🔎 Today’s Daily Sift: Social Media Social media is entering its identity era. On August 13, Meta said it had removed more than 750,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia that it believes belonged to users under 16. Australia’s under 16 social media ban is becoming a global experiment in something much larger than child safety. Digital identity. Platforms now need to determine who is actually behind an account. How old are they? Are they human? Are they returning after being banned? Meta is using AI based age estimation and behavioral signals to help answer those questions. Yet government data suggested more than 80 percent of under 16 Australians were still accessing social media during the early months of the ban. The gate exists. Users are already learning how to route around it. Then Instagram delivered the cultural counterpoint. The platform unveiled its first major wordmark redesign in roughly a decade, saying the new identity is built around individuali...