Digital ID
The End of Online Anonymity? Australia’s New Law Pushes Digital ID for Everyone To Ban Kids From Social Media
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Australia is gearing up to roll out some of the world’s strictest social media rules, with Parliament having pushed through legislation to bar anyone under 16 from creating accounts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. It’s a sweeping measure but, as the ink dries, the questions are piling up.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government and the opposition teamed up on Thursday to pass the new restrictions with bipartisan enthusiasm. And why not? Opinion polls show a whopping 77% of Australians are behind the idea. Protecting kids online is an easy sell which is why it’s often used to usher in the most draconian of laws. Still, the devil—as always—is in the details. Proof of Age, But at What Cost? |
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Here’s the crux of the new law: to use social media, Australians will need to prove they’re old enough. That means showing ID, effectively ending the anonymity that’s long been a feature (or flaw, depending on your perspective) of the online experience. In theory, this makes sense—keeping kids out of online spaces designed for adults is hardly controversial. But in practice, it’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
For one, there’s no clear blueprint for how this will work. Will social media platforms require passports and birth certificates at sign-up? Who’s going to handle and secure this flood of personal information? The government hasn’t offered much clarity and, until it does, the logistics look shaky. And then there’s the matter of enforcement. Teenagers are famously tech-savvy, and history has shown that banning them from a platform is more of a speed bump than a roadblock. With VPNs, fake IDs, and alternate accounts already standard fare for navigating internet restrictions, how effective can this law really be? The Hasty Debate |
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Critics on both sides of Parliament flagged concerns about the speed with which this legislation moved forward. But the Albanese government pressed ahead, arguing that urgent action was needed to protect young people. Their opponents in the Liberal-National coalition, not wanting to appear soft on tech regulation, fell in line. The result? A law that feels more like a political statement than a well-thought-out policy.
There’s no denying the appeal of bold action on Big Tech. Headlines about online predators and harmful content make it easy to rally public support. But there’s a fine line between decisive governance and reactionary policymaking. Big Questions, Few Answers The most glaring issue is privacy. Forcing users to hand over ID to access social media opens up a Pandora’s box of security concerns. Centralizing sensitive personal data creates a tempting target for hackers, and Australia’s track record with large-scale data breaches isn’t exactly reassuring. There’s also the question of what happens when kids inevitably find workarounds. Locking them out of mainstream platforms doesn’t mean they’ll stop using the internet—it just pushes them into less regulated, potentially more harmful digital spaces. Is that really a win for online safety? A Global Watch Party Australia’s bold move is already drawing attention from abroad. Governments worldwide are grappling with how to regulate social media, and this legislation could set a precedent. But whether it becomes a model for others or a cautionary tale remains to be seen. For now, the Albanese government has delivered a strong message: protecting children online is a priority. But the lack of clear answers about enforcement and privacy leaves the impression that this is a solution in search of a strategy. All on the Platforms Under the new social media law, the responsibility for enforcement doesn’t rest with the government, but with the very companies it targets. Platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram will be tasked with ensuring no Australian under 16 manages to slip through the digital gates. If they fail? They’ll face fines of up to A$50 million (about $32.4 million USD). That’s a steep price for failing to solve a problem the government itself hasn’t figured out how to address. The legislation offers little in the way of specifics, leaving tech giants to essentially guess how they’re supposed to pull off this feat. The law vaguely mentions taking “reasonable steps” to verify age but skips the critical part: defining what “reasonable” means. The Industry Pushback Tech companies, predictably, are not thrilled. Meta, in its submission to a Senate inquiry, called the law “rushed” and out of touch with the current limitations of age-verification technology. “The social media ban overlooks the practical reality of age assurance technology,” Meta argued. Translation? The tools to make this work either don’t exist or aren’t reliable enough to enforce at scale. X didn’t hold back either. The platform warned of potential misuse of the sweeping powers the legislation grants to the minister for communications. X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s team even raised concerns that these powers could be used to curb free speech — another way of saying that regulating who gets to log on could quickly evolve into regulating what they’re allowed to say. And it’s not just the tech companies pushing back. The Human Rights Law Centre questioned the lawfulness of the bill, highlighting how it opens the door to intrusive data collection while offering no safeguards against abuse. Promises, Assurances, and Ambiguities The government insists it won’t force people to hand over passports, licenses, or tap into the contentious new digital ID system to prove their age. But here’s the catch: there’s nothing in the current law explicitly preventing that, either. The government is effectively asking Australians to trust that these measures won’t lead to broader surveillance—even as the legislation creates the infrastructure to make it possible. This uncertainty was laid bare during the bill’s rushed four-hour review. Liberal National Senator Matt Canavan pressed for clarity, and while the Coalition managed to extract a promise for amendments preventing platforms from demanding IDs outright, it still feels like a band-aid on an otherwise sprawling mess. A Law in Search of a Strategy Part of the problem is that the government itself doesn’t seem entirely sure how this law will work. A trial of age-assurance technology is planned for mid-2025—long after the law is expected to take effect. The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, will ultimately decide what enforcement methods apply to which platforms, wielding what critics describe as “expansive” and potentially unchecked authority. It’s a power dynamic that brings to mind a comment from Rowland’s predecessor, Stephen Conroy, who once bragged about his ability to make telecommunications companies “wear red underpants on [their] head” if he so desired. Tech companies now face the unenviable task of interpreting a vague law while bracing for whatever decisions the minister might make in the future. The list of platforms affected by the law is another moving target. Government officials have dropped hints in interviews—YouTube, for example, might not make the cut—but these decisions will ultimately be left to the minister. This pick-and-choose approach adds another layer of uncertainty, leaving tech companies and users alike guessing at what’s coming next. The Bigger Picture The debate around this legislation is as much about philosophy as it is about enforcement. On one hand, the government is trying to address legitimate concerns about children’s safety online. On the other, it’s doing so in a way that raises serious questions about privacy, free speech, and the limits of state power over the digital realm. Australia’s experiment could become a model for other countries grappling with the same challenges—or a cautionary tale of what happens when governments legislate without a clear plan. For now, the only certainty is uncertainty. In a year’s time, Australians might find themselves proving their age every time they try to log in—or watching the system collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. |
corbettreport.com
But it’s another thing altogether for those conspirators to follow through on that psyop and actually achieve their desired end goal: the erection of the biosecurity state.
For those of us who managed to maintain our sanity over the last five years, the question is not whether COVID was a psyop—the answer to that question was obvious from the start—but whether the COVID conspirators have accomplished their objectives.
So, where do we stand in 2025? Did the COVID scamsters win?
Lockdowns
One of the intended effects of the COVID psyop was to take the concept of lockdowns and social distancing from the realm of obscure authoritarian fantasy to stone-cold reality.
As I pointed out in my 2020 video on “What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns,” the idea of using school shutdowns, mandatory lockdowns and social distancing as pandemic prevention measures was first floated by Albequerque high school student Laura Glass for her local science fair project. (For those who are interested, she won third place!)
Prior to 2020, the notion of locking down healthy populations to prevent the spread of disease was still pie-in-the-sky fantasy. No government had seriously attempted to impose lockdowns or social distancing on a mass scale and the very thought of mass quarantines and government-imposed, electronically monitored lockdowns would have been laughed off as conspiracy paranoia.
On the other side of the 2020 divide, however, lockdowns became not only thinkable but an essential tool in the biosecurity state’s toolbelt.
Since 2020, for example, we have seen the extent to which lockdowns penetrated the popular imagination reflected in such ideas as “climate lockdowns.” After all, if locking people in their homes worked for a planetary health emergency, why not use it for a planetary climate emergency?
Yet another example of the mindset shift that has occurred over the past five years arrived last week when the UK Covid-19 Inquiry delivered its verdict that the lockdowns the UK government imposed during the scamdemic were “too little, too late“ and that they could have saved 23,000 lives by locking down earlier.
This is, of course, nonsense. Actually, it’s worse than nonsense; it’s nonsense based on made-up numbers from a known liar. As Off-Guardian point out in their (shadow-banned) tweet on the subject:
For those who don’t know, the tweet is referring to this passage from the inquiry’s report:
Professor Ferguson told the Inquiry that in later work which analyzed the impact of restrictions in England: “we explicitly modelled the counterfactual scenario of moving the lockdown of 23rd March back to 16th March, and estimated mortality … would have been reduced by 48%.“ That could have equated to a reduction in deaths in England from 48,600 to approximately 25,600 in the first wave up to 1 July 2020.
“Professor Ferguson” is, lest we forget, Neil Ferguson, the “virus modeller” (or should that be the “Liberal Lysenko“?) from Imperial College London who produced the computer model suggesting that 500,000 Britons were destined for the grave unless the UK government imposed a national lockdown. Ferguson has since walked back that claim and now denies calling for a lockdown at all, but it should be kept in mind that his about-face came after he was caught breaking the UK lockdown restrictions to carry on an affair with his married lover.
This is also the same Neil Ferguson who used his amazing “virus modeling” powers to predict 50,000 deaths from the UK’s 2002 mad cow outbreak (actual number of deaths: 177) and up to 200 million deaths from a potential, theoretical bird flu outbreak (which has yet to arrive).
Ferguson’s projection of what could have resulted if the government had locked down faster and earlier suffers from the same “garbage in, garbage out” tomfoolery as the Club of Rome’s environmental apocalypticism. Keep in mind that the number of people who would supposedly have been saved by a quicker UK lockdown is based on a fundamentally flawed input: the number of people who the UK government assert died of COVID. Those of us who called out the scam from the start have been noting for years that these COVID death tolls are statistical chicanery, since they rely on the fraudulent claim that everyone who died with COVID—as measured by the scientifically meaningless PCR test—had in fact died of COVID.
In other words, Ferguson’s numbers are plucked out of thin air and aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. They should not be taken seriously by anyone, whatever their opinion on the efficacy of lockdowns.
But, as usual, the damage has been done. The controlled establishment media has run their headlines about the lives that could have been saved by earlier lockdowns, and the type of people who still get their news from these mockingbird repeaters will now be more certain than ever that social distancing and quarantining populations is the right thing to do in the event of a declared health emergency.
Chalk that one up as a win for the COVID scamsters.
QR Codes, Vaccine Passports and Digital ID
Even more important to the would-be medical tyrants than the normalization of lockdowns and social distancing, however, was the creation of the technological infrastructure upon which the biosecurity state is enabled. This digital infrastructure includes:
- the QR codes that people were habituated into scanning before being allowed access to or egress from various quarantine zones;
- the vaccine passports that were used to assess compliance with vaccine mandates; and
- the various contract tracing apps and self-quarantine apps that were employed to keep track of citizens as they moved from place to place.
If you’ve read about my recent experience trying to order breakfast in Malaysia, you’ll know that, once again, the COVIDians have been remarkably successful in achieving their objectives. As I found out during that Malaysian sojourn, scanning QR codes to access online menus and using cashless payment systems to pay for purchases is becoming so normalized in certain parts of the world that it can be difficult to so much as order breakfast without a smartphone and cellular service. Indeed, the smartphone has become a virtual prerequisite for participation in the public space, and it was the scamdemic that allowed the shift to 100% dependence on smartphones to take place.
One recent demonstration of this smartphone requirement for participation in public life came from an email I received this week from a Corbett Reporter in Canada. He was trying to send a registered letter to the US via Canada Post but was informed that his addressed envelope alone would no longer do. Instead, he now had to fill out an online form and print off a special tracking number in order to mail the item. Not owning a smartphone, he was out of luck. He would have to go home, fill out the online forms on his desktop, print out the paperwork and bring it back to the post office. He opted not to send the letter, vowing instead to never again mail anything to the US.
Living in Japan as I do, the only surprising part of his story is that Canada held off making this change in their postal system for so long. Japan Post implemented the same electronic system for international mail four years ago. Of course, at that time the COVID border closures and postal delivery issues were used as the excuse for the intrusive new policy. But, given that country after country is now bringing in similar measures, the reality is clear: the change to a computer-dependent postal system is a global directive that was pushed, using the cover of COVID contagion, during the scamdemic. The end result is that one must either carry their smartphone with them at all times or spend extra time at home filling out online forms and printing off paperwork if they want to send mail internationally.
Of course, all of these technological “upgrades” to our daily experience—from the smartphone postal system to the QR code menus to the cashless payment systems—serve the same agenda. They are meant to pave the way toward the apotheosis of the biosecurity state: the consolidation of all our information into a single government-issued digital identity app. Soon, we will be giving the government real-time access to all of our daily movements, transactions and interactions and will be signing in with government-issued digital credentials everywhere we go online and in real life.
In the event of the next scamdemic, the scammers will hardly have to do anything at all. The QR code check-ins, vaccine passport checks and cashless payments will already be so much a part of our daily life that we’ll hardly notice any new scamdemic-related restrictions on our activities.
That’s another win for Team COVID. But they’re not done yet.
Clot shots
Another key goal of the scamdemic, of course, was to fast track government approval of mRNA and DNA “vaccine” technologies.
We know this, of course, because the conspirators told us as much in their own words. Who can forget the October 2019 Milken Institute-hosted discussion on the “Universal Flu Vaccine“? In case you have forgotten, that was the conference in which such luminaries as Tony Fauci and Rick Bright lamented that the poor, beleaguered Big Pharma corporations were going to have to spend billions of dollars and at least a decade of hard work proving the safety and efficacy of their DNA/mRNA injection techniques…unless some health emergency arose to justify the emergency approval of these experimental technologies.
So, were Fauci and Bright and their co-conspirators successful in their fast-tracking task? Did they circumvent a decade of regulatory approval work for their Big Pharma buddies? Well, if the point was to invoke a health emergency to get emergency approval for these clot shot monstrosities, then we need look no further than “Operation Warp Speed” for proof that the COVID conspirators were, in fact, remarkably successful.
And let’s never forget that Trump considers the Warp Speed MAGA jabs to be “one of the greatest things ever in politics or in the military!”
Lest there be any doubt about Trump’s devotion to this technology, let’s not forget that he hosted an event launching his $500 billion AI-pushing “Stargate” project on his third day in office earlier this year, at which Larry Ellison discussed using AI to develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. And just two months ago, Bill Gates used his place of honor at a White House banquet to boast that he and Trump were discussing “vaccines and gene editing” in their joint effort to “tak[e] American innovation to the next level.”
But this isn’t just about Trump, and it isn’t just about what’s happening in the US. This is a worldwide agenda. And, if this smattering of headlines from the past few months is any indication, the COVID era has given a gigantic shot in the arm (pun intended) to the clot shot “vaccine” manufacturers:
Experimental mRNA flu vaccine shows superior efficacy against symptomatic illness (just don’t ask about the side effects)
COVID Vaccine Tech May Reduce Disabilities in Snakebite Victims
Personalized mRNA Vaccines Will Revolutionize Cancer Treatment—If Funding Cuts Don’t Doom Them
The Dawn of Personalized DNA Vaccines
And, exactly in line with my reporting in Who Is Bill Gates? there’s this recent report
New Gates-Funded Microneedle Patch Implant Installs Both mRNA and Quantum Dot Markings Into the Body
Yes, it’s safe to say we are now ensconced in the era of genetic intervention masquerading as “vaccines.”
That’s another win for the WHO mafia.
Mission Accomplished?
I could go on. I haven’t even mentioned yet the passage of the WHO’s pandemic treaty or how its provisions actually encourage the work of the bioweapons industry…in the name of “defense” against such weapons, naturally. (A “poor man’s nuke,” anyone?)
But you get the point. Just as it’s difficult to deny that the COVID scamdemic was the biggest psyop of our lifetime, it’s equally difficult to deny that the perpetrators of that scam have been remarkably successful, achieving so many of their 2030 Agenda items in one fell swoop.
So, did the conspirators win?
The answer to this question is even more important than it might seem at first glance. History, as we know, is written by the winners, so if the WHO goons and their string-pullers and paymasters did indeed win, then our grandchildren will grow up learning about the terrible plague that threatened to wipe out the global population in 2020. They’ll read about how some crazy kooks resisted the loving lockdowns of the government and warned against the life-saving vaccines. They’ll truly believe we were only saved by the skin of our teeth thanks to our benevolent masters imposing lockdowns, mRNA clot shots and masks on us all (though they should have locked us down sooner and harder!).
This is why spreading the truth about these events is so vital. We must not let the lies stand. If these lies are written into the history books, then the conspirators really have won.
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By Cindy Harper
The platform’s age checks are part of a bigger push to create online spaces policed by biometrics.
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The rollout begins this week as an optional process and will become compulsory in December in countries including Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, reaching the United States and other regions by early 2026.
The company says these steps are meant to make its vast online world safer for younger audiences, restricting how players of different ages can interact inside user-created “Experiences.”
To take part in chat features, users must now verify their age either by scanning a government-issued ID or recording a short facial video through Persona, an outside verification company.
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Conversations are limited to others in the same or adjacent age groups unless users connect through “Trusted Connections,” which verifies they have a real-world relationship.
Roblox says the goal is to limit unsafe interactions and hopes the model will become “a new industry standard.”
While promoted as a safety improvement, this model also signals a move toward identity-linked participation in online spaces.
Digital ID verification effectively removes the anonymity that has long been part of internet culture.
It ties access to personal credentials, leaving fewer opportunities for users to interact without surrendering identifiable data.
The same technologies now appearing on entertainment platforms are increasingly being discussed by US policymakers as potential requirements for accessing social media, adult content, or even general-purpose platforms.
Several US states have already passed or proposed laws mandating age verification or digital ID checks for online activity, a trend that privacy advocates warn could erode personal freedom and create databases of sensitive personal information.
According to Roblox, “information uploaded to Persona is retained for a period of 30 days” before deletion.
Persona’s privacy policy indicates that it may collect extensive information, including device identifiers, geolocation data, and records from brokers and public sources.
This wide net of data collection extends well beyond what is required to confirm age, deepening concerns about how biometric and ID data could be reused or shared.
The company has not specified exact rollout dates for all markets but expects global enforcement to be completed within a year.
This makes Roblox the first major online platform to require facial age checks for chat participation.
The move comes as Roblox faces ongoing lawsuits and public pressure related to reports of grooming and child exploitation on the platform.
On the same day the company revealed its latest update, advocacy groups UltraViolet and ParentsTogether Action hosted an online protest, submitting a petition signed by 10,000 parents and grandparents calling for stronger child safety rules.
Roblox also introduced a new Safety Center, described as “a dedicated resource for parents and caregivers that provides clear guidance and tools to help them make informed decisions, set up Parental Controls, and support their child’s online experience.”
Still, the underlying trade-off remains significant. Roblox’s “Facial Media Capture Privacy Notice” confirms that it may conduct “other facial media processing” for “safety, assurance, or feature-specific purposes,” though the company says “Roblox does not use such facial media to identify you personally.”
Yet by normalizing ID scans and biometric checks, the company moves closer to a model of online life where anonymity is the exception rather than the rule, a change that could permanently alter how people experience privacy in digital environments.
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