12 December 2025

Welcome

I’m going to write about Australia’s social media age restrictions today. No surprise there. The whole world is watching to see how things go — although obviously it’s way too early to tell.

There are other stories, of course. Did anyone mention AI? But not a lot more. This edition has been produced in a bit of a rush because I was without electricity all morning.

Do let me know if I’ve missed anything important or made even worse mistakes than usual.

Social media age restrictions are here

You may have noticed.

Given that the age restrictions — nah dammit let’s just call it a ban because that’s an ordinary word whose meaning covers the facts — affect so many families in Australia, it’s only natural that there’s been plenty of news stories.

Rather than repeat all that, I’ll just draw your attention to some of the highlights.

I will say, though, that it’s very silly for people to be asking whether the age restrictions have been a “success” or not — and not only because no one has given them an actual measurable goal.

If the goal is to reduce the harm to teenagers, then we won’t know that for years. But we’re not running a control group who still have their socials, so there’s no way to know whether any change will have been down to the ban or to other factors.

If the goal is simply to keep teens off the platforms, then just three days in we can’t yet know whether they’ll find their way around the ban or move elsewhere — of course they will move elsewhere — or whether those over 16 will continue to be falsely flagged as younger.

If the goal was simply to reassure anxious parents that the government was Doing Something, however, well, draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, on with the show...

• News Corp was crowing at its victory, projecting its slogan “Let Them Be Kids” onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge and other landmarks.

• One of the key groups pushing for the ban, 36 Months led by radio bloke Wippa, was selling a “United Nations General Assembly Sponsorship” for $150,000 in the lead-up to the Australian government-hosted event there. Excellent reporting from Cam Wilson at Crikey. We already knew Wippa had been plugging another commercial opportunity, inviting brands to take part in a media campaign called “The First Best Summer Ever”.

• Wilson has also reported that 36 Months is funded and co-staffed by firm making gambling ads. “The revelation comes as the government is expected to abandon plans for an online gambling ad ban, using the teen social media ban as cover,” he writes, but I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

• There’s plenty of stories, like this one from ABC News, recounting how kids are getting around the ban.

• Hundreds of Australians have complained of wrongful account closures, with Google apparently the worst in those figures, but don’t bother contacting the Commonwealth Ombudsman because it’s not the government doing it.

• Youthful 6 News Australia chief Leo Puglisi says the ban will leave young Australians in the dark on news and politics.

• Associate Professor Ben Harris-Roxas, an internationally recognised expert in health impact assessment, says the ban gets it wrong.

• It’s been confirmed that Reddit is mounting a High Court challenge to the ban.

• Friend of the Cybers Leanne O’Donnell, an actual lawyer, has a solid explainer over at the Alternative Law Journal.

• The ban’s cultural shift could take a generation, reports AAP, with one psychologist comparing it with the introduction of smoking bans.

• At the Guardian, Josh Taylor recounts how we got here.

• Scimex has added to their extensive collection of expert commentary.

• And don’t forget, the social media ban is just the start of Australia’s planned restrictions.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE RESTRICTIONS IN PODCAST FORM: Two weeks ago I spoke with noted digital rights enthusiast Justin Warren in The 9pm Social Media Ban and the Special Duck with Justin Warren. We also discussed the controversy over the new Bureau of Meteorology website and its budget blowout, and much more. Look for “The 9pm Edict” in your podcast app.

Also in the news

• The government has abandoned plans for an external AI advisory body. They’ll rely on existing rules and the new AI Safety Institute instead.

• A million Australians will get free AI skills training, according to industry and innovation minister Tim Ayres. It’s a partnership between the government’s National AI Centre (NAIC) and TAFE NSW. Given it’s an online course, the figure of one million is clearly just pulled out of the air, because the margin cost for more students is minimal.

• Working from home improves your mental health, according to a major study across two decades and 16,000 people.

• The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has kicked off a scheme to help keep unsafe mobile phones off the market, along with other illegal radio equipment.

• The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has reported on Service Australia’s handling of personal information. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the repeated code words “partly effective” always mean there’s plenty of room for improvement.

• Matt Bevan’s If You’re Listening has a great episode on overhyped humanoid robots.

IF YOU FIND THIS NEWSLETTER HELPFUL, PLEASE SUPPORT IT: The Weekly Cybers is currently unfunded. It’d be lovely if you threw a few dollars into the tip jar at stilgherrian.com/tip. Please consider, especially at the summer freelancer drought looms.

Elsewhere

• It’s only a proposal at this stage, but the US could review your last five years of social media posts as part of its visa application process. The idea is not popular.

• A great feature this: Inside the Dark and Predatory World of Crypto Casinos, from the New York Times (gift link).

• TIME magazine has named “The Architects of AI” as 2025 Person of the Year. This award has always been for significance, not for love or even respect.

• Disney has signed a US$1 billion deal with OpenAI, bringing the former’s stock of characters into the latter’s video generation tool Sora. As a CNN analyst put it, it’s a billion-dollar hedge on the future of slop.

• In a story that is not at all weird and creepy, a husband brought his late wife “back to life” with AI.

• Springer Nature has retracted and removed nearly 40 publications that relied on a “bonkers’” dataset. “The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces,” reports The Transmitter.

• Microsoft cut its sales quotas for AI and its share price dropped 3%.

• US digital rights lobby group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched an age verification resource hub to help people fight back against what they describe as “ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults”.

• US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman as the typeface for official communications. His predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri was a “wasteful” diversity move, apparently. Calibri was designed to be easier to read on screens, especially for people with certain visual impairments.

• Luke Steuber has made a plugin for the Chrome web browser to change it back, at least on websites.

Inquiries of note

Nothing new this week.

What’s next?

Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 3 February 2026, per the sittings schedule posted recently, although the public service may well push out a few more things before Christmas.

There’s just one more edition of this newsletter for 2025, next Friday 19 December. At this stage I plan to return on Friday 23 January.

DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? Let me know. If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.