Oct 24, 2026, 6:56 PMHave you lost an account, or been wrongly blocked by an age check? Are you a parent who had trouble giving consent? Tell EFF how new social media restrictions are affecting you by emailing us at agegates@eff.org. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/two-states-can-now-restrict-social-media-access-heres-what-do-next
@eff What's nice is that I don't have to deal with it directly because I don't use anything that demands an age check from me lol
But yeah, if it does start affecting services like Invidious (YouTube FOSS frontend) from being able to fetch videos at all (even self hosted services). Then I'm gonna be stuck with articles, Odysee, and PeerTube. Unfortunate, but I will never submit myself to such terms of age verification.
@XavianFox @eff unfortunately some of us don't have a choice. case in point: everyone here in australia as well as the uk. i do use a vpn when i'm faced with making that decision but it doesn't work for everything. :'))))))
@industrial_cream @eff I am aware of that.
I do think that more people should become aware of VPNs and Tor. But also become more active as individuals to fight against this age verification joke that they call "protecting children."
I am in the US, but that doesn't mean that I won't be subjected to the same harmful laws.
So what I do as an individual, is to boycott and refuse use of such platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others. At the same time, I use platforms that follow a public trust model, using open source software, decentralized federation, and strong easy to understand privacy policies.
I do use platforms like YouTube still, more in an indirect way, because I am using Invidious as my YouTube FOSS frontend. But I am more than okay to give it up completely in favor of Odysee and PeerTube like I said before.
And if they start like, banning connections to fediverse platforms, like Mastodon and PeerTube, because they don't "agree" with their legal policies. It would be difficult for them to do that without a full world wide effort.
With how infrastructure is set up right now, what the many governments are going to try to do, won't work effectively if not at all.
@XavianFox @eff we did try to get them to listen to us. many, many citizens (including me) wrote to politicians who were going to vote on this telling them how cooked it would be, including cybersecurity, mental health, privacy, & children's wellbeing experts. the australian federal government completely fucking ignored all of us. both the party in charge (labor) and the main opposition party (liberal/liberal national party (it changes with the wind)) are right wing parties in differing amounts who don't give a shit about the people who don't donate huge amounts of money to their parties.
individual boycotts aren't possible for everyone. as an example, i do local mutual aid whenever i can via a massive signal group chat (which i know isn't super secure if there's a fuck tonne of people & there's probably some cops or similar in it & blah blah blah but the majority of us are careful & rightfully paranoid). a LOT of people outside the group are unfortunately still on meta owned social media platforms, so some of us do things like make graphics for protests, mutual aid requests, drawing attention to something fucked up that's happened etc.
so we use the master's tools, so to speak. plus not everyone is tech-savvy &/or willing to use alternative sources like invidious.
by the way if you've got the time, this article i found https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/30/teen-social-media-ban-legal-compliance-esafety/ goes through how the ban's actually failing.
None of what I listed above is anywhere technical, any individual person can make the switch to alternative FOSS web frontends using a simple browser extension called libredirect:
https://libredirect.manerakai.com/
The overall experience is different though, since there is no algorithm or recommendation system to make media consumption convenient. So adjusting your habits on how you search for and consume media has to be made to use them comfortably. For me, it tool about a week to get comfortable using the alternatives, but only 10 minutes to start using the alternatives with this browser extension.
The only time it becomes technical, is if you're trying to host your own instances of those alternative FOSS frontends. Which is not common, and I don't expect people to do that.
Also, I'm very glad that the ban is not going well there, it sounds like a lot of progress is being made to have the people heard, when they had been ignored the people and went along with it anyways.
I'm not really up to speed with what is going on in Australia unfortunately. But in general, I haven't been on my RSS app in a while, since I've been distracted with other things, so I'm behind on news in general. But here soon this week, I will be reading a lot more in preparation to vote in the US midterms.