Enforcing a ban also presents additional privacy risks, experts add.
Under the Australian law, platforms looking to verify a user’s age can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available such has how long an account has been held.
Michael Geist, a professor and Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said that potential data collection alone is concerning and would need to apply to all social media users regardless of age to be effective.
He noted that it can be difficult to discern between a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old by appearance alone, whether in person or online through biometrics systems.
“So what those systems tend to do then is dig deeper,” he said. “They look at who your friend circle is or the language that you use when posting to try to make a better guess.
“Well, now they’re literally engaging in increased surveillance in order to try (to identify your age), and raising even more privacy concerns in order pull this together.”
From metafilter:
"[…]Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.
They might not be disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.
This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today.
This is how it works:
Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect.
One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who always has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal.
Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic.
Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal (“think of the children”) and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue (“social media is bad for children”) and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against.
There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They’re sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they are real people, but they’re also sockpuppets.
The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing.
And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children.
And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost."