I’d say their attempt is actually better than what the government came up with. I also thought the idea of chatting with a bot that guesses your age was pretty funny.

pretty ridiculous

In the good way, yes. Who was it the admin of a Lemmy instance, I think, who said he would receive alcohol as a form of ID verification because to even acquire it legally in the first place you have to be of age, anyway? That's pretty much golden and incentivizes the local economy!

Yes

Similarly UK has tried to get 4chan, kiwifarms etc but they have no UK footprint so they just ignore them.

No, that's a matter of enforcement. UK is still trying to fine 4chan - but failing. Australia has just outright said the law doesn't apply to them.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/09/4chan-not-blocked-australia-under-16s-social-media-ban

yes you should be very weary of sending someone a photo you took while driving a car that doesn't inlcue your face /s

That's also a good choice, there are others too. I would suggest to everyone look around for a good generic DNS provider.

Yeah.

So far, changing my DNS has worked fine for me. I've had no requests of ID from any of the socials.

No, it's account based, in a lot of cases changing your DNS won't change the server you end up with at Youtubes or whoever

Age-restricted platforms are expected to take reasonable steps to:

• find existing accounts held by under-16s, and deactivate or remove those accounts

• prevent under-16s from opening new accounts

• prevent workarounds that may allow under-16s to bypass the restrictions

• have processes to correct errors if someone is mistakenly missed by or included in the restrictions, so no one’s account is removed unfairly.

Does every Australian now have to prove their age to use social media?

For example, if someone has had an account since Facebook started in Australia in 2006, Meta could reasonably assume they are older than 16 so no further check is needed.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs

Platforms then use a variety of signal's to detect if someone is under 16:

DNS has nothing to do with it

We discussed it in the community posts back in Dec 2024 when the law passed -- February is when the sign up change happened and March was when the announcement went up. The UK's bullshit may be what prompted the announcement happening then though.