Australia’s Insane Social Media Ban: Digital ID—How to Remove People’s Freedom Under the Disguise of Protecting Them

This is the Digital ID I mentioned earlier. Digital IDs and CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are tools they are pursuing and need to fully establish control. Here, they have attempted to introduce it in Australia under the guise of protecting children. If they cannot introduce it through conventional means, they might orchestrate another pandemic or a cyber pandemic, such as a hack on the financial system, which I wrote about previously.

6:52

“On the other side of the aisle, people argue that banning kids under 16 is just a thinly veiled attempt at mass surveillance. Of course, if you’re testing to see if someone is 13, 14, 15, or 16, you’re also testing to see by definition if they’re 6n+. So if there’s going to be age verification, everybody is going to have to go through an age verification process, won’t they? Yes. So this isn’t just about the privacy or collecting data about kids—this is literally everybody accessing social media. That’s how it has to work, isn’t it?

Digital rights activist Meredith Whitaker tells the Sydney Morning Herald, “My God, banning people under 16 from using social media will not work. It would basically be creating a system to monitor internet usage at a whole population scale because you can’t know that somebody is over the age of 16 without checking everyone.”

This all comes to a head when Australia passed the Digital ID Bill of 2024, a national digital identity system. Australians became familiar with scanning QR codes during the COVID pandemic, but the government says this is different. Tex is something brand new and world-leading. Labour says businesses will soon be able to opt into technology called Trust Exchange, or Tex, to verify a customer’s identity, allowing personal information the government already has to be shared with the tap of a phone.

Cyber experts have concerns about that record. If the government’s involved in every transaction, they have the potential to know that I’ve gone to this hotel at this time. But the government says it won’t be tracking how people use the technology. Australians would understandably want to be satisfied that the privacy issues have been thought through here. While entering the system is voluntary at this time, it wasn’t without opposition. The Labour government introduced legislation for a digital ID into the Senate last year, and curiously, it was passed without any debate being allowed, which should be a warning sign.

Lisa Given from Melbourne University’s RMIT speaks: “Some people very cynically are saying the ban around social media is just to push the government’s decision to implement a digital ID system. Because if a ban comes into place and we say no one under the age of 16 can have access to a social media platform, that really means that every single user is going to have to prove that they are over 16. So in the process, they would have to join the digital ID system of the Australian government.”

And that’s not all. The Australian government is rushing through a bill that cracks down on misinformation. That’s misinformation on subjects including elections and negative commentary about the economy or financial system. This bill does cover elections and political thought, clearly in violation even of the United Nations. The fact that elections, referendums, public health preventative measures, and imminent harm to the economy or financial markets are just some of the topics covered by this bill is chilling.

Whether you’re progressive, conservative, from the left, or the right, we need to rise up and oppose this bill. The government’s function is not to regulate in a free society the content of people’s minds. It isn’t their role to arbitrate over the free thought, free expression, and free speech of people. Opposition to this bill comes from every quarter of Australian politics and society. It’s universal. There is no support for this bill, and even the United Nations has said this would be a violation of the right to free speech.”

Here is my previous post with a video where Whitney Webb discusses the same issue in the US. What’s worth noting is that it began during Trump’s presidency. I previously wrote that it could be either the “Cowboys” (Neocons) wanting to introduce Digital IDs to combat terrorism or, in this case, immigration, or the “Yankees” (Globalists) aiming to introduce Digital IDs to address pandemics, digital pandemics (such as hacks), or, in this case, internet bullying—or, as highlighted in the main video, protecting children online. Ultimately, none of this distinction matters since the goal remains the same.

Beyond the deep state: blackmail, surveillance capitalism, and people as drones—this is just the tip of the iceberg (the work of Whitney Webb and Shoshana Zuboff).

24:38

“Yeah, so for example, there's this push to sort of create a government-issued digital ID. For example, in the case of the United Kingdom, you had the Tories, the conservatives, sell it as a necessary way to resolve the migration crisis over there. But then the Labour Party comes in and pushes for the same thing but says it's necessary to stop cyberbullying and online hate and hate speech. The sales pitches are different, but the policies lead to the same places.

Unsurprisingly, in the United States, it's actually been pretty similar to what's going on in the UK to the point that you have Trump essentially pushing for that same system under the guise of controlling immigration issues, which, of course, are of major concern to his base. The person that he just made his borders czar, Tom Homan, was a major advocate for this biometric entry-exit system for all people entering and leaving the US, which, of course, would include any American citizen that wishes to travel abroad.”

43:22

“Well, I think a lot of the surprise ultimately comes down to people not really remembering very well what happened during the first Trump Administration and also being sold the idea that this time would be very different. With the cabinet appointments that have been announced thus far, I think it's very clear that it's most likely going to be very similar to when Trump was in office the first time. For example, Trump campaigned on things like reinstating Glass-Steagall, but instead, when he got into office, he further deregulated the banking industry. He deregulated biotechnology and GMO crops to the point that small farmer organizations and organic farmer organizations sued the federal government over that executive order.

Instead, his campaign this time sold itself as "we're going to make America healthy again," which implicitly suggested a reduction in the prevalence of GMOs in the food supply and agriculture. However, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and a lot of other very prominent and wealthy Trump donors, in addition to the VP himself, are heavily invested in biotechnology.

A lot of people, as happens every four years, often get swept up in political rhetoric and forget the historical antecedents, particularly if that politician has been in office before, which in the case of Trump is true. People get very wrapped up in campaign sales pitches, which is ultimately what they are. If you look at modern US political history, the number of presidents who have kept their campaign promises is pretty much non-existent. Unfortunately, that trend continues, and I see no reason why it would not.

The problem also lies in not knowing a lot of what Trump did in office. For example, his previous Attorney General Bill Barr legalized pre-crime in the United States by creating a Department of Justice program called DEEP, which was allegedly marketed as preventing mass shooters before they could strike. Palantir has been working on developing this kind of pre-crime functionality—predictive policing for US law enforcement, the FBI, and other groups. Will that continue in the next Trump Administration? Similarly, there were efforts in the previous administration to profile Americans based on their social media activity to decide if they might be showing early warning signs of neuropsychiatric violence and whether they should be sent to a court-ordered physician or put under house arrest.

This was something pitched to Trump by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and a close friend of Trump's named Bob Wright. They pitched the creation of an agency called HARPA (a health ARPA), which was later created by Biden under the name ARPA-H. Instead of having that program as its flagship, the Biden Administration sold it as a cancer development moonshot. However, the same architects who designed the HARPA program pitched to Trump by Bob Wright and Kushner also created ARPA-H. This is an example of these bipartisan initiatives and how people fail to recognize these continuities.

Social media exacerbates this memory problem because we're constantly bombarded by current events with very little context. People scroll through sound bites and rarely read long-form investigative journalism anymore. Remembering these things is important. If someone brings them up, perhaps we should be skeptical because of what happened last time. Instead, people who raise these points are often dismissed as doomsayers, accused of being "woke" or Marxist. In the last election cycle, I criticized Biden and was accused of being a Trump supporter. It happens every four years when someone is willing to criticize both sides.”

As I mentioned before, either the "Cowboys" (Neocons) will push for Digital ID to combat terrorism, immigration, and voter fraud, or the "Yankees" (Globalists) will push for Digital ID to address epidemics, cyber epidemics (like hacking), protect people from hate speech, or safeguard children online. Ultimately, none of this matters as long as they achieve their goal of implementing Digital ID.