Australia

Yeah don't get me wrong, I 100% support the stated intent of the ban. It's just a terrible method to go about it. Facebook is known to have commissioned internal studies about the psychological effects of changes to their algorithm, and then when those studies show the change causes harm, but also produce a little more profit, they go with the profit every time. Why don't we make that illegal?

If we have to do age-gating, why not require it to be done in a privacy-preserving way, such as parental controls, zero-knowledge proofs, or blind signatures? Parental controls would, in fact, be by far the easiest for everyone involved, and the only information that would actually need to flow is from the parent to their kids' devices, and then the devices reporting "yes, this is a child" or "no, this is not a child".

The answer is: because the government didn't care. It didn't want to actually fix the problem. It didn't want to listen to experts' opinions or consider the broader public's concerns. It wanted to win some quick easy PR. That's why submissions into the legislation were open for just one day, and why Parliament didn't even take the time to consider the small number of submissions that were able to be made in that limited window. A government that is acting seriously in response to a chronic threat (I can make some exception for quick responses into sudden, unexpected, acute crises) does not behave in this way. Ever. Good legislation takes time, and this sort of hurried response only indicates that it knew it was doing the wrong thing, and wanted to minimise the amount of time it was exposed to criticism.