Australia investigating five social media giants for not enforcing ban on kids
Australia’s government has decided to double the fines it can levy companies that don’t take appropriate steps to enforce the country’s ban on children under 16 accessing social media – and said Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube are under investigation for possible non-compliance.
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The decision to increase fines came after publication of a study that found around 80 percent of kids in Australia continue to use social media despite the ban, mostly because age verification tech hasn’t blocked their accounts.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Sunday announced the increased fines, saying that while social media companies have deactivated or restricted access to five million accounts since the ban came into force last December. The PM thinks that’s a decent start but feels Australia’s cyber-regulator, eSafety, “needs more tools in their belt to take on these billion-dollar social media companies and hold them to account.”
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Those tools include the ability to demand information about a platform’s attempts to enforce the ban, including third-party information from age assurance or app-store providers.
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“Social media companies have a social responsibility, and they must uphold their legal responsibility in Australia to keep under 16s off social media,” Albanese said.
The new fines can reach AU$99 million ($68.25 million) for systemic failures – back of the sofa money for the social media giants.
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The company says it’s a low-cost CPU suited to everyday workloads such as file servers, database servers or web servers.
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Iran’s internet ends in tiers
Internet Governance Researcher Imad Payande has published updated research on the state of Iran’s internet, which he says now offers tiers of access to different users.
“In the first one to two weeks of the conflict, relatively unrestricted connectivity appeared limited to specific groups – primarily journalists and individuals with institutional affiliations. For the broader population, access to the global Internet was largely unavailable,” he wrote.
In the second week of the war he saw “configurations” go on sale – “custom connection profiles enabling access to the open Internet.”
Payande said those connections “relied on alternative protocols and tools rather than standard VPNs, suggesting a different underlying infrastructure and possibly a limited number of controlled gateways.”
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Searchlight Cyber says its researchers informed WiseTech of the vulnerabilities prior to publication, and that the Australian company made a round of fixes but is “still working on further mitigations.” ®
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