That's the legal loophole that I'm sure a tiny number of people are using. In the real world, reportedly around 3/4 of kids under 16 that were using social media still are by either having changed their age during the window and using a sibling or older friend to do face scans for age recognition, or by creating new accounts and again using an older friend/sibling/relative etc. for the age verification. I heard about the ways children of some of my cousins got around it at Christmas, and their parent's didn't care!
The most embarrassing thing is that our Government thought the idiotic idea was workable in the first place... But of course now they've gone and made things worse, because now kids' profiles pretend to be older, so more inappropriate stuff (like gambling ads for those who put an over-18 birthdate) can get targeted at them - great job, eSafety Commissioner!
The number of times I've had to lie to websites on my kid's behalf is horrendous. I resent governments and companies for putting me in that situation.
But it's a good lesson, I suppose. It changed the lesson to my kids about lying from "lying is bad", to a more sophisticated "lying is bad for these reasons, and so these lies are bad, but those lies are not."
Yeah, I think it's overall bad for society, but on an individual I'd definitely do it too (within reason) for certain services if I had kids that age.
But it feels like by making silly laws like this that aren't likely to be respected by much of the population is bad for the rule of law, which is bad for society. But fair enough, the rule of law is only a good thing as long as the laws are (on the whole) good.
We have a lot of this problem in Australia because as much as we pretend not to be, we're pretty authoritarian in regulating personal behaviour. For example in my state they're currently criminalising riding EN15194 compliant e-bikes above 10 km/h (literally 6 mph, slower than a jog) in my state on 90% of the bicycle path network (90% of the network are 'shared paths' so you'd only be allowed to ride at the bike's full 25 km/h (15 mph) motor limit on the small amount of dedicated bicycle paths). That and requiring anyone with any e-bike to have a drivers license - which cuts out people who can't have a license due to disability, medical issues but who could still ride a bike, or anyone under-16.
It's very silly, almost completely unenforceable and again just going to create huge non-compliance and further teach people that laws are silly things to be ignored... I really don't think that is good for society, and I've observed that the more Government has tried to regulate our behaviour, the less responsibility people seem to take, and the more the Government tries to further regulate.
So I think a big criteria of evaluating any new bill is "are most people actually going to respect this law", but all my experience with politicians is that they prefer magical thinking of believing that anything you make a law will immediately be fixed, even if it's impossible to adequately enforce or even technologically impossible to implement. Every time I've been involved in public consultation processes I'm constantly arguing practicality of the actual bill and they're arguing about the ideals that drove the poorly thought out laws...
The most embarrassing thing is that our Government thought the idiotic idea was workable in the first place... But of course now they've gone and made things worse, because now kids' profiles pretend to be older, so more inappropriate stuff (like gambling ads for those who put an over-18 birthdate) can get targeted at them - great job, eSafety Commissioner!