Australia’s under-16 YouTube ban: another lurch towards censorship

I’ve just published a short Op-Ed at UnHerd on the Australian government’s latest attack on privacy and free speech.

Australia is once again at the vanguard of the technocratic nanny state. The country’s Labor government this week widened its ban on access to social media for under-16s to include video platform YouTube. Minors will still be able to visit the site, but will not be able to upload content or log in to interact with other users. Because users must prove their age, the lion’s share of the internet is now set to be de-anonymised in Australia, with significant implications for privacy and free speech.

Hidden behind the concerns for children’s welfare is a politicised attempt to radically extend government control over platforms which shape social discourse. Australia’s lead regulator for online safety is Julie Inman Grant, who was accused by a US House Judiciary Committee report last month of coordinating with major advertisers and national governments through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to “silence American speech”. GARM, the report alleges, engaged in “collusion to silence conservative viewpoints through targeting Breitbart News, Joe Rogan, and Twitter (now X) among others”.

You can read the full article here.

I went well over the 600 word limit so I’ve including a few key outtakes below:

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant recently lost a case brought by Musk and campaigner “Billboard Chris”. The Commission deemed a tweet by Billboard Chris to be “cyber abuse” because it “misgendered” a transgender activist, and then forced X to geo-block it.

This kind of focus has enabled the Commission to build strong levels of support among the bourgeois intersectionalists who perceive Inman Grant as valiantly battling alt-right demons. This has resulted in progressives more broadly dropping their guard, allowing Inman Grants to rip through our digital rights.

Trying to use a VPN to get around revealing your identity to get on social media? Inman Grant has also expressed hostility to VPN use: “You can use VPNs, you can use burner phones, different SIM cards every day. So it's going to be a challenge for a long time because, again, the internet's global.”

But before you jump in and assume it is just the “Left” is driving this, the eSafety Commission was set up under Australia’s conservative government (way back in 2015), just as the UK’s Online Safety Act was created under the Tories, and both are now turbo-charged under Labor.

In fact, one of the chief proponents of the teen social media ban in Australia has been heterodox hero Jonathan Haidt. In an introduction to a Substack guest post by Labor member Andrew Leigh, he dismisses concerns about IDing every social media user: “Is it unreasonable for companies to check that the person signing a contract is old enough to sign a contract?”

Leigh goes on to cite a survey by the eSafety Commission itself that “forty-four percent of teens experienced at least one negative online incident, including being contacted by a stranger (30 percent).” Apparently, Leigh is shocked to learn that there are people on the internet that you don’t know, and they can contact you!

Haidt also blurbed U.S. censorship leader Renee DiResta’s new book, stating, “I am in awe of DiResta's ability to see through the digital haze and identify many of the most important threats coming at the United States and humanity more broadly.”

The alliances continue to shift in strange ways. Hopefully, Australian progressives will catch up and realise that the eSafety Commission is not their friend, but I won’t be holding my breath.