Hong Kong age assurance plan for social media, AI will draw on international examples | Biometric Update

Hong Kong has become the latest government to look at minors, chatbots and social media and conclude that something ought to be done, possibly, in a manner yet to be determined. Secretary for Justice Paul Lam has unveiled a "multi-pronged approach", which in the dialect of officialdom means a bill, a memo and possibly an assembly in a school hall. The prongs, per Biometric Update, are legislative, administrative and educational — which is to say, the full arsenal of doing a bit of everything and therefore very little of anything.

"Could include" is doing heroic work here. Nothing is committed to, nothing is dated, and nothing will trouble a single server. The genuinely breathtaking part is the research plan: Hong Kong will study overseas experiences regulating minors' AI use, then "analyse how effective they are." That is a government announcing that before it legislates, it intends to find out whether legislation has ever worked, anywhere, which is either admirable epistemic humility or a magnificent way of scheduling the decision for a term when somebody else is in the building.

Meanwhile "age assurance" — an industry phrase designed to sound like a firm handshake from a bank manager — will presumably mean another box to tick on the way to the thing you actually wanted to open. No threshold is mentioned, no timetable, no named regulator — only a promise to weigh the international examples, such as they are. Paul Lam's job title is, note, Secretary for Justice, and he is standing in front of the law explaining that the law may be one of several options. The overseas examples being studied are, one assumes, jurisdictions where the same announcement was made with equal enthusiasm and identical absence of consequence. Somewhere a twelve-year-old has already worked out how this ends, and it isn't with a birthday field.