Story by Lana Lam/BBC Australia.
Australians must prove they are over 18 before they can access adult content such as porn, R-rated video games and sexually explicit AI chatbots under new laws.
The changes will protect children from harmful content, with platforms fined for breaches, Australia’s online safety regulator said.
“We don’t allow children to walk into bars or bottle shops, adult stores or casinos, but when it comes to online spaces… there are no such safeguards,” its commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.
Experts say the new laws – which come three months after Australia introduced an under-16s social media ban – will face similar concerns over data privacy and users trying to trick age-verification technologies.
In Australia, as in many countries, users visiting adult sites are usually asked to verify their age by clicking on a box that says they are over 18.
But the new changes mean platforms must introduce stricter age-verification checks from Monday.
This can include facial recognition technology, digital IDs and credit card details.
Under the new rules, companies behind search engines, app stores, social media and gaming platforms, porn sites and AI systems – including companion chatbots – must take “meaningful steps” to prevent children from being exposed to adult content.
“If a young person searches the internet for suicide or self-harm content, the first result they see will be a helpline – not a harmful online rabbit hole,” Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, said in the lead-up to the new rules being announced.
Research by her agency found that one in three children aged 10-17 had seen sexual images or videos online.
It also found that more than 70% of children had been exposed to online content showing high-impact violence, self-harm and suicide material, and information on disordered eating.
Days before the new measures came into effect, Australian news site Crikey reported that RedTube, YouPorn and Tube8 – all owned by Canadian porn giant Aylo – had stopped all Australians from registering accounts and accessing content.
A spokesperson for Aylo said that, while it would comply with the new rules, it did not think they would protect children and “instead creates harms relating to data privacy and exposure to illegal content on non-compliant platforms”.
Dr Rahat Masood, who teaches cybersecurity at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), said the new laws will have limited impact.
“Age-verification laws may raise barriers but are unlikely to completely prevent young people from accessing restricted content,” she said.
Most youngsters were very digitally savvy, she said, using VPNs (virtual private networks) or other tools to trick sites into thinking they were logging on from another country. Using a parent’s credit card or ID would also be a fairly easy way to get around the rules.
A greater concern is whether young people seek darker corners of the web, Masood said, such as overseas adult websites that are not regulated, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, or getting adult material from platforms like Telegram, Discord or WhatsApp where age-checks are limited.
She said the new rules may reduce casual or accidental exposure to harmful material but adult users will also be worried about their data privacy.
“For many people, there is a discomfort with linking identity verification to highly personal browsing activity,” Masood said.
Sabrina Caldwell, who lectures on ethics in technology at UNSW, agrees the changes will be flawed, much like the social media ban, but they will create an extra barrier.
“For many children – and adults for that matter – this will be effective in helping them to avoid startling or unsettling imagery and information without warning,” she said.
“And even if they do sneak onto such sites, they should be aware of the dangers they may encounter.”
But critics say the age-verification rules for social media and adult content were moves that Australia will come to “absolutely regret” in years to come.
Seth Lazar, a philosophy professor at the Australian National University, says the new measures were “extremely misguided, both as a matter of technological practice and from the perspective of liberal values”.
“Instead of these crude, circumventable policies that create an infrastructure of private companies effectively doing law enforcement, they should just mandate that every operating system provider has to create genuinely functional parental controls apps that meet a set of minimum criteria,” Lazar said.
“Build tech to support parents, not to replace their judgement.”
Last July, the UK introduced new laws for porn sites to “robustly” age-check users or risk fines of up to £18m, or 10% of worldwide revenue.
