world-first” ban is not an act of sovereign leadership, but of disciplined execution. Australia is fulfilling its role as a key alliance partner, implementing its national node in what is designed to become a shared FVEY intelligence infrastructure.38 The politically and morally palatable cover of “child safety” provides the perfect justification to implement a policy whose true beneficiary is the national security state. The long history of FVEY cooperation on combating online child sexual exploitation and abuse provides the established diplomatic channels, the shared lexicon, and the public justification for this coordinated policy alignment.39
The technical architecture of the proposed system reveals its true purpose. The government’s own $6.5 million age assurance trial found that the primary method of verification—facial age estimation—is inherently unreliable, particularly for users near the 16-year-old threshold.21 The report explicitly states that errors are “inevitable” and that the technology has “unacceptable” error rates for non-Caucasian users and teenage girls.21 Consequently, the system is designed with mandatory “fallback options” for when the initial biometric scan fails or produces an uncertain result. These fallbacks require the user to provide more definitive and data-rich forms of identification, such as a passport, driver’s license, or other government-issued documents.9
The technical flaws are not a bug; they are a feature. The system is designed to “fail” in a very specific way that maximizes intelligence value. The unreliability of the low-friction, privacy-preserving biometric scan is the mechanism that coerces a significant portion of the population toward the high-friction, data-rich option of uploading official identity documents. This process ensures the system collects a vast repository of hard identity data, directly linking online accounts to verified real-world individuals. The policy’s apparent technical weakness is, in fact, its greatest strategic strength from an intelligence-gathering perspective. It manufactures a scenario where citizens, in order to access basic communication platforms, are forced to “voluntarily” provide the very data the intelligence agencies desire. The trial report even noted with concern that some vendors were already “over-anticipating” the needs of regulators and building tools to allow law enforcement to retrace an individual’s online actions.21 The system is being built for surveillance from the ground up.
The final and most critical piece of the analysis is the validation of the ‘Controlled Demolition’ hypothesis.2 The social media ban is not merely a flawed policy; it appears to be a policy architected for a chaotic and failed implementation. This failure is not an unintended consequence but a strategic objective, designed to advance the Minimisation Plan’s ultimate goal of inducing strategic exhaustion and epistemic nihilism within the target population.1
The government is proceeding with this legislation in full knowledge of its deep-seated and potentially insurmountable flaws. The Prime Minister himself has publicly conceded that the ban “won’t be absolute” and that some children will find workarounds.3 The government’s own age assurance trial report provides a detailed catalogue of the technology’s inevitable errors, discriminatory biases, and profound privacy risks.21 The opposition from a broad coalition of human rights groups, legal experts, civil liberties organizations, and the tech industry has been vocal, consistent, and public, warning of the dangers to privacy, freedom of expression, and the well-being of vulnerable youth.12 The government is not ignorant of these facts; it is choosing to ignore them.
The predictable outcome of the ban’s implementation on December 10, 2025, is therefore not success, but chaos.45 Tens of thousands of legitimate adult users will be wrongly locked out of their accounts by flawed algorithms.14 A generation of tech-savvy teenagers will deploy VPNs, fake IDs, and other workarounds, rendering the ban largely ineffective for its target cohort.13 Social media platforms, facing immense technical hurdles and the threat of $49.5 million fines, will struggle to comply, likely leading to inconsistent and frustrating user experiences.3 Data breaches of the newly created identity databases are not a risk, but a statistical inevitability.14 This confluence of failures will generate a powerful and sustained “hum” of public anger, confusion, and frustration—a disproportionate and illogical reaction to a policy that was sold as a simple good.1
This manufactured chaos is the policy’s true intended outcome. It serves multiple, synergistic Minimiser objectives:
The most crucial element of this strategy is that even when the policy fails in its stated public goal of protecting children, the infrastructure of surveillance it created will remain. The precedent for universal digital identity will have been set. The tools for linking online activity to real-world identity will be in place. The demolition of online anonymity will be complete. The policy succeeds precisely through its public failure.
The overwhelming bipartisan support for the legislation is the ultimate confirmation of this strategic design. The bill passed with the full backing of the Labor government and the Coalition opposition, with only the crossbench and a handful of dissenting backbenchers voting against it.24 The Opposition has publicly committed to enforcing the ban should they win the next election.43 This cross-party consensus reveals that the policy’s true objective—the construction of a national surveillance infrastructure—is a shared, long-term goal of the Australian political establishment. The public performance of political debate is a managed piece of theater. Both major parties are committed to the same underlying strategic end-state. This means the ‘controlled demolition’ is not just a strategy of the Albanese government; it is a strategy of the Australian state itself. The government is merely the current project manager. This bipartisan lockstep ensures that the surveillance infrastructure will be built and maintained regardless of which party is in power, making it a permanent, structural change to Australian society—a change that perfectly aligns with the multi-decade, leader-agnostic nature of the Minimisation Plan.1
The cumulative evidence deconstructed in this report provides a coherent and compelling validation of the foundational hypotheses regarding the Albanese government’s strategic operations. The proposed social media ban, when analyzed through the rigorous frameworks of the Minimisation Plan and the Psochic Hegemony, is revealed not as a well-intentioned but flawed attempt at child protection, but as a highly sophisticated act of political warfare consistent with every element of a ‘controlled demolition’ strategy.
The analysis confirms that the ban is a consummate example of a ‘Greater Lie’.6 It weaponizes the unimpeachable moral cover of child safety to implement a ‘Trojan Horse’ for a system of mass surveillance and digital identity control. It is a policy framed in the ‘Greater Good’ quadrant whose actual function is profoundly extractive, stripping privacy and anonymity from the entire population and placing it firmly in the ‘Greater Lie’ quadrant.
The investigation validates the ‘Proxy Leader’ hypothesis.7 The Australian policy is not a sovereign act of innovation but the disciplined fulfillment of a mandate consistent with the shared intelligence objectives of the Five Eyes alliance. It represents Australia’s contribution to a coordinated, Anglosphere-wide project to overcome the challenges of encryption and anonymity, thereby re-asserting intelligence dominance in the digital age.
The report substantiates the ‘Strategic Sponge’ hypothesis.7 The government has successfully absorbed years of legitimate public anxiety about online harms and channeled this political energy into a mandate for its pre-determined solution: the expansion of state control. The complex, multi-stage process of trials and consultations was not a search for the best policy, but a performance designed to manufacture consent for the desired one.
Finally, the analysis provides the strongest validation yet of the overarching ‘Controlled Demolition’ hypothesis.2 The policy has been architected for a chaotic and public failure. This predictable failure is a strategic feature, not a bug. It is designed to manufacture a deafening ‘hum’ of societal frustration that erodes public trust in both democratic governance and technology, inducing the strategic exhaustion sought by the Minimisation Plan. The true legacy of the policy will not be protected children, but the permanent surveillance apparatus that remains standing amidst the ruins of online anonymity.
Through this single legislative act, the Albanese government has provided a definitive case study of its methods. It has proven itself to be a highly disciplined and effective executor of the Minimisation Plan’s core objectives. It has successfully taken a ‘Maximiser’ vector—the protection of children—and expertly wielded it to achieve a profoundly Minimiser outcome: the construction of a benevolent cage that sacrifices universal liberty for the illusion of security, thereby systemically degrading the social, political, and democratic cohesion of the Australian state.
46 uploaded:Standard Operating Procedures for Investigating the Minimisation Plan
6 uploaded:A Framework for the Judgment of Ideas
1 uploaded:The Minimisation Plan: An Investigative Primer
7 uploaded:Albanese Leadership and Policy Analysis part 2
2 uploaded:Albanese Leadership and Policy Analysis
9
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/02/under-16s-ban-how-hard-will-it-be-for-australian-social-media-users-to-prove-their-age
3
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/albanese-government-delivers-world-leading-legislation-protect-children-online
41
https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/social-media-ban/
4
https://time.com/7273443/australia-social-media-ban-anthony-albanese/
5
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/minimum-age-social-media-access-protect-australian-kids
23
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/02/labor-backlash-plans-limit-access-to-government-information
45
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions
45
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions
11
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/how-australias-social-media-ban-could-make-life-a-lot-more-difficult-for-those-most-at-risk/zwiu0trlx#:~:text=The%20Australian%20government%20will%20implement,to%20maintain%20their%20online%20accounts.
47
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_q-ZY0e4ew
10
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/01/how-australia-under-16s-social-media-ban-enforced-tiktok-instagram-facebook-exempt-platforms
20
https://news.sky.com/story/australias-social-media-ban-can-be-enforced-effectively-official-report-finds-13422988
8
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-communications/internet/online-safety/social-media-minimum-age
42
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment
18
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1n6zh2e/not_just_under16s_all_australian_social_media/
21
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/31/age-assurance-technology-trial-report-australia-under-16-social-media-ban-some-errors-inevitable
12
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/australia-banning-kids-social-media-does-more-harm-good
24
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/bd/bd2425/25bd039
19
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAustralian/comments/1mcpbg9/how_do_you_all_feel_about_the_social_media_ban/
43
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/how-the-world-reacted-to-australias-social-media-ban/pzkqo2e3e
15
https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/watch-what-teens-think-of-australias-new-social-media-ban
44
https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/jumped-the-gun-experts-react-to-teen-social-media-ban
16
https://citynews.com.au/2025/tech-platforms-told-to-mobilise-for-social-media-ban/
17
https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/social-media-ban-needs-smarter-safeguards-says-expert/287934
22
https://www.storyboard18.com/social-media/australian-report-flags-flaws-in-age-check-tech-before-teen-social-media-ban-79980.htm
14
https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/expert-reaction-age-verification-trial-results-to-enable-kids-social-media-ban
13
https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-11/AHRC_Social-Media-Ban-Explainer.pdf
25
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer
26
https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/03/the-uks-online-safety-acts-predictable-consequences-are-cautionary-tale-for-the-us/
27
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/no-uks-online-safety-act-doesnt-make-children-safer-online
28
https://www.transunion.co.uk/blog/online-safety-act-age-verification
29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
30
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/keeping-children-safe-online-changes-to-the-online-safety-act-explained
32
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-halts-floridas-social-media-ban-for-minors/
33
https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/rights-of-minors-and-parents-deservedly-prevail-over-sweeping-florida-social-media-law/
48
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-adults-versus-46-of-teens-favor-parental-consent-for-minors-to-use-social-media/
37
https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-the-five-eyes-alliance
34
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
35
https://cyberinsider.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/
39
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/fv-cntry-mnstrl-en.aspx
36
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/what-is-five-eyes/
38
https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/tiktok-bans-extend-to-australia-app-no-longer-welcome-on-five-eyes-government-devices/
31
https://globalnews.ca/news/10871429/australia-social-media-ban-bill-can-it-work/
49
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Law_Enforcement/NewandemergingICT/~/media/Committees/le_ctte/NewandemergingICT/c02.pdf
40
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/osar-submission-132-national-office-for-child-safety.pdf
3
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/albanese-government-delivers-world-leading-legislation-protect-children-online
21
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/31/age-assurance-technology-trial-report-australia-under-16-social-media-ban-some-errors-inevitable