Mic Drop: Age of Consent

Summary

Podcast Summary: Click Here – "Mic Drop: Age of Consent"

Release Date: August 1, 2025
Host: Dena Temple-Roston
Episode Title: Mic Drop: Age of Consent

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Click Here, hosted by Dena Temple-Roston, the focus shifts to Australia’s bold attempt to regulate social media usage among minors. With U.S. states similarly contemplating age verification laws, the Australian case provides a timely exploration of privacy, parental concerns, and the intricate challenges of enforcing digital age restrictions.

Australia’s Bold Social Media Ban

Australia's legislature enacted a sweeping law in late 2024 aimed at banning social media access for individuals under 16 years old. This legislation, part of a broader surveillance framework known as TOLA (Telecommunications and Online Legislation Act), stands as one of the most stringent surveillance laws globally. The primary objective, as articulated by privacy advocate John Payne, is to mitigate the perceived social harms that social media inflicts on young Australians.

John Payne [01:52]: "The government has this view that by putting a ban on social media, that when this bill becomes law in one year's time, kids will come, you know, flooding back onto the sporting fields around the country to play football, play cricket and golf and basketball. It's like, no, you know, it's not going to happen."

Privacy and Enforcement Challenges

The implementation of this ban raises significant concerns regarding privacy and the feasibility of enforcement. Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, oversees the rollout of this law. She acknowledges the complexity of enforcing such a ban without infringing on broader privacy rights.

Julie Inman Grant [04:32]: "If people think we're just going to flip a switch and their under 16 accounts are going to disappear, that probably won't be the reality. So we have a lot to figure out. We're not strangers."

One of the core issues is verifying the age of users online. Traditional methods like age verification boxes are easily bypassed, leading to considerations of more intrusive measures such as biometric verification and behavioral tracking.

John Payne [07:49]: "Everyone is not of age until they prove themselves otherwise. So in fact, everyone becomes a suspect."

Technological Solutions and Privacy Risks

To enforce the age restriction, platforms might employ technologies that scrutinize user data to ascertain age, such as:

• Biometrics: Utilizing facial recognition to estimate age based on facial features.

  Dena Temple-Roston [11:26]: "Another option Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety commissioner, suggests, is a technology that uses AI to look at hand movements like, say, holding up a peace sign and then a fist to the camera. And believe it or not, AI can use that to figure out your age."

• Behavioral Tracking: Analyzing browser histories and interaction patterns to infer age.

  John Payne [11:26]: "Tracking behavioral signals, looking at your browser history, for example, and estimating the age from your viewing habits."

• AI-Based Hand Movements: Interpreting gestures to determine age with claimed high accuracy.

  Julie Inman Grant [11:47]: "It claims to have a 99% success rate, which is kind of crazy when you think about it."

However, these methods pose significant privacy risks, including the potential for data breaches and invasive surveillance, which could undermine the privacy of all users, not just minors.

John Payne [12:26]: "None of these options can accurately verify someone's age online in a way that respects people's right to privacy and keeps their data safe."

Impact on Marginalized and Remote Youth

Another layer of concern is the potential disproportionate impact on marginalized groups and youths in remote areas who rely on social media for social connection and access to information.

John Payne [07:02]: "It puts the locus of power in the hands of the communications minister and one regulatory body, which is the eSafety commissioner. And they can do that by issuing regulations in the absence of parliamentary oversight and debate."

This centralization of regulatory power, without sufficient oversight, raises questions about accountability and fairness in the enforcement process.

Comparisons to U.S. Legislation

Australia's initiative is paralleled by similar efforts in the United States, notably Florida's 2025 law banning social media for individuals under a certain age. However, Florida's law faces constitutional challenges grounded in the First Amendment, which protects free speech—a protection that Australia does not afford in the same manner.

John Payne [09:06]: "We do have an implied right to free political speech in our Constitution and upheld by a High court. But we don't have similar as given to the Americans under your Constitution. We're probably the last liberal democracy in the world not to have an omnibus national bill of rights. And this is something that we really really need. You know, we want digital rights."

This difference underscores the unique legal landscape in Australia and the potential vulnerabilities of the new law in protecting digital rights.

Potential Evasion and Unintended Consequences

John Payne highlights the likelihood that minors may find ways to circumvent the ban through tools like VPNs or anonymizing services, potentially leading them to more dangerous segments of the internet.

John Payne [13:57]: "If they don't subvert the technology, the checks that you're required to prove age by using Tor or using a VPN, they're going to go off into darker parts of the Internet that don't have this type of regulation or don't care, or they're simply going to spend time on a different technology platform and it could be gaming, it could be PlayStation, it could be anything."

Moreover, stringent age verification could inadvertently restrict access for legitimately older minors or users who face barriers in proving their age, thereby affecting broader user experiences and freedoms.

Advocacy for Digital Rights and Legislative Reforms

John Payne and other digital rights advocates are not deterred by the challenges. They emphasize the necessity for Australia to adopt a more comprehensive bill of digital rights to navigate the complexities of internet regulation without compromising fundamental privacy and autonomy.

John Payne [10:05]: "We're probably the last liberal democracy in the world not to have an omnibus national bill of rights. And this is something that we really really need. You know, we want digital rights."

Their efforts are geared towards ensuring that legislation like the social media ban is thoughtfully crafted, balancing child safety with the preservation of individual liberties and privacy.

Looking Ahead: Law Implementation and Advocacy

The Australian social media ban is slated to take effect in December 2025. In the interim, privacy advocates like John Payne are actively campaigning to influence policy revisions that better address human rights and privacy concerns.

John Payne [15:03]: "The fight isn't over yet, it's just intermission. So there'll be a lot more fighting from digital rights advocates like us to try and, you know, get some sense and sensibility built into the."

Dena Temple-Roston concludes the episode by promising ongoing coverage and updates on this evolving issue, underscoring the dynamic interplay between technology, law, and societal values.

Conclusion

"Mic Drop: Age of Consent" delves deep into the contentious issue of regulating social media access for minors in Australia, unraveling the multifaceted challenges of enforcement, privacy, and unintended repercussions. Through insightful discussions with experts like John Payne and Julie Inman Grant, the episode underscores the delicate balance policymakers must strike between safeguarding youth and upholding digital freedoms. As Australia navigates this legislative endeavor, the global community watches closely, recognizing the broader implications for digital rights and internet governance.

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Notable Quotes:

• John Payne [01:52]: "The government has this view that by putting a ban on social media... it's like, no, you know, it's not going to happen."

• Julie Inman Grant [04:32]: "If people think we're just going to flip a switch... we have a lot to figure out."

• John Payne [07:49]: "Everyone is not of age until they prove themselves otherwise. So in fact everyone becomes a suspect."

• John Payne [11:26]: "Tracking behavioral signals... and estimating the age from your viewing habits."

• John Payne [13:57]: "...they're going to go off into darker parts of the Internet that don't have this type of regulation."

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This summary is designed to provide an in-depth overview of the podcast episode "Mic Drop: Age of Consent" for those who have not listened to it, capturing the essence of the discussions and expert insights presented.

Transcript

[Dena Temple Rousted]

From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here. Hey, it's Dena. We're back next week with new stories, but today we're visiting one that's taken on new relevance as US States push for new age verification laws. We look to Australia, where lawmakers tried to do something bold, ban kids under 16 from social media. What happened next says a lot about privacy, parenting, and the fine print of enforcement. Take a listen. Were you really a bouncer at Limelight in New York?

[John Payne]

Yeah, I was about 1990. I used to date a doll girl there as well. She had bleached white hair. I had bleached white hair as well.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

So it's a natural progression from being a bouncer at Limelight to becoming an expert on privacy.

[John Payne]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

I'm Dena Temple Rousted, and this is Click Here's Mic Drop. A longer listen to one of our favorite interviews of the week. On Tuesday, we told you about an Australian surveillance law that requires tech companies to build back doors for law enforcement just for the asking. The law, known as tola, is now considered one of the strictest surveillance laws in the world, which may be why when the parliament in Australia imposed a sweeping ban on social media for kids under 16 back in late 2024, no one was that surprised. Privacy advocate John Payne says no one seems sure how it will actually work.

[John Payne]

The government has this view that by putting a ban on social media, that when this bill becomes law in one year's time, kids will come, you know, flooding back onto the sporting fields around the country to play football, play cricket and golf and basketball. It's like, no, you know, it's not going to happen.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

Stay with us.

[Megan Dietri]

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London, and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

I'm Dena Temple Rooster and this is Click Here's Mic Drop. For years now, there's been growing concern about what social media might do to kids brains and their mental health. The genesis of this movement began with a writer named Jonathan Haidt. He wrote a book called the Anxious Generation. And he basically laid out every parent's worst nightmare about tech and their kids. A flip phone wasn't engineered to hold your attention forever, but a smartphone is Jonathan Haidt talking at Intelligence Squared in the UK and so Kids are now, they're watching videos, the boys are watching porn, they're communicating with their parents during class. Why are we doing this? Just a quick note here. Jonathan Haidt is a controversial figure. His critics say he's played on parents fears. The research behind say the effect of smartphones on kids isn't as conclusive as height makes it sound. But most parents can see for themselves that social media has an unsettling ability to rock their kids worlds. All of which could explain why Australia's Prime Minister announced the new social media ban him.

[John Payne]

Social media is doing social harm to our young Australians and I am calling time on it. I want Australian parents to know that we have your back.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

It turns out one of the officials in charge of rolling out the Aussie ban is actually an American, Julie Inman Grant.

[Julie Inman Grant]

If people think we're just going to flip a switch and they're under 16, those accounts are going to disappear. That probably won't be the reality. So we have a lot to figure out. We're not strangers.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

This is Grant speaking at a Council on Foreign relations panel in D.C. she's been Australia's e safety commissioner since 2017 and she's been at the forefront of tackling issues like revenge porn and online harassment and now kids and social media. And she says this isn't just about age gating kids, it's about a cultural shift. One that she likens to what happened in the US in the 1970s and 80s when there was this whole movement in Congress to make cars safer. This is Grant talking about it with Politico.

[Julie Inman Grant]

Think about all the life saving technologies we take for granted that are in our cars, from airbags to anti lock brakes. So the analogy would be embed the virtual seat belts and erect the digital guardrails to prevent the next tech wreck from happening.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

Foreign things. The law makes social media companies responsible for making sure kids under 16 aren't on their platforms. And if they don't follow through in doing so, it could trigger multimillion dollar fines.

[John Payne]

Platforms now have a social responsibility to ensure the safety of our kids is a priority for them.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

Beyond that, John Payne says there are just a slew of open questions. And his fear is that the way platforms decide to answer those questions may do more than what the law intends. So they won't just keep kids safe online, but could end up infringing on everybody's privacy, adults included. Among other things. He says it's not even clear what platforms the ban applies to. The Prime Minister has said Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X will be covered for sure. But beyond that, it's up to the country's communications minister to decide, which John says concentrates too much power in one place.

[John Payne]

It puts the locus of power in the hands of the communications minister and one regulatory body, which is the ESAFETY commissioner. And they can do that by issuing regulations in the absence of parliamentary oversight and debate.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

John worries that the limiting access could end up harming young people in marginalized groups or kids living in remote areas who are largely isolated without social media.

[John Payne]

We think that it doesn't make due consideration of the human rights impact of the bill. It infringes upon children's autonomy, their agency and even their political rights. And kids these days are expressing themselves politically younger and younger compared to previous generations.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

But most of all, what worries John is something baked right into the law. That 16 year old age limit. How do you even begin to verify how old someone is Online?

[John Payne]

Everyone is not of age until they prove themselves otherwise. So in fact everyone becomes a suspect.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

That's when we come back.

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[Dena Temple Rousted]

Australia isn't alone in its efforts to curtail youth access to the Internet. And at the start of this year, 2025, a new law in Florida went into effect that bans kids under the age of from using social media. But the law now faces some constitutional challenges. The thing that they hide behind here in the United States is the first amendment right. So lots of these things get stopped in their tracks because we have a first Amendment. There's no first amendment in Australia.

[John Payne]

We do have an implied right to free political speech in our Constitution and upheld by a High court. But we don't have similar as given to the Americans under your Constitution. We're probably the last liberal democracy in the world not to have an omnibus national bill of rights. And this is something that we really really need. You know, we want digital rights.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

John worries that Australia's new law will end up violating those not so totally protected digital rights. Because there are only a handful of ways to know whether someone is a kid line. You can, of course, ask.

[John Payne]

Some involve simple, you know, ticking a box. Yes, I'm over the age of 18.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

But how would you know if someone is being truthful? It makes me think of a meme from all the way back in the 1990s about identifying people online. There was a large dog sitting on a chair at a desk, and his paw is on the keyboard of a computer and he's speaking to a smaller dog sitting below him, and he says, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. So if you want to get tougher than a pinky promise, I'm neither a dog nor a child. You have to start looking at the kinds of options that worry John Payne. Things like biometrics, the automated recognition of individuals which looks, among other things, at facial features and estimates age based on that. That means, of course, handing off personal biometric data. That's already happening, by the way, in a lot of airport security checks. Another option platforms have looked at is.

[John Payne]

Tracking behavioral signals, looking at your browser history, for example, and estimating the age from your viewing habits.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

So lots of Scooby Doo and Taylor Swift searches could get you banned. And that would be bad news for Bronies.

[John Payne]

I am a Brony.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

That's right, the adult fan club. Mostly men who love the cartoon My Little Pony. Another option Julie inman Grant, the eSafety commissioner, suggests, is a technology that uses AI to look at hand movements like, say, holding up a peace sign and then a fist to the camera. And believe it or not, AI can use that to figure out your age. It claims to have a 99% success rate, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Of course, the government already does have a way to confirm age in real life. Government IDs, like driver's license people could just be required to upload those.

[John Payne]

And of course, the more intrusive is providing identity documents that are issued by the state to validate the surety that you're remote. So each of those methods involve increasing intervention.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

The problem, John says, is that none of these options can accurately verify someone's age online in a way that respects people's right to privacy and keeps their data safe. Millions of people uploading IDs, credit cards, and biometrics into a database puts a lot of that very sensitive information at risk of being stolen. And it forces people to kind of opt in to being surveilled.

[John Payne]

And that could lead to even more sophisticated technologies being required to enforce this ban, which only adversely affects the privacy of all Internet users, not just under 16 year olds.

[Julie Inman Grant]

But even if you ignore all of.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

Those concerns and the government does find a way to enforce this law while protecting privacy, John Payne thinks the law fundamentally is trying to solve for a problem it doesn't fully understand.

[John Payne]

The government has this view that by putting a ban on social media, that when this bill becomes law in one year's time, kids will come flooding back onto the sporting fields around the country to play football, play cricket and golf.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

And be nice to their parents.

[John Payne]

It's like, no, you know, it's not going to happen. If they don't subvert the technology, the check, the checks that you're required to prove age by using Tor or using a vpn, they're going to go off into darker parts of the Internet that, you know, don't have this type of regulation or don't care, or they're simply going to spend time on a different technology platform and it could be gaming, it could be PlayStation, it could be anything.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

I guess parents would say that if everyone doesn't have it, it makes it easier for them to say no rather than being the exception to the rule.

[John Payne]

Yeah, it's very, very difficult. And the argument's no same as a parent to wanting the latest pair of Nikes or Chuck Taylors. Except now that these consumable items that we get are smartphones.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

The law actually takes effect about a year from now in December 2025, time that John says he'll be using to push the government to rethink the law through the lens of human rights and privacy.

[John Payne]

The fight isn't over yet, it's just intermission. So there'll be a lot more fighting from digital rights advocates like us to try and, you know, get some sense and sensibility built into the.

[Dena Temple Rousted]

We'll keep you posted. This is Click Here Spectrum from Recorded Future News. This has been Click Here's Mic Drop. It was written and produced by Megan Dietri, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, Lucas Riley and me, Dina Temple. Rest it was edited by Karen Duffin. We'll be back on Today Tuesday with an all new episode of Click Here. Have a great weekend.

[Megan Dietri]

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from News outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.