[simondotau]

For what it’s worth, as an Australian, and as the operator of an online community, I unreservedly approve of the social media ban enforced by our government.

Conversely, I don’t agree with the way some other countries are going about it. Especially the UK with the abysmal way they have physically policed online speech by adults. Incredibly sad to see police prioritise non-violent “speech crimes” because they’re too scaredy-cat to tackle actual violent crime.

There is a reasonable answer to be found, if we're willing to be inventive. It shouldn’t be beyond the imagination of cryptography experts to design a system where only governments can issue an age identification certificate, which individuals can use to generate verifiable proof of age tokens. But where the tokens can’t be used by the government to identify the individual.