[HN Gopher] Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social m...
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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
https://archive.md/i0VxX
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy54q80gy9t
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-soci...
(https://archive.ph/Ba2JR)
Author : chirau
Score : 424 points
Date : 2025-12-09 18:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I'm not against teens communicating with each other online, but
| I'm very much against the algorithm-driven dopamine addiction
| factories that are social media today.
|
| Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer
| than 15 seconds...they might actually realize their incredible
| potential!
| lm28469 wrote:
| If you ever worked with people who fully grew up with modern
| social media and just entered the workforce you know we're
| already doomed, there is no recovery from this, that's why
| governments are starting to act
| whimsicalism wrote:
| alarmist nonsense
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| By all means tell us why
| whimsicalism wrote:
| younger generation is earning more in the workforce than
| past generations, clearly they haven't been too cooked by
| phones.
|
| even though i'm in the younger generation and have less
| experience in the world, i can recognize pearl clutching
| and moral panics when I see them.
| Erikun wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Australia compliance etc etc...
|
| ....
|
| But then also global measures?
|
| > _Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of
| Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including
| stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads,
| and no access to NSFW or mature content._
| kevin061 wrote:
| Awesome. I hope they do the same in Europe. Children should not
| be addicted to TikTok.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| Forget the children, _no one_ should be subjected to the
| brainrot that is TikTok. Or any form of vertical short videos
| for that matter.
| kevin061 wrote:
| True.
| nxor wrote:
| Could not have said it better. The harm these apps are
| doing is so immense. Why form any hobby at all when you can
| scroll four hours of tik tok a day?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| I'm not sure that "vertical videos" are any worse than
| horizontal ones, round ones, pentagonal ones, or any other
| layout.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I am not sure. If you classified usefulness of video by
| aspect ratio it might be a good correlation with landscape.
| With 4 by 3 being the best.
| about3fitty wrote:
| Besides this being ineffective for the motivated, it might have a
| subtle antitrust effect.
|
| As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor
| locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
| Bratmon wrote:
| I think you're 180deg backwards on that.
|
| How many alternative platforms are there really going to be
| that can afford to develope and operate the legally-mandated
| age-detection ML-models?
|
| Especially after the bureaucrats see that the law isn't working
| and start looking for scapegoats without massive lawyer teams
| to make an example of
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Why would they do that? There are plenty of platforms that
| simply won't care, and there's stuff like Mastodon et al.
| Bratmon wrote:
| The law tends to be pretty good at caring about you when
| you don't care about it.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Quite a decisive move by the Australian government. I don't know
| if it's a move in the right direction or not but the research
| clearly shows that around the time social media became
| mainstream, teens' and preteens' mental health took a nosedive
| (Especially girls).
| hallole wrote:
| Hugely decisive! Feels more like a policy for idyllic
| hypotheticals. "Suppose we could ban social media..." well,
| hey, they actually did it.
|
| I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in
| response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-
| internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We
| shall see!
| protocolture wrote:
| >well, hey, they actually did it.
|
| They passed legislation, its not clear at all that they
| succeeded.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| Given that "social media" is in fact not banned and all this
| does is impact a select (and frankly logically inconsistent)
| list of services, this seems very unlikely. Children are
| still free to be groomed and gamble on Roblox and join
| servers belonging to The Com on Discord. To be clear I don't
| think those services should be regulated by this obscene law
| either but this isn't going to bring back any kind of halcyon
| era for kids. It will expand the surveillance of and shame
| around young people's internet use, however.
| anakaine wrote:
| How so? It has been implemented so that age verification is
| a token only, a yes/no authorisation. The age verification
| service doesnt get browsing details, and the site providing
| content doesnt get any additional user details beyond what
| they would likely already have, including those subject to
| PII legislation.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| > It has been implemented so that age verification is a
| token only, a yes/no authorisation.
|
| This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify
| a single particular implementation for age-based
| verification and there's absolutely no single "age
| verification service" that platforms are legislated to
| use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based
| on several recommended methods, including age inference.
| https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-
| need-t...
|
| Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding
| whether she's concerned about people bypassing
| authentication-based age verification checks: "If you're
| an adult - you probably won't need to do anything extra
| to prove your age, because like I said before, these
| platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https:/
| /minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
| rpdillon wrote:
| This is false. Like all the age restricting laws being
| passed around the world, the implementation is not being
| specified and is being left to the individual platforms,
| which are using some combination of photo ID and video
| selfie in order to validate people's ages. Each platform
| is implementing it differently, and on different
| timelines. For example, X has failed to even respond for
| a while, but it's finally said they'll comply.
|
| > Companies have told Canberra they will deploy a mix of
| age inference - estimating a user's age from their
| behaviour - and age estimation based on a selfie,
| alongside checks that could include uploaded
| identification documents.
| watwut wrote:
| I still prefer my kids to play roblox over being on X or
| tiktok much.
|
| It is still more ok then most of what any other todays tech
| provides. No matter how much geeks on HN hate it.
| creata wrote:
| And it can inspire them to learn programming with Lua(u).
| everyday7732 wrote:
| It will also massively expand the surveillance of adults:
| if a platform introduces face scanning or checking
| government IDs for "age verification", then they don't just
| scan the underage users.
| subscribed wrote:
| Roblox blocked communication between adults and kids. I
| can't chat with my own children in app even though we don't
| live in Australia.
|
| That's for the better, as far as I see it, I can just shout
| :p
| akst wrote:
| The success so far is really just political, which has
| largely been shutting down debate and dismissing calls for
| some kind of cost analysis of what we risk losing in
| enforcing this.
|
| Whenever someone brings up this stuff, the politicians take
| the tone that "we won't let anyone get in the way of
| protecting children", and this is in response to people who
| in good faith think this can be done better. Media
| oligopolist love it because it regulates big tech, so they've
| been happy to platform supporters of the policy as well.
|
| Third spaces won't reappear because the planning system in
| most cities shuts anything down the moment someone files a
| compliant. They get regulated out of existence the moment
| police express concern young people might gather there. The
| planning system (which in NSW/Sydney is the worse) has only
| gotten worse since the 80s after the green bans. It was
| largely put in place to allow for community say in how cities
| are shape, which sounds nice but it's mostly old people with
| free time participating who don't value 3rd spaces, even if
| they might end up liking them. They just want to keep things
| the same and avoid parking from getting overly complicated
| (and this is a stone throw away from train stations and the
| CBD).
|
| Third places can be fixed by reforming planning which is
| slowly gaining momentum via YIMBY movements, but this social
| media ban is just not a serious contribution to changing
| that. If anything Social media phenomenon like Pokemon GO
| contributed more to these third places lighting up.
|
| Governance in Australia is very paternalistic, it's a more
| high functioning version of the UK in that sense. I think it
| might be in part due to the voting system being a winner
| takes all single seat electorate preferential voting system
| which has a median voter bias for least controversial
| candidates.
|
| As a kid I always felt being in Australia you missed out on a
| lot of things people got to do in America, that has slowly
| changed as media and technology has become less bound by
| borders but looks like that being undone.
| euroderf wrote:
| I know! Let's hang out a THE MALL!
|
| The Seventies are BACK!
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I think one must also re-evaluate how in modern times a
| parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the crime
| of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove
| unrestricted outside (within reason). I've heard of this
| happening in both the US and Australia, the HOA mindset
| really needs to die.
| youngNed wrote:
| These are very very isolated outliers amplified by a media
| hellbent on ragebait.
| kyrra wrote:
| You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then.
| Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on
| them for riding their bikes around the block, and the
| cops followed the kids back to their front door and then
| talked with the parents.
| youngNed wrote:
| I have. I also, crucially, don't live in America.
|
| This article, also crucially, does not relate to America
| WorldPeas wrote:
| when did kyrra mention they lived in America?
| youngNed wrote:
| When they spelt neighborhood, when the kids rode around
| the block.
|
| When they said they live in a country where a police
| force follows kids on bikes
|
| The clues were all there.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I think a huge part of that is context. Age, location, time
| of day, etc. I'd be curious to see numbers on this, usually
| it's just asserted as "back in my day we played outside and
| got dirty all day!" but then I hear those same (usually now
| grand-) parents talk about all the tv shows/movies they
| watched as they espouse their views on modern media!
|
| My assumption is a lot of those people who proudly proclaim
| that lifestyle were raised in (segregated) suburbs and have
| rose tinted glasses. But I'm also making assumptions like
| them, so again I'm curious to find info on this.
| nxor wrote:
| Where are you from? Sweden? Denmark? Fun fact for Europe:
| America is quite a dangerous country. At the very least,
| this is why parents fear the outdoors. And much of our
| nature is polluted. There are cases of this. I agree it's
| wrong, but it's good to understand the background.
|
| And as far as the internet: I am part of the younger
| generation and I welcome this change. I see how it affects
| my generation every day.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I am also from a younger generation and from a state that
| has experienced quite a bit of pollution, but before the
| popularity of the smartphone ~2012 or so, there was still
| much more play outside. As for crime, it has been on a
| downtrend for decades, and many areas are the most
| peaceful they've been in years1. I admit this may still
| be higher than in Europe, but this is exactly the
| fearmongering message platforms like X try to spread to
| garner support for authoritarian policy
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
| nxor wrote:
| 1. I am not saying people are playing outside at the same
| levels. 2. I live in the rust belt and don't need to be
| told what I see is fearmongering. I have been personally
| affected by it.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| America isn't universally dangerous, but it is very
| diverse. Where I am (Western Pennsylvania) there are kids
| outside running around all the time (maybe less now that
| it's very cold out). It just depends where in the country
| you are.
| nxor wrote:
| This might interest you:
|
| No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda McGurk
|
| I read this book in school and it's about this difference
| between Europe / Scandinavia and a rural part of Indiana
|
| I'm not saying kids don't play outside, just that the
| violence is why some parents fear it. I agree the
| internet makes this fear worse but frankly, EVEN ONE
| CRIME is scary enough if you ask me
|
| A 26 year old girl was set on fire in Chicago public
| transportation. It's really unforgiveable to me when
| people then say I'm "fearmongering"
|
| Yes, I fear being attacked on public transport!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the
| crime of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove
| unrestricted outside_
|
| This is more about criminalising poverty than anything
| about parenting. I live in a rich part of Wyoming. The kids
| are fucking feral.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I live in Philadelphia in Mt Airy. I see kids of all
| races around all the time. Sometimes my kids. The only
| place I read about parents being jailed for their kids
| being outside is HN.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Thinking about this this will of course fail. Because teens
| will do what they did before online: make their own social
| networks. But by necessity these will be small.
|
| I hope that's what will happen. That this is only really a
| problem for FANG, for the tech industry and doesn't actually
| prevent social media.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm
| not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly
| safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or
| predation.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Funny, but I (and I believe many who support this law) would
| say that's a good thing. The problem is not (and never was)
| social interaction online, it is large corporations designing
| their algorithms to be as addictive as possible to tie kids
| as early as possible to their services.
|
| I have had to recently get back to using Facebook (after
| creating the account ~15 years ago and leaving it dormant for
| >10 years), due to several sports clubs using it as their
| only means of communication. It's scary how good these
| algorithms have become, I often only want to look up
| something related to the club and end up being roped into 1h
| of doomscrolling. And I'm an adult with significant better
| impulse control than most teenagers.
| nxor wrote:
| Not just mental health: ability to concentrate + engagement
| with people around us.
| sneak wrote:
| There is no evidence that social media use shortens attention
| spans or reduces social engagement offline. This is a meme,
| and a false one.
| awillowingmind wrote:
| What you're implicitly saying here is that we should wait
| until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple
| decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because
| you're dealing with a soft science. At that point the
| damage will have been done and much harder to address.
|
| If you don't think attention spans are on the downtrend &
| that social media has something to do with that, I don't
| know what to tell you. I think it's pretty clear.
| a_victorp wrote:
| Except that there are studies linking social media use with
| reduced attention spans. Here is one: https://www.dialogues
| review.com/index.php/2/article/view/930
|
| There are at least other two that I could find
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| maybe it's a step in the right direction but you can't regulate
| away ALL parenting. I know kids in the 5th grade getting brand
| new Iphone 17s! i've even seen one kid at the age of 7, getting
| their own Ipad. some parents even force their kids to use play
| on their iphone, just so they don't have to keep an eye on
| their kid anymore. My jaw really dropped to the floor on that
| one.
|
| at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start
| parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that
| bad.
|
| How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining
| everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is
| just band-aid.
|
| the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens"
| until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed
| device that just lets them get their homework done.
| japhyr wrote:
| > you can't regulate away ALL parenting
|
| This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the
| kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then
| blame everything on parents.
|
| Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time
| now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to
| catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad
| thing, even though they paid for all the public
| infrastructure we use every day.
|
| As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It
| sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the
| better.
| adamesque wrote:
| i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from
| "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery
| slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one
| regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?
|
| in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from
| smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't
| allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and
| actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring
| casual use.
|
| is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in
| place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| it does help. i think this is a good step in the right
| direction.
|
| but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do.
| for example, screentime in the home. you can't really
| create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age
| of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework,
| etc).
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the
| problem. They still see the exact same content shared by
| friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do
| damage.
| didibus wrote:
| The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure
| from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through
| friends and all that.
|
| If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids
| it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so
| on. That too can have a negative impact.
|
| The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use
| social media, it doesn't create that impact of being
| excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
|
| The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't
| create a difficult environment for kids and parents to
| navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will
| likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they
| appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases
| the burden on society which will also likely fail.
|
| If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to
| grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of
| everyone.
| docjay wrote:
| I don't have kids, but I can see how one parent banning
| their kid from social media could create issues when the
| others are on it. I was a quirky kid that already struggled
| to make friends and any additional imposed quirkiness would
| have been devastating.
|
| That said, and I don't mean to oversimplify this, but what
| about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad
| stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one
| sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine
| part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the
| point where you have shared moments laughing at the
| absurdity of it all.
|
| I'm a few multiples of the age in question and I haven't
| used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the
| main issues is people only showing the doctored up
| highlight reel of their life. If that's still the issue
| then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that's also part
| of real life _and_ a teachable moment. Granted I wasn't
| bombarded with "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI
| Edition", but the concept of someone being 'fake' isn't
| new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it
| and mentally deal with it. That _is_ the world they're
| going into, whether it's a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex,
| or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Is this around the same time we started over diagnosing mental
| health disorders?
|
| 'Life being stressful is not an illness' - GPs on mental health
| over-diagnosis
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2pvxdn9v4o
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46172682
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us
| determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if
| rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test
| data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one
| way or the other.
| hephaes7us wrote:
| Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then,
| whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could
| easily reach consensus within the year.
| nazgul17 wrote:
| Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive
| per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a
| powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
| hephaes7us wrote:
| If a kid uses a pseudonymous account and fraudulently
| bypasses an age verification system, I have a hard time
| believing that the company would be fined $50M.
|
| I would guess that this massive fine is more for
| situations like if a company can be shown to have
| wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly
| negligent. (But I have not read the law!)
| justatdotin wrote:
| violation would be: not making a reasonable effort,
|
| violation would not be: a kid bypassing their reasonable
| effort.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Even if it achieves only a small reduction in usage (say
| 10%), i would expect that should have a measurable effect
| on happiness if the hypothesis of [social media causes
| unhappiness] is true. If no increase in happiness is
| observed, i think we could say that social media does not
| cause unhappiness.
| TimByte wrote:
| The mental health trends are real, but pinning them exclusively
| on social media risks missing a lot of context
| creata wrote:
| I can't see this as decisive.
|
| * The ban only targets ten services.
|
| * The ban applies only to actually logging into the service -
| everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still
| being tracked while logged out.
|
| * Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by
| using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even
| employing any reliable verification measures.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| How does a country effectively enforce this? Below is how they
| propose doing this. If you don't have any form of verification of
| your actual age, it's seems like they are just going on what the
| user says ( self reports). How can a company be found liable if a
| used lies about their age?
|
| >the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were
| prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature,
| but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that
| companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued
| identification as the only way to prove their age because of
| privacy concerns.
| Avicebron wrote:
| > How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their
| age?
|
| You make them bleed money when you find they are in violation.
| They either figure it out or they go under as a company. There
| isn't a natural law saying companies have a right to exist.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Or they leave the country, which would then be very unpopular
| for the governing parties involved.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| More akin to their data centre electricity costs. They pay it
| and move on.
| t0lo wrote:
| How can seatbelts be enforced? This is preposterous and
| imbecilic- if there isn't a policeman inside every car checking
| every minute how will we make sure that people are wearing
| them. Clearly there is no point in trying!
| wiredpancake wrote:
| There is seatbelt cameras in Australia.
|
| They are everywhere, they can also be mobile and placed
| almost anywhere. These camera are mounted high so they can
| view down in through the windscreen.
|
| They automatically issue a $1,251 for not wearing one to the
| license holder.
| kbelder wrote:
| Huh, interesting. Australia keeps surprising me.
|
| https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-australian-
| state...
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| That's about $5 in USD if anyone is wondering
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Go and read the actual report of what the eSafety commissioner
| is requiring.
|
| The company can't be found liable if they have put in
| reasonable age verification technology, particularly if the
| user lied about their age or found a way to circumvent the
| restrictions.
|
| They clearly aren't going by just what the user says as the
| companies have implemented age verification tools that try to
| do that detection.
| nacozarina wrote:
| this is an egregious violation of their civil rights.
|
| the law of unintended consequences looms large.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Like what?
|
| Kids not being able to do particular things until they're of
| age? That's much of an egregious violation of their civil
| rights.
| bccdee wrote:
| I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss
| political issues in the public forum. That's basically the
| definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse)
| social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go
| from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights
| are limited, but they do have rights.
|
| I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Well kids can discuss political issues across other
| discussion boards just not those on the social media sites
| impacted by the ban. They can also continue to do it say,
| in person in public.
|
| I think the discussion of political issues in a sensible
| way on platforms like instagram, tiktok, X, Reddit etc for
| those ages is perhaps a lower priority than the mental
| health impacts that those platforms in general provide.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Kids not being informed about the war crimes of their state,
| and other states.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Kids not being informed about the war crimes
|
| Interesting to frame this as a bad thing. As a parent, I
| would take that as a feature, not a bug. To me this is very
| suspicious why there seem to be so many people here, who I
| am assuming are mostly adults, advocating so strongly
| strongly for <16 olds told be on social media, as if it was
| something they need.
| trallnag wrote:
| You sound like a Russian government official.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Haha or a person who's been around lots of children of
| all ages.
|
| An under 16 year old not seeing the social media version
| of war crimes is a good thing. And that's the upper limit
| of the age range of this ban.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| They can go and watch the news on the TV, they an also go
| and visit other news websites.
| demarq wrote:
| If all the kids start pretending to be grownups, they end up
| escaping all the protections put in place to protect kids in the
| first place.
|
| In football we call this an own goal
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Not really, it gives them justification to more thoroughly
| remove privacy and anonymity in order to make sure the age and
| identity of the user are more confidently known.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm fairly confident that's not how it works, but am happy to
| be proven wrong?
| deminature wrote:
| As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably
| older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all
| the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only
| taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage.
| The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult
| user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard
| of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems
| the estimation is accurate.
|
| Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this
| occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year,
| as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting
| to see how the implementation went in Australia.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Pretty much aligns with how I have felt it here in Aus as well
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Nothing has changed for my 15 year old either. It's business as
| usual today for her.
|
| She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a
| platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got
| another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection
| check on her behalf.
| rkagerer wrote:
| > _pass the facial age detection_
|
| Are you _kidding_ me? So the answer is let 's let some random
| vendors used by said corporation _scan her face_? This feels
| like using DNA sequencing to confirm you 're tall enough to
| ride the rollercoaster.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| It's just as reliable as you'd expect from a system that
| relies on shitty cellphone camera pics.
|
| They're trying to guess the age of someone who could pass
| for 11 or for 22, and who with careful use of makeup could
| push that figure in either direction.
| pjc50 wrote:
| For some reason (and this is one reason people think
| there's a conspiracy), that is the "preferred" form of age
| verification. It certainly saves the government from having
| to do IT.
| eviks wrote:
| Interesting, was she unable to pass the test just didn't even
| risk it, thinking the algo is good and can reliably detect
| reality?
| protocolture wrote:
| >Pretty well executed - I'm impressed.
|
| It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over.
| Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the
| execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for
| older people was the only metric.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| The government have previously stated they won't pursue
| breaches unless they're particularly egregious anyway so this
| is basically shameless political theatre.
| protocolture wrote:
| ABC did a poll of a large number of kids affected by this,
| and only 6% estimated the legislation would be successful.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| ABC polled a cohort that's going through the most
| rebellious period in their lives and asked them whether
| they think authority figures can effectively prevent them
| from doing something they want to do. Had I been asked
| the same question as a teenager, I would've answered no
| every single time, regardless of the actual
| circumstances.
| protocolture wrote:
| Yes but theres also no data to suggest that they are
| incorrect.
| hashmap wrote:
| The execution didn't finish; it started. Big policy changes
| typically take time to solidify, and it'll probably take a
| bit to get a reliable read on its trajectory. But there is
| international momentum on this, so making predictions based
| on whatever percentage of people that were supposed to have
| their accounts deactivated actually did the day of (if we
| even have that data, and I doubt that we do), is probably not
| going to be useful.
| vintermann wrote:
| Apropos social media and age, I have some relatives with the
| last name of Aam. (Am or Aam is an old farm in the Volda area
| of Sunnmore, Norway).
|
| If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message
| telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek
| help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I
| don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it
| does.
|
| This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed
| it. Go and try if you want.
|
| So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be
| smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some
| algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media
| friends to notice.
| abirch wrote:
| You have to see if it's in a corporation's interest for false
| positives or false negatives. For you and AAM, it costs
| Facebook almost nothing for a false positive on "age abuse
| material" so I would expect them to continue to flag your
| family name as a false positive.
|
| With snap and others, I would expect them to focus on
| reducing false negatives and give the benefit of the doubt to
| the kid who is under 16. Worst case, you say "Mea Culpa" and
| update your algorithm accordingly to any cases that you
| missed but the state has found.
| subscribed wrote:
| I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox
| account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat
| unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.
|
| All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various
| forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which
| seems to be very far from invisible.
|
| I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can
| be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at
| the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or
| with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using
| Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion
| dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive
| practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's
| a out the control.
| taejavu wrote:
| Can you give examples of what your friends had to do for each
| platform? No one I know has been affected, so it does seem
| "invisible" to me. However I've also been an adult for quite
| some time now. If you don't mind me asking, are your friends
| young adults?
| someNameIG wrote:
| As an Australian the only platforms I have that asked for an
| age check were Discord and Bluesky. Which is funny as neither
| came under this legislation, they're implementing this
| because they chose to.
|
| Nothing from Reddit or any of the Meta platforms which have
| to comply with this legislation.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely
| affected by this
|
| I'm a 40 year old man and I've been impacted. A huge circle of
| people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now
| want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic
| when they keep it (despite saying they don't) and then get
| breached in 6 months.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > Pretty well executed
|
| There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those
| changes where positive effects are experienced early but many
| if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks,
| months or years.
| falaki wrote:
| I really hope other nations, including the United States, copy
| this. Australia proved that it is possible. I think the results
| will be so overwhelmingly positive that others will take notice.
| Good job Australia!
|
| Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this
| day and age.
| tartoran wrote:
| Of course it is possible, why would it not? I'm glad this is
| happening and I'm sure it'll follow in other countries,
| probably not the in the US though. Frankly I really hope most
| people just get off social media's grip and start interacting
| the way we used to.
| AngryData wrote:
| Isn't it a little early to declare success? I think the bigger
| worry with the US though is not whether it is technically
| possible, but whether anyone in power cares to actually help
| kids versus using this it as an excuse to implement Orwellian
| surveillance upon citizens.
| anakaine wrote:
| Surveillance could be part of it, if you let it be. Improved
| mental health, education, and social outcomes for each
| generation is also pretty darned important.
| falaki wrote:
| Alcohol, tobacco and many other products have age
| restrictions, so do cars and many other products of the
| modern society. Social media can and should have age
| restrictions.
| ethin wrote:
| This is a nonsense take that gets perpetuated over and
| over. For some reason.
|
| Purchasing alcohol or buying a car is not the same as
| verifying your age on an internet property. They aren't
| even comparable. This is just as dumb as saying "well you
| have to verify your age to go into a bar". Sure, but does
| the bartender or salesman who sells you the alcohol
| completely remember every pixel of your photo or video
| selfy, permanently? Or do they just remember your face more
| generally?
|
| The problem with these age verification laws is that they
| harm everybody, adults and kids. They don't do anything to
| protect kids and their sole purpose is a way for
| governments to suppress things they don't like. Any age
| verification technology (be it age estimation or similar)
| has a permanent record of the photo ID or video selfies (or
| whatever you use to prove your age) that you give it.
| Forever. If these systems didn't have those records, the
| result would be you having to verify your age _every_ time
| you visit the website. There is a massive, massive
| difference between getting alcohol at a bar, or going to a
| strip club or similar, and providing your photo ID to a
| bouncer or bartender, who probably won 't remember your ID
| after 5 minutes, versus a computer which permanently
| remembers it. That is the differentiator.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in
| this day and age.
|
| Great, another Oprah's book club book that assures parents that
| there's just _one easy trick_ to saving your children.
| protocolture wrote:
| While I am definitely in favor of the US causing itself more
| damage, its actually quite sickening to see people spruiking
| this legislation.
|
| First of all, Australia has proven nothing, kids are stepping
| politely over this barrier without issue.
|
| Second we are already hearing from disabled teens losing their
| only social lifeline.
|
| Congratulations, you have isolated and disenfranchised a bunch
| of kids.
| anakaine wrote:
| The changes are not even 12 hours old for most of Australia
| and people are declaring failure. Far out.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| For people in an industry that is _built_ on A/B testing,
| HN sure expects governments to get everything perfect first
| go with no edge cases or externalities doesn't it!
| WorldPeas wrote:
| push it to prod!
| tamimio wrote:
| I hope it won't, because the whole thing is just a medium to
| enable digital ID using fears as a justification, in this time
| it's kids.
|
| The whole 'anxious generation' isn't because of social media,
| it's because the new generations are hopeless and helpless
| (incl genz and millennials too), wherever you look in any
| domain, it's bleak times waiting ahead for them, boomers fucked
| them up severely and now want to suppress them with laws and
| bills and control them because they know for a fact something
| will snap at this current rate.
| protocolture wrote:
| Its crazy how the AusGov has just tried to turn this into some
| kind of nationalistic celebration. Passing laws isolating
| children isnt to be celebrated by lighting up national monuments.
| batiudrami wrote:
| Isolating children? They're schoolchildren! They see their
| peers at school every day.
| deadbolt wrote:
| Isolated from ads sold by the social media companies lol
| protocolture wrote:
| We already have reports about disabled kids experiencing
| suicidal ideation due to losing their only non family social
| connections.
|
| Not to mention that Australias youth are quite politically
| engaged, we have a news network entirely run by teenagers
| that just had their service gutted.
| emulatedmedia wrote:
| Isolating children from what? If anything, this will make they
| spend more time with their friends and family
| squigz wrote:
| What about the kids who are bullied and isolated at school?
| What about those who have an abusive family?
| deadbolt wrote:
| What about the kids who are bullied on social media?
| squigz wrote:
| One of the good things about the Internet is that you can
| leave such sites and find people who don't do that.
|
| Most kids don't really have such a choice when it comes
| to school or their family.
| chalupa-supreme wrote:
| Online abuse works the exact same way. Most kids don't
| choose to be abused online either.
| squigz wrote:
| Yes. What I'm saying is that people can choose to leave
| online spaces that are abusive, as opposed to abuse at
| school or home, which are much harder (usually
| impossible) for children to escape.
| awillowingmind wrote:
| Ah yes brilliant. Instead of trying to address these issues
| at their source let's just let kids form immaterial
| connections online and guarantee they never learn how to
| form any sort of in person communication skills!
| nxor wrote:
| That's the spirit. Gotta get that ad revenue.
| iteria wrote:
| I'm sorry what does a gay kid do about parents that think
| they are fundamentally immoral? What does any kind of
| abused kid do? Because my parents were abusive, but not
| in the way that left marks and the internet was the only
| thing keeping me sane. I lived in a neighborhood with no
| kids my age and across town from my school, so even the
| friends I made there lived nowhere near me. The internet
| was not a place I made immaterial connections. It's where
| I maintained what I had until the rare occasions I could
| see them outside of school. It was where I got to
| interact with people who gave me the motivation to keep
| going until I could escape. What does a kid like me do
| without the internet? No one was going to step in because
| my parents isolated me and where a bit mean (from their
| POV, not mine). Not when I was clean, had food and
| clothing, and was a straight A student, be real.
| awillowingmind wrote:
| You are framing this as if you had no in person social
| connections due to your circumstances. By your OWN
| admission elsewhere in this thread, this is untrue:
|
| > Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for
| them to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids
| outside. Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens
| supposed to be where they won't be harassed. When I was a
| kid we used to just wander around and chat. There used to
| be a whole event on Friday evenings where high schoolers
| would decent on this mall across the street from two
| movie theaters. We went to the skating ring. There were
| teen clubs. More. Right now, I can't think of a single
| place a teen could just hang out besides at each other
| houses which is mostly what I watch them do. It makes
| sense why they end up in virtual spaces. They can
| socialize privately that way.
|
| What I am saying is that we should work toward bringing
| those ^ spaces BACK, rather than allowing kids to wallow
| in digital space. The more we are online, the more
| difficult that becomes. The more time we spend in digital
| space, the more we lose control over our physical spaces.
| squigz wrote:
| Ah yes brilliant. Let's keep trying to solve these issues
| that we've been trying to solve for centuries. That's
| clearly going well. Instead, let's put a bandaid on it so
| we don't have to look at the issue for a little bit.
|
| Alternatively, letting some kids who struggle to form
| connections IRL learn to form them online might give some
| the confidence and self-assuredness to form connections
| IRL when they want to.
|
| Anyway I'm not sure why you think that I'm suggesting we
| don't try to address bullying and family abuse. Did I say
| we should only do one or the other?
| awillowingmind wrote:
| We very clearly are making progress on these century long
| issues, unless you somehow think kids now are growing up
| in more hostile physical environments than they were 100
| years ago.
|
| This ban does not prevent kids from using IM platforms
| like WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord so your argument that
| this somehow restricts the ability for online
| communication is false.
|
| What you are arguing against is the restriction of access
| to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat ---
| all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that
| have shown to have negative affect on the mental health
| of teens, young adults, AND adults.
| squigz wrote:
| > What you are arguing against is the restriction of
| access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X,
| Snapchat --- all of which are filled with predatory
| algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the
| mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
|
| Actually, what I'm arguing against is the restriction of
| whatever apps a government chooses to apply their very
| loose definition to. What happens when the kids
| congregate on another platform? Presumably they'll just
| add that to the list too, right? Does a cat and mouse
| game seem productive? To say nothing of the precedent set
| being used for political ends.
|
| What I'm arguing _for_ is stuff that may actually solve
| the underlying issues - like, for example, addressing
| those predatory algorithms you refer to.
| nxor wrote:
| Absolutely second this, and I am part of the younger
| generation. Technology is isolating. Social media feeds
| superficial relationships. The anxiety it creates is so
| worrying.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Isolating children from what?
|
| We already have reports of disabled kids experiencing
| suicidal ideation as they are cut off from their only non
| familial social experience.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Do you have kids ? Do you see kids in your day to day life ? I
| do, every day, and even <10 years old already have permanent
| neck damage from scrolling as soon as they haves 5 seconds of
| free time. I see groups of friends walking back from schools,
| they're side by side, scrolling on their phone, not talking,
| not even looking in front of them. I walk by 3 schools multiple
| times every single day and that's all I see as soon as they're
| outside of the playground (because they're not allowed while
| inside). Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is
| much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| They already excluded many popular and addictive services
| that are used for grooming
|
| This will enhance surveillance and state control of content,
| but not address the problems you've mentioned
| protocolture wrote:
| I do have a son. I plan to tell my kiddo not to engage with
| those platforms and set boundaries. I dont plan to force
| every kid in every scenario into the same pattern.
|
| >Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much
| more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
|
| "Locking" Why not instead ban the social graph, or certain
| engagement techniques. Theres a whole other arm here, where
| the AusGov has pulled back entirely from promised gambling
| restrictions. Its easy to see a path where dark patterns in
| both industries are outlawed instead of banning half.
|
| Not to mention that 4chan and youtube are unaffected, so I
| doubt those kids with the broken backs or whatever are going
| to be "free".
| cal_dent wrote:
| I don't necessarily think this as it is will "work" but I'm all
| for someone at least trying to do something. Yes, there are a
| bunch of externalities and potential second order effects that
| don't sit well with me but, at this stage, I'd rather some
| attempt at trying to regulate than throwing up hands and saying
| its all too hard.
|
| Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more
| authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if
| they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they
| did this or not frankly
|
| Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10%
| but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media
| from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
| eviks wrote:
| If you just want to try something that doesn't work, why not
| legislate touching grass every morning without all the
| downsides of a dumb blanket ban?
| cal_dent wrote:
| Yes, excellent idea. Let's do that too
| eviks wrote:
| No, not too, but instead. What's your argument for doing
| dumb harmful stuff instead of dumb harmless stuff?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| "I don't necessarily think this as it is will work" !=
| "harmful" or "dumb"
|
| Like do warnings on cigarettes work? I definitely saw a
| guy move cigs to older pack he had from china because he
| didn't like ugly warning picture on the new pack. Do
| mandatory id checks work? If I saw some kids get their
| hands on smokes does it mean "it doesn't work" and
| therefore there should be no limits on big tobacco?
|
| is a start
| Simulacra wrote:
| I like to win another poster said about addiction to cigarettes
| other things. The world drugs was an absolute failure. I think
| that is how this is going to go, lots of regulation and
| expenditure for something that's going to ultimately fail.
| Can't really work unless it's a little authoritarian, such as
| permitting Websites to only allow youth who have a permit. But
| I am in agreement, we need to do more, and we can't really
| depend on the parents anymore. So I think in a way, we have to
| make it costly for children to do things they're not supposed
| to be doing, but without disadvantaging certain groups.
| taylorius wrote:
| I sense a great disturbance in the force - millions of teens
| muttering "for fuck's sake" and tossing their phones onto the
| sofa.
| Simulacra wrote:
| The force is the sunlight that will shine upon their skin when
| they go outside!
| pmsh wrote:
| Well it's Australia, this is just one more drop in an ocean of
| anti-youth policy...
| ed_mercer wrote:
| This is great. Even if it doesn't actually keep teens off, it
| sends the message that social media is bad for you. Just like
| smoking and drinking.
| metalman wrote:
| any kid who cant figure out how to slide right by a government
| hack is a looser, and while we should feel a little bad for both
| of them, presumambly someone will take pity and fix there phones
| up , and let them know that there is sex and everything on the
| net
| nephihaha wrote:
| There is a pattern of government using moral panics to exert
| greater control. Australia and New Zealand seem to be used as a
| testbed for projects which are introduced elsewhere.
|
| The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and
| has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two
| unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same
| mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
|
| In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
|
| The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
| TimByte wrote:
| The offline-socializing point is good, but it's also a cultural
| shift that won't magically happen because a law is passed. If
| anything, the hard part is rebuilding the offline spaces and
| social norms that used to make that easy.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I agree. I had to coax people out after lockdown and it took
| years.
|
| We do need offline spaces. I've been out for a Christmas
| lunch today. Much more meaningful than meeting on Zoom or
| whatever. I don't hate technology but I think we have to use
| it widely.
| iteria wrote:
| Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for them
| to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids outside.
| Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens supposed to be
| where they won't be harassed. When I was a kid we used to
| just wander around and chat. There used to be a whole event
| on Friday evenings where high schoolers would decent on this
| mall across the street from two movie theaters. We went to
| the skating ring. There were teen clubs. More. Right now, I
| can't think of a single place a teen could just hang out
| besides at each other houses which is mostly what I watch
| them do. It makes sense why they end up in virtual spaces.
| They can socialize privately that way.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| What do you think is happening in New Zealand with regards to
| "moral panic" projects?
| mullingitover wrote:
| Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are
| attempting to but are blocked by federal courts. Will be
| interesting to see if the tech industry allows it, or decides to
| break up the federal government before it becomes too powerful.
| chistev wrote:
| Break up the federal government?
| gentooflux wrote:
| I believe they're implying that there's an unhealthy amount
| of regulatory capture in favor of big tech
| estimator7292 wrote:
| We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian
| state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next
| step is dissolving congress and installing a new
| constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining
| the law of the land on the whims of a senile man
| paxys wrote:
| There's no need to dissolve congress. You instead make sure
| that (1) a single party stays in power (through
| gerrymandering, voter suppression and more), (2) the courts
| are stacked with loyalists and (3) the legislature and
| courts rubber stamp all decisions of the executive
| regardless of legality or anything else.
| lazide wrote:
| Sure, but also why wouldn't they? It's historically
| unpopular as an institution, and clearly toothless.
| Sevrene wrote:
| Democratic institutions only have as much power as
| they're given.
| lazide wrote:
| Have you not been paying attention?
| Sevrene wrote:
| Can you expand on this, what do you think I'm missing?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| For the same reason russia and north Korea has elections?
| It sounds better to pretend the dictator is chosen by the
| people
| googlywoogly wrote:
| There's no need to do any of things you mention
| considering that both parties are owned by the same
| people and are essentially two faces of the same party in
| practice. Also - almost all the powers that be -
| including courts and Congress are already for sale/at the
| service of big tech.
| leptons wrote:
| Both sides are not the same,not even close, and the
| voting record proves it.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > the voting record proves it.
|
| Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I
| don't necessarily believe this but I also have no
| counter-argument:
|
| Mostly performative. When it's decided that something
| actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial
| lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be
| close to retirement or from a state where they won't be
| heavily punished for that specific vote.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin
| to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost
| unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you
| to prove it and not others to disprove it.
|
| From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state
| where they won't be heavily punished for that specific
| vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in
| a positive light it would sound more similar to "the
| state population falls on both sides of the issue and
| thus either vote could make sense from their legislator
| depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or
| any number of other explanations depending on the vote
| and populations.
| leptons wrote:
| It's not performative when people are starving. I agree
| with holding out on the government shutdown to try to
| prevent Americans losing healthcare. But when Republicans
| are absolutely fine with poor people starving so that
| they can take away people's healthcare, with a bonus that
| they get to shut down the government and say "see,
| government doesn't work", it becomes clear that letting
| the government shut down (especially food program
| shutdowns) continue is going to hurt more people than the
| government shutdown is going to help. So, when you say
| "performative" it sounds like you support the "both sides
| are the same" meme, but the ideologies are vastly
| different - one side is fine with people starving
| indefinitely, and the other actually doesn't want that.
|
| I would think at least some of this should be obvious,
| but I guess not?
| axus wrote:
| Democracy with Chinese Characteristics
| redhed wrote:
| Yeah this is usually how it happens. Whether its ancient
| Rome, modern Russia, Venezuela, etc all the dressings of
| the old Republic stay but become subverted by an
| autocrat.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Yea, US is probably gonna end up as Russia if nothing
| changes. On paper a democracy with elections. In practice
| a dictatorship.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| utter nonsense, i truly don't see how people can live in
| the US and be left with this impression.
| louthy wrote:
| You also need a country name with 'Democratic' in it:
|
| Democratic People's Republic of America.
|
| That's how you know it's a fully totalitarian state.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| TBH these steps are not that easy and probably are not
| possible in a federated country like US.
| joshred wrote:
| Gerrymandering already exists. Voter suppression was huge
| in the past, and may become huge again. The supreme court
| made sure of that.
|
| And also... the supreme court keeps issuing partisan
| decisions.
|
| So... what is left? Number 3?
|
| I guess you're arguing that federalism protects people,
| but how does it do that in a way that isn't already being
| eroded?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Everybody seems to have missed the memo that all power was
| concentrated in the Executive branch since the Bush
| Doctrine, and that since 2016 people have started insisting
| that the Executive doesn't even have any obligation to the
| President, _the only important vote left_ (although limited
| to choosing between two private clubs funded by the same
| donors.).
|
| If Congress steps away from doing anything but serving
| donors (helped by the filibuster), and the captured
| regulators don't have to obey the President, there's
| actually no democracy left. We're in the impossible
| situation where Trump not being in control is scarier than
| Trump being in control.
|
| Even scarier is that the people saying that we're on the
| way to becoming an authoritarian state are saying that
| because they think that the voters get _too much say._
| Authoritarianism is when we don 't beatify Dr. Fauci, or
| agree that it's fine for pregnant women to take Tylenol.
| The upper middle class, in its complete narcissism and fall
| into self-indulgent fantasy, is entirely focused on
| aesthetics.
|
| edit: when replies that say that there's already a problem,
| but seem to be heretical about the covid response get
| flagkilled, there's a blessed opinion. I have no idea how
| elite echochambers are supposed to avoid an authoritarian
| state. Your bosses are kissing Trump's ass, and you're
| working hard doing things that advance their agenda. They
| couldn't do it without you.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I will bet you up to $1000 at 2:1 odds that in 5 years we
| will still have the same constitution and congress will not
| have been dissolved at any point.
|
| perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for
| adults or maybe just dystopian movies.
| fridder wrote:
| I do wonder about the normalization of dystopian ideas.
| Take even a show like Scandal. The fact that one of the
| big reveals is that billionaires stole the election by
| targeted hacking of election machines is kinda messed up.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Right, because there's no need to change the Constitution
| when you have a captured Supreme Court to help you ignore
| it, and no need to dissolve Congress when they've
| steadily made themselves less and less relevant over the
| past few decades.
| XorNot wrote:
| Russia still has a constitution, a parliament, separation
| of powers, and an independent judiciary. It even has
| opposition political parties and elections.
|
| And yet...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Motte meet Bailey
| rusk wrote:
| It was a clever riff on the current situation where business
| tells government
| kube-system wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn%27s_Early_Light:_Taking_B.
| ..
|
| That is basically what the Heritage Foundation wants to do.
| delfinom wrote:
| Not going to help the tech industry given their largest
| audience bases are in blue states, who will happily just
| regulate them to death if the federal government doesn't.
| betteryet wrote:
| How about we break up the tech industry instead?
|
| This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is
| asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of
| bricks.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g:
| voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan,
| 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively
| impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g:
| facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?
| rockertalker wrote:
| I think if you run a website as a main source of your
| business profitable or not you're in the tech industry.
| It's a question of scale not industry classification or
| purpose classification.
| betteryet wrote:
| Not my point. The original comment said the tech industry
| can decide to break up the federal government because they
| don't want to be forced to clean up their act. Societies
| should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain
| freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. If the tech
| industry is against that, then they should be the ones
| broken up.
| jMyles wrote:
| > Societies should be stronger than any industry and
| fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity.
|
| I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
|
| But societies also need to be stronger than states,
| especially in an age of connection and sharing.
|
| States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in
| the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope
| that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray
| for.
|
| Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are
| closer to states than they are to algorithms.
|
| But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we
| need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized
| and less rent-seeking) web apps.
| betteryet wrote:
| Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too
| and really need to act early. States can become one
| person or party and it's game over for a long time.
| Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at
| preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of
| faith in it.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
|
| As long as it's not farming, defense or healthcare of
| course. Historically speaking at least.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _They are closer to states than they are to algorithms_
|
| This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is
| convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything.
| States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to
| anyone's head forcing them to consume _< insert content
| you disagree with>_. In a country of equals, everyone's
| opinion, including _< position you disagree with>_,
| should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic
| due process.
|
| Just because many people hold _< position you disagree
| with>_ and vote for _< politician you find repugnant>_
| doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to
| limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on
| social media) for it.
| jMyles wrote:
| I agree with everything you've said with regard to the
| justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a
| free market at work in social media.
|
| * So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically
| skew what can and cannot be shared
|
| * Censorship at the behest of world governments is
| rampant, and completely overran anything representing a
| nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19
| pandemic
|
| * States, with their monopoly on the legitimate
| initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every
| level of the experience, from chip makers to the
| duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the
| social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe
| the reason people join and stay, but the availability of
| places to join and stay is in no sense a market
| phenomenon
|
| Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS
| all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because
| they enjoy his company?
| biophysboy wrote:
| The thing with those alternative communities is that they
| sort of orbit around the larger tech platforms. Their
| agenda is set by the news-of-the-day within certain
| X/FB/YouTube subcommunities. Its sort of analogous to wire
| services in traditional media.
|
| Additionally, people that post on those platforms
| originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms,
| and took their audience with them.
| atmosx wrote:
| I agree. It's just there has not been a pro-EU vote in any
| form or capacity by any EU population. So the stopped doing
| referendums but the EU grew only even more unpopular- and
| lately with VDL and KK, its as if its a cruel joke we all
| expect for it to end soon.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| What are you talking about? Lots of countries have voted to
| join EU. Any country can leave when they want. EU is still
| popular in most countries.
| atmosx wrote:
| Can you name a referendum of a country within the EU that
| has to do with the EU in some form or capacity and
| received a positive vote? Netherlands, France, Italy and
| Greece all voted at a certain point in time. The result
| was always a "no".
|
| The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the
| idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not.
| betteryet wrote:
| EU is holding, but the fact that every authoritarian (US,
| China, Russia) is trying to break it apart should tell you
| something. It's like the only one remaining, and they don't
| like it.
|
| You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most
| men who have run the EU in recent history.
| atmosx wrote:
| If they had any, they would be in front line... not
| asking me to go get myself killed :-)
| wrxd wrote:
| So unpopular that the only country who ever decided to
| leave is now regretting its decision
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Why not both?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's not going to happen, at least not in the land of crony
| capitalism.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Because Fedgov stopped any real anti-trust regulation over a
| century ago and have shown they have no will nor ability to
| change that since.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are
| attempting to but are blocked by federal courts.
|
| When much of government ( federal, state, local ) communication
| is done via social meda, would it be legal to ban anyone from
| accessing it?
|
| Or are official government social media sites required to be
| accessible to everyone?
| jedberg wrote:
| People under 18 don't have the same rights.
| Lerc wrote:
| Agreed. What rights should they have though?
| Aloisius wrote:
| In the US, children's right to free speech has only very
| narrow exceptions compared to an adult.
|
| The Supreme Court has even struck down state bans on
| selling violent video games to children because it violates
| a child's first amendment rights.
|
| A full ban on social media full of protected speech? That
| passing Constitutional muster would require some legal
| gymnastics and overwhelming scientific evidence of harm -
| evidence that is sorely lacking despite what people
| believe.
| stevage wrote:
| The Australian ban doesn't block anyone from accessing
| content.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Unless the social media site puts up super random login
| gates and A/B testing anti-patterns that blocks you from
| accessing content?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit?
| Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize,
| to impulse buy...) and you change the behavior.
|
| I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem
| is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when
| being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Socialising != Social media. Teens can still use messenger,
| WhatsApp, phonecalls, text or even....face to face!
| baby wrote:
| That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed
| thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of
| impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid
| and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me
| to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen
| suicides and all.
| kahmeal wrote:
| Facebook then wasn't what facebook is today. The social
| media of the early internet was largely a digital expansion
| of otherwise healthy social norms. Then the internet blew
| up. Now it's more akin to the drug dealers DARE warned us
| about. Still waiting on _those_ free drugs, tbh.
| jsphweid wrote:
| What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous
| for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons.
| However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic
| modern feed garbage content in general.
| rhines wrote:
| Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At
| least for most people anyway. The average user, and
| probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.
|
| If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff
| and having discussions with people you know (even if you
| just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums,
| or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or
| sharing photos you take with a specific community.
|
| It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or
| Instagram), or when your comments are written for the
| algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on
| Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media
| is an issue.
| gffrd wrote:
| It's possible your social life would have exploded without
| Facebook.
|
| If you found a community on Facebook, you'd likely have
| found it regardless without it.
| barbazoo wrote:
| How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying
| children's mental health?
|
| The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in
| the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think
| right now.
| yifanl wrote:
| Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot
| slower and less efficiently.
|
| And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a
| painkiller an a heroin addiction.
| safety1st wrote:
| It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as
| TVs were going from one in the household to one in every
| room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll
| rot their brains." And there was research to back up that
| it had a negative effect to some degree.
|
| So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids'
| hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand
| recently that they're not a social media company anymore,
| they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every
| app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an
| endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
| ncruces wrote:
| I pretty much agree with this.
|
| We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least
| I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when
| watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio
| (Spotify/etc).
|
| Except we now we put a _garbage_ TV in every hand.
|
| It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because
| it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one;
| because it's been proven that it's bad for
| eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because
| the content is crap.
|
| Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low
| effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s
| (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone
| smarter/saner.
| mckirk wrote:
| "Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain
| cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey
| Shore might be right for you!"
| ch2026 wrote:
| We had the same fear mongering in the 80's and early 90's
| about TV. And in the 20's and 30's about radio programs.
|
| Same shit, new generation.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _How come ad supported TV existed for decades without
| destroying children 's mental health?_
|
| Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than
| the current situation.
|
| 1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a
| fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several
| websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-
| harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more
| than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
|
| 2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs
| are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for
| most people, within arms reach 24/7.
|
| 3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in
| most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by
| governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.).
| It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline
| than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or
| whatever your favorite channel is.
|
| 4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce
| the most amount of happy chemical.
| testing22321 wrote:
| In Australia TV is very commonly referred to as "the idiot
| box".
|
| Australians are very aware that it destroys people's brains.
| kentm wrote:
| > How come ad supported TV existed for decades without
| destroying children's mental health?
|
| I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of
| measuring it.
|
| Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that
| had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal
| amount and it had a noticeable impact.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally...
| you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively
| feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any
| certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there
| are _some_ guardrails). Social media can with much less
| restriction.
| safety1st wrote:
| I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV,
| and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level
| impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as
| these were adopted.
|
| Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones,
| and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and
| anxiety increase en masse.
|
| My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the
| phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get
| one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever
| clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up
| there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the
| den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of
| mind.
| Xelbair wrote:
| The previous static ads of the past are completely different
| beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven
| design(leading to doomscrolling etc).
| fainpul wrote:
| > we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had
| advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen
| mental health impact was observed as these were adopted
|
| That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc.
| due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and
| poster ads where a thing decades ago.
|
| Things escalated with social media, but there were issues
| long before that.
| squigz wrote:
| My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and
| depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world
| and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to
| enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so
| of course they're more anxious/depressed.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and
| scale.
|
| Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as
| long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive
| at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies
| doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they
| just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes
| money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put
| out very different products.
|
| Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given
| change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
|
| Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be
| addictive to _you_ , personally, rather than just generally
| addictive to people.
|
| And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of
| money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time
| on the problem of making the product more addictive.
|
| I don't know what you do about it.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I remember when Facebook required a university address. That
| made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a
| permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians
| that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has
| those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard
| problem.
| nick238 wrote:
| Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more
| high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit
| willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate
| returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not
| addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep
| the user high.
|
| Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free
| stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act
| like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid
| influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
| TimByte wrote:
| Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the
| doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse,
| governments don't really know how to regulate "the business
| model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
| awillowingmind wrote:
| I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content
| rather than support ad-based revenue.
|
| But you can't solve that issue with policy. It's a cultural
| issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they
| consume (with money).
|
| Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I'm not sure
| if you're US based, just speaking from my perspective), and
| likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported
| media.
| riversflow wrote:
| I long thought this way, but I've realized ad-supported social
| media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that
| has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a
| way of funding the internet that doesn't shut out literally
| Billions because they cant afford it, I'm all ears.
|
| Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless
| people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without
| actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
| naravara wrote:
| I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other
| 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
|
| Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became
| ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems
| began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm
| serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but
| another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to
| largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each
| other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of
| alienation. That's inevitable, I felt bad when I found out
| about parties or hang-outs I didn't get invited to at that age
| as well. But I didn't even know about 90% of them, and those I
| did I heard about through passing references rather than a
| stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was
| having without me.
|
| I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under
| those circumstances, though I'm not sure that by itself would
| rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before
| trying other interventions like addressing Meta's "19 strikes
| before banning you for CSAM" rule. Kids are just the canaries
| in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that
| is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on
| adult brains too, we can't try to pretend we can be
| psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is
| spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
|
| The culture of interacting just changed as more people got
| online and more tools became available to expand access to
| things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment
| section where anyone could come to your website and directly
| modify the page's HTML and most of the time nothing would
| happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just
| wasn't this background miasma that was going to flood your
| comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into
| the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet.
| Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of
| money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
| ethin wrote:
| Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously.
| Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the
| vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will
| tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable
| authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to
| actually solve the problem.
| amrocha wrote:
| Oh, alright, I guess we just need to overthrow capitalism and
| install a different economic system
|
| Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
| amarant wrote:
| I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember
| thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around
| 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took
| over the market in Sweden where I lived.
|
| Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period
| of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and
| you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now
| it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people
| you know.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with
| one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still
| needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real
| discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who
| you had met IRL.
| snarf21 wrote:
| The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get
| rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it
| loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
| kahmeal wrote:
| You're not wrong. Even simple "page hit counters" became a
| target of manipulation once they were common. Human nature is
| tough at scale.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| It's crazy that social media is banned but kids are still
| subject to gambling ads prior to or after watching the footy on
| free to air TV.
| csense wrote:
| RIP freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the
| press.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Just online, which has been a bad idea from day one due to the
| evertrending centralization of the Internet, the primary
| catalyst thereof being people's laziness. Offline, it still
| exists.
| anticrymactic wrote:
| How so?
|
| Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only
| access to speech, press and association?
| quailfarmer wrote:
| Since about 10 years ago, online platforms are a major part
| of how many people speak, publish, and associate.
| dmix wrote:
| The only way to enforce it is basically a very dangerous game
| and will normalize gov control of the internet down to the
| individual level.
| akersten wrote:
| > since when is speech I don't like speech?!
| TimByte wrote:
| The real danger isn't the ban itself... it's the precedent that
| could be built on top of it if governments decide they like
| controlling digital participation
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Texas SB2420 requires age verification to download apps. Now,
| both the government and corporations have a new lever to
| identify exactly who you are, where you are, what you're
| doing, and can selectively cut you off from everything.
| Government-endorsed technofeudalism with inverted
| totalitarian features normalizing deviancy to become
| shameless, traditional totalitarianism.
|
| -> Scenario
|
| Want to use cash for lunch or parking? Sorry, no, you must be
| banked, and have an app.
|
| Want to use a bank? You must use an app.
|
| How do you get an app? You must have a phone and an ID.
|
| Want to buy a phone? Whoops, conundrum encountered.
|
| (And don't even think of wanting to get an ID.)
|
| -> In summary
|
| This further disenfranchises the extremely poor, and takes
| power and freedom away from everyone who isn't a billionaire.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If you're in Australia, you never had any of that.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| Nice! Soon enough they'll be forbidden to be outside during the
| day too, to avoid taking any risk crossing these "adults" thing
| probably.
| youngNed wrote:
| And cigarettes! What next booze!?
|
| Libertarianism really does hit a wall when it comes to kids, in
| so many ways, doesn't it?
| didibus wrote:
| Curfew laws are quite common aren't they?
| TimByte wrote:
| This feels like one of those policies that sounds great at a
| podium but is going to age horribly
| winddude wrote:
| I kind of get it, except youtube... which has much more
| educational, news, and long form content. Also also forcing
| face/age verification sounds ripe with issues.
| burningChrome wrote:
| FYI the article is from back in December of this year and
| there's already been articles about teen circumventing the
| process of verification:
|
| https://www.wionews.com/trending/australian-teens-defy-under...
| lm28469 wrote:
| It has some educational content, most of it is brain rot like
| everywhere else though. Open a brand new youtube account and
| check out what's being pushed by default, you either get room
| temperature IQ political analysts or "shorts" with softcore
| porn thumbnails to bait people for a click
| eimrine wrote:
| Open a new YT account then feed it with [1] for few hours at
| least then you will unleash the full power of Youtube...
| unless you missclick even once into some popular blog
| typically they very clearly aimed at low-IQ people which
| accidentably might be your kid or somebody else like you know
| who I mean. But to prevent that slippery slope at least
| partly, just increase the feeding time of your YT account
| with the best requests possible which are carefully stacked
| at [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com
| stOneskull wrote:
| most content can be viewed without an account
| jl6 wrote:
| Is the mechanism of the ban actually going to work, or is it just
| going to train more kids how to use fake IDs and VPNs?
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Not sure it matters.
|
| It's a relatively uncontroversial ban, with public support in
| Aus because of mental health concerns, and key social media
| sites complying.
|
| VPN's come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's. As do the
| credit and debit that are usually required somewhere along the
| line to pay for the services.
|
| Historically, if it's awkward to circumvent most people tend to
| comply; which means in turn that minority that can figure out a
| way around it are unlikely to find many of their friends
| present. While for majority there's unlikely to be much of a
| draw or peer group pressure to circumvent.
|
| I'm sure Aus gov will monitor, media will highlight problems
| etc, but would be surprised if it was not actually quit
| effective.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's not ID based so why would they need fake ID?
| paxys wrote:
| Putting "teens" in the title is misleading. The ban is for ages
| 15 and below.
| jfindper wrote:
| Thir _teen_ , four _teen_ , fif _teen_.
|
| It's half of the "teens" someone experiences before hitting the
| age of majority. I think it's fine to say "teen" in the title.
| Aachen wrote:
| TIL English teenager isn't necessarily the translation of
| Dutch tiener. Wikipedia at least says 10-19 for us and 13-19
| for English. In German the word teenager is also used and the
| page gives _both_ definitions on the same page without
| realising it 's self-contradictory
|
| Idk that anyone takes this so literally (as that you're only
| a teenager if your cardinal age ends in the literal word teen
| and so twelve is definitely not a teenager), I've always
| understood it as "in their tens" but that may be my origin
| jfindper wrote:
| Where I am, "teens" is 13-19 because they are all suffixed
| with "teen". Ten, eleven, and twelve are generally called
| "pre-teens", if anything.
| Aachen wrote:
| Not very useful without saying where that would be :P
| jfindper wrote:
| Well, it's useful for explaining my first comment, at
| least.
|
| But North America, for the curious.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > But North America, for the curious.
|
| Just say canada. I don't understand why canadians always
| do this.
| jfindper wrote:
| I'm in Michigan. Is that Canadian now? Will have to
| update my passport asap.
| hearsathought wrote:
| Then say michigan or america. You may be "in michigan"
| but are you "from michigan". Why would you say north
| america unless you have ties to canada.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _You may be "in michigan" but are you "from michigan"._
|
| I have literally 0 reason to answer this, it has
| absolutely nothing to do with the conversation, but to
| placate whatever weird obsession you have, yes. I was
| born in Michigan.
|
| > _Why would you say north america unless you have ties
| to canada._
|
| Why do you care? Is North America offensive now or
| something?
|
| I said "North America" because, for the purposes of this
| specific conversation, it doesn't matter _at all_. Except
| to you, apparently. For some unknown reason.
|
| I try not to be super US-centric on international forums.
| First time someone's ever started questioning me about
| it, though.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > Is North America offensive now or something?
|
| North america encompasses the US, Canada AND MEXICO. Not
| sure what the age range for "teen" is in canada. If you
| are not canadian, why are you speaking for canadians.
| Don't think they even use "teen" in mexico as they speak
| spanish in mexico.
|
| > I try not to be super US-centric on international
| forums.
|
| HN is an american forum. You can be US-centric if you
| want. I give you permission.
| jfindper wrote:
| This has to be one of the most meaningless, pedantic,
| strangest string of comments I've had the misfortune of
| participating in.
|
| I cannot possibly muster up enough energy to care about
| this anywhere near as much as you do.
|
| Good luck, fellow North American.
| amatecha wrote:
| The ban is also for anyone who refuses to submit their private
| data (face scan or government ID) to an unrelated 3rd party
| company which will invariably store that data with insufficient
| security.
| decimalenough wrote:
| The ban does not specify how companies are supposed to do it.
|
| Eg Snapchat is not requiring ID (which the average Australian
| 15yo wouldn't have anyway), they're trying to determine age
| with the user's camera, and this is trivially spoofed using
| video played back on another device.
| stOneskull wrote:
| i think eventually they'll say 'these methods are not
| working' and enforce digital id
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Although I think that social media causes issues with
| underdeveloped brains, If this is about confirming age at the
| point of login, then this is really about identifying everyone
| and not protecting children. If this is the case, you know they
| are going to use this data to target people for speech related
| things.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Now, all we have to do is mandate that you pass a psychiatric
| test in order to use social media or LLMs. In this way, we can
| protect the mentally disabled. People are killing themselves
| after going on sites like Reddit. It's too dangerous to the
| mentally disabled.
| ipaddr wrote:
| These platforms are heavy censored with a direct line to
| governments. This will push kids to other platforms with less
| censorship. That's a major benefit.
|
| As we go down this road platforms will need to be banned for
| everyone. For example VK wasn't on the list and they won't
| implement age checks. They and many other sites will need to be
| banned until you are left with a white list of acceptance sites.
| Add in age verification on those sites for everyone.
|
| Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the
| standard.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the
| standard._
|
| This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of
| 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Historically consumer access to security/privacy tools has
| always been something the govt has wanted to restrict or
| prevent entirely.
| jMyles wrote:
| > This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of
| 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
|
| ...then the rest of the world will see what the people of
| China and Russia already know: bans on VPNs cause them to
| explode in popularity and development pace.
|
| There's a reason that the most sophisticated VPNs and
| tunneling tech are built to evade the GFW.
|
| I recently visited a remote part of Siberia, and I was amazed
| at the ubiquity of VPNs. Grandmothers who grew up in shamanic
| traditions knew how to get around apparent traffic shaping
| (even on youtube!) to listen to their traditional music. It
| was quite inspiring.
|
| I'm not saying bans are a good idea - I'd much rather the
| adults in the room read the writing on the wall and bring
| about peaceful dismantling of legacy states in favor of a
| censorship-resistant internet.
|
| But it is coming either way.
| subscribed wrote:
| They already started moving to different platforms. No VPNs
| needed. At some point they'll stray off the Internet (because
| gov.au of course barks at every platform except discord,
| mysteriously).
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Starting Jan 1, 2026, Texas SB2420 is also requiring ID
| verification for all app stores. It's not about "think of the
| children", it's lazy parents who chose unAmerican totalitarianism
| and billionaires weaponizing government to eliminate privacy and
| make data brokers rich.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=btkirlj8
| chrismorgan wrote:
| A paragraph from an email Reddit sent me presumably because I
| created my account in Australia:
|
| > _Users confirmed to be under 16 will have their accounts
| suspended under the new Australian minimum age law. While we
| disagree with the Government 's assessment of Reddit as being
| within the scope of the law, we need to take steps to comply.
| This means anyone in Australia with a Reddit account confirmed to
| be under 16 will be blocked from accessing their account or
| creating a new one. Note that as an open platform, Reddit is
| still available to browse without an account._
|
| "Confirmed to be under 16" sounds like they're not trying very
| hard to identify them. But maybe I'm just spared any attempt at
| checking since my account is 12 years old.
|
| I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant
| with the letter or the spirit of the law--an account is not
| required for at least _some_ forms of damage. But I've paid no
| attention to this law since I live in India now.
| stackskipton wrote:
| If you gave them an email address, it's possible they were able
| to verify you with 3rd party data brokers without your
| knowledge.
| Elfener wrote:
| > I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant
| with the letter or the spirit of the law
|
| Haven't read the law, but I don't think they considered this,
| since the most popular social media sites make it very hard or
| impossible to browse without an account. I guess with adult
| content bans they do consider this, since people don't tend to
| make an account there.
|
| And a very similar fun fact: You can't browse facebook
| marketplace if you're logged into an under 18 account, but can
| without an account (at least here in Hungary).
|
| Somehow, things are going to work better when you're not logged
| in...
| didibus wrote:
| To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would
| help me from wasting time on them.
|
| In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social
| media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche
| forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone
| texting? Email?
|
| I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated
| their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example?
| Would they be allowed again?
| nwhnwh wrote:
| Communication over a distance between people who don't know
| each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it,
| like customer service... is a disaster in general.
| Cyclone_ wrote:
| It looks like for now the ban is just limited to 10 apps.
| There's quite a few which are arguably worse that received an
| exception.
| Elfener wrote:
| > YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No
| comments
|
| Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which
| disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that
| makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist
| (what???), notifications (why???)
| matsemann wrote:
| Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of
| hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift
| for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new
| interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted
| with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met
| friends I later traveled countries to meet.
|
| Of course, these things were different than the beasts today.
| Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.
|
| So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is
| obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just
| nostalgic for how it was.
|
| But what about hn?
| criddell wrote:
| Are you describing the difference between a social network
| and social media?
| matsemann wrote:
| I don't know, what would be what?
|
| Hn and reddit are kinda the same concept, it's just the
| scale of them making it different, or?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'll take on the low status role of not knowing if this is a good
| idea.
|
| I've seen the data showing teen sanity nose diving concurrently
| with social media penetration. I'm also a borderline kook
| libertarian.
|
| So I appreciate the arguments in both directions, and I think the
| only way to find out if it works is to try it out. Preferably on
| a remote isolated island without nuclear weapons, in case things
| go badly :)
| ethin wrote:
| And, of course, as usual, this law, like all it's others in the
| rest of the world, will do absolutely nothing in protecting kids.
| It will instead only create a huge national security hacker
| paradise because everyone will use these so-called "age
| verification" services, which aren't exactly known for their
| security.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Frankly, I would have been pissed if this were the case when I
| was a teen and I got a lot of healthy & useful value out of
| social media.
|
| That said, some of the subcommunities I've seen created,
| particularly among young women, seem obviously unhealthy/toxic
| and regulation is probably needed there. I'm thinking of things
| like '#edtwt'.
|
| But I also think we need to avoid ruining things for smart,
| responsible kids by focusing on the worst.
| feb012025 wrote:
| I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good
| faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with
| socialization.
|
| I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense
| there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing
| politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when
| it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And
| suddenly they ban social media. Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for
| the same thing in America.
|
| I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids"
| unfortunately
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just
| because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime
| reporting on steroids.
| feb012025 wrote:
| Each party is splitting into factions. I imagine the
| establishment of both parties think social media is a problem
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Maybe. I think it's overall a rightward shift, only in
| urban cores is it accelerating a leftward shift. To the
| extent that it is motivating marginal voters to vote (which
| I think it is), it is also benefitting the right. It's also
| breaking down ethnic voting patterns in a way that benefits
| the right, I think.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It is _not_ motivating marginal voters to vote. The
| choice is between two nearly identical establishment
| candidates from two private clubs. The electorate is
| going the same way it 's going in Europe, except in
| Europe other parties are legal (although marginalized
| through parliamentary methods.)
|
| In the UK, for example, Reform has been consistently
| polling the same as the Conservatives and Labour _added
| together._ , and all three of those added together only
| represent 2/3 of the electorate. In the US, that
| translates to 2/3 of people becoming non-voters.
|
| Why that might look like a rightward shift in the US is
| because the Republicans don't fix their primaries (since
| the 90s), and their voters actually have an effect on who
| gets picked to run. Why it won't actually be a rightward
| shift is because Republicans ignore their platforms after
| being elected, and don't mind getting thrown out at the
| end of a term or two to work at the businesses they
| helped while in office.
|
| Democrats simply don't believe in any sort of democracy
| anymore. They invest all their effort into yelling at
| black people and Hispanics, and raising as much money as
| they can from the worst people in the world. The rest of
| the time they spend attacking anybody running to the left
| of them as racist or Russian, while their media outlets
| simply ignore those people other than when they're
| helping promote the slander. That's whats pushing away
| "ethnic voting."
|
| As a black person, I know when the voting season is here
| because I see a bunch of paid Democrats running around
| calling black people who criticize their party _ethnic
| slurs_ and using the word "massa" a lot. Republicans
| don't do that. They don't rely on black people so just
| ignore us. Democrats rely on us, but will never do
| anything for us, so they use terror.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I definitely think your views are a good example of what
| I mean, it's giving internet poisoning.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's almost as if a country's population need more than 2
| parties to express themselves.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| The two party system exists because even in a multi party
| system (eg. those that exist in proportional
| representation governments) still end up as "In
| government" vs "In opposition"
|
| Secondly, we employ "adversarial" systems for two
| branches of government (legislative and judicial) because
| it's a hell of a lot easier to spot flaws in ideas of
| people you are opposed to (as opposed to some European
| Judiciaries that have "inquisitorial" systems, where a
| judge investigates activity)
|
| Very often in the proportional systems people opine that
| "grand coalitions" should form, with the two largest
| parties, although that loses a lot of the advantages of
| the adversarial system, and has a tendency to steam roll
| smaller interests in the country.
|
| Finally, the Greeks pointed out that governance within
| societies cycles through a series of styles
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
|
| The USA itself has gone through SIX iterations of how
| parties should look
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_system#United_States
| thijson wrote:
| I think the Greeks called our form of government an
| oligarchy. Elections as popularity contests are so easily
| swung by money.
|
| Instead, democracy was determined to be selecting public
| officials by random lots.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
|
| I guess it's a bit like the jury system.
|
| I read an article not long ago on here about how
| promotions in companies should also be done by lottery in
| order to break up cabals.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think the degree to which money swings general
| elections is vastly overrated and would love to see your
| evidence to the contrary.
|
| No amount of spending will get you a democrat senator in
| Texas, for instance.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Which is why parliamentary systems are so much more
| stable than first-past-the-post.
|
| They let voters express their preferences, and leave
| building the coalitions up to the politicians. Instead of
| expecting voters to understand that their preferences are
| expressed during the primaries, and the general election
| is just to pick which coalition wins.
|
| It is crazy that no one in America is promoting a
| Constitutional amendment to fix the basic governance.
| lisbbb wrote:
| People in power just want total control of the narrative
| and they don't want you to find out the truth about
| anything. Look at Walz in MN--he's like the ultimate Jedi
| "nothing to see here" mind trick with his wholesome
| grandfatherly persona, which is furthest from the actual
| reality of who and what he is. They all just want to force
| you into their reality and they hate it when you don't go
| there.
| bamboozled wrote:
| This is a ban on "children" having access to a social
| media account? What are you on about ?
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Every political party ON THE PLANET has always had to
| manage internal factions, it doesn't matter if you're
| talking the Soviet Communist Party, the Democrats, the
| Republicans, The Tea party faction.
|
| There's absolutely nothing new about parties having
| internal divisions. Even the fact that at the moment
| everything is so partisan is nothing new, history has shown
| that several times over the past century that politics has
| followed a penudulum that swings from partisan extremes,
| back to centrist moderates, and then back to the extremes.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline.
| I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify
| with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to
| radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a
| cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both
| ways.
|
| I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the
| medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media
| posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse
| because they have a competent grasp on social media in
| common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval
| ratings are only going up.
|
| Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand
| the medium.
|
| Generally agree, but
|
| > Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse
|
| Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite
| his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with
| Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me.
|
| > Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings
| are only going up.
|
| Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am
| not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not
| simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe
| there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants
| whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I
| certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts -
| Trump buddying aside - were much better.
|
| > Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
|
| Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of
| other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most
| progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these
| complaints do not apply.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Mandani did really well _in NYC_ which is entirely
| consistent with the social media helping the left in urban
| cores but hurting elsewhere.
|
| I think it is structural about the medium because it
| elevates the profile of relatively rare things like crime
| or 'wokeness gone amok' that dems are losing on. Similarly,
| with regards to ICE, it is helping dems by also raising the
| profile of rare incidents. But on net I think this sort of
| coverage hurts dems more than it helps.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| All popular grooming platforms were already excluded from this
| policy
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| I thought that was curious as well. Roblox is allowed?
| Really?
| jfindper wrote:
| Agreed. I'm no fan of social media, and _especially_ not a fan
| of TikTok and Instagram. But I really doubt this is about the
| kids more than it is about getting another foothold along the
| path of controlling internet access wholesale.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| I actually do think people directly see the negative public
| health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and
| that that is the driving force behind all of this.
|
| I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as
| being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are
| knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone
| bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.
| jfindper wrote:
| I think this might be true at the parent level, but less and
| less true as you climb up the government ladder.
|
| The shitty part is that when the parents really _do_ believe
| something is "for the kids", it becomes that much easier to
| push through laws that have awful side effects (intentional
| ones or not). Which is why "for the kids" is so common, of
| course.
| jmathai wrote:
| It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires
| regulation at the national level because I can't win against
| Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Interesting, my experience is completely opposite; I'm not
| losing to them at all.
|
| Honest conversations with your kids from an early age are
| key.
| fn-mote wrote:
| How do you know you're not losing?
|
| How many years of evidence do you have?
|
| I think I won my battle against being addicted to
| games... but I don't go back to find out.
| poguemahoney wrote:
| I'd view that as more of a works for me argument than
| necessarily actionable. Social dynamics are complex and
| personality, status, etc, plays into which relationships
| end up mattering, being convincing, etc. I.e. some
| children bond closer to a grandparent not because parents
| have failed in any way at honest conversations.
| Loic wrote:
| 3 kids, same honest conversations, 2 where it worked and
| works very well, 1 where it is a constant battle.
|
| So sorry but no, the platforms are addictive and not all
| the kids can resist against an armada of statisticians
| ensuring the systems stay addictive only through honest
| conversations.
|
| By the way, this would mean you could solve all the
| addiction issues if it would be working...
| zmmmmm wrote:
| You don't know you lost until after it happens. Then it's
| too late.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| you could if you just whitelisted the apps you wanted your
| kids to use
| bdangubic wrote:
| and delete the web browser?
| eikenberry wrote:
| Computers (they each had their own) in public space and
| no phone until 14. Worked great w/o no filtering or
| whitelisting of any sort.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| there are similar mechanisms for controlling website
| usage. school computers do it all the time
| lisbbb wrote:
| My son is 15. My talk to him went something like this:
| There's a lot of porn and nasty things that you can't
| unsee, so be careful what you look at. Also, those
| extortion gangs target teenage boys, so if some girl is
| suddenly hot for you online, come see me immediately so we
| can troll the ever loving fuck out of them. I think it went
| pretty well. We like doing things as a family, but more
| like the Addams family...
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's the only way that can work in the long term.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Also have a 15 year old, same talk. Seemed to be just
| fine.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Holy Kimchi on a Popsicle Stick!
|
| I feel validated!
|
| Bless you the holy spirit of Bad Religion.
| beeforpork wrote:
| Yes! I'd call this preparation for life.
|
| Education and believably honest offers of support are
| needed to navigate the world, which is ugly and evil in
| some parts. Restrictions are really just
| counterproductive because curious young people are drawn
| to restricted stuff, and age restrictions build a sense
| of 'us (the young) against them (the adults)', so it's
| hard to convince that you actually offer honest support.
| Restrictions also focus on the bad parts, while we should
| instead focus on the good parts, the advantages of a
| global network of anything, which is totally amazing.
| Restrictions are counter productive.
|
| Humans need to learn to live here, and it starts when
| we're young and curious.
| seneca wrote:
| > It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it
| requires regulation at the national level because I can't
| win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat
| and TikTok.
|
| Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very
| much in the target age here, and they only have a passing
| understand of what social media even is due to us
| explaining how unhealthy it is to them.
|
| It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same,
| but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state
| isn't the answer.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| Likewise, the state abdicating its responsibility and
| placing the burden solely on parents isn't fair either,
| and that is exactly the environment we currently find
| ourselves in.
| Lerc wrote:
| I remember there being an experiment where parents were
| placed in a room with some toys their children were
| allowed to play with and some toys their children weren't
| allowed to.
|
| They measured the parents perceived level of control
| against their actual level of control by seeing if they
| stopped their children from playing with the researchers
| laptop that had been left in the corner of the room.
|
| Part of me wonders if it was apocryphal, I'm not sure if
| a test like that would get past an ethics committee (at
| least since laptops existed)
| palata wrote:
| Yes, let's allow cigarette manufacturers to target
| children, and let's the capable parents teach them. Same
| for porn, alcohol, drugs. If your kids have issues, it's
| your fault, not society's. /s
| rpdillon wrote:
| Remarkably, Youtube's logged out experience will still be
| completely available to all age groups. And an a Australian
| HN user mentioned that one 14-year old had another
| (presumably older looking) 14-year old do the "video
| selfie" for her to verify her account on one the sites. So
| I'm not sure the fight will go away, but it may be slightly
| more tractable.
|
| It will normalize people thinking that uploading their
| state-issued ID to whatever contractor is validating
| accounts is safe and normal.
| yfw wrote:
| Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. And its
| forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and
| malware ridden ones. How would you measure any level of
| success from this initiative? Doing something isnt a solution
| if it has tons of bad sideeffects
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn.
|
| One does not follow from the other.
|
| We make speeding illegal even though even the most
| affordable cars can trivially bypass all speed
| restrictions. It doesn't mean that the efforts to curb
| speeding are in bad faith just because it is still possible
| to bypass speed reduction rules.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free
| and malware ridden ones
|
| It very much is not.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It very much is. Free VPNs almost always have some sort
| of catch. E.g. HolaVPN users agree in the ToS to become
| an exit node for other VPN users:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)
|
| If social media is so compelling, then teens almost
| certainly will take whatever steps are necessary to
| access it.
| yfw wrote:
| Because social media is so easy to cut out you dont need
| to ban it or its so addictive you do?
| noosphr wrote:
| Banning the printing press in Europe would have stopped the
| 30 years war.
|
| Somehow I don't think anyone here would approve of the long
| term consequences.
|
| The end result of this will be that everyone needs to give
| their real name and address to view social media.
|
| Anything you say or watch that the current government doesn't
| like will result in police coming for a chat.
| treis wrote:
| It's not that the people don't genuinely believe what they're
| saying. It's that they've deluded themselves into thinking
| their ideological right is "for the kids".
|
| There's always been Reefer Madness sorts of people. Sex,
| Drugs, Rock and Roll, Video Games, DnD, Rap Music,
| Homosexuality, and on and on. Today it's half woke mind virus
| and half DEI (for lack of a better term). Most of the people
| that spout this stuff genuinely believe they're fighting for
| the kids.
| cess11 wrote:
| Whether intentional or not, one consequence of a success in
| this area would be to isolate older people from the views of
| young people and to stifle the younger generations influence on
| these communication media in the future.
|
| Personally I suspect these elderly people in powerful political
| positions to be quite afraid of kids, it wouldn't be the first
| time in history, but it's likely the first time they're this
| old and as alienated from younger generations as they are.
|
| Perhaps we're seeing patriarchal class societies mutate into
| primarily gerontocratical societies.
| Lendal wrote:
| I chuckled when I read that, when over-16 is considered
| elderly.
|
| What will we do when we no longer have the views of 14 year
| olds at our fingertips? Well, hopefully they will write their
| views down on notepaper, and in two years we'll hear all
| about it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're
| losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy
| positions,
|
| When Twitter added its location feature and it turned out that
| political accounts with millions of followers are run out of
| Pakistan or India you have to be crazy to still deny the scope
| of foreign influence that is exerted over social media.
|
| You see it with the rise in anti-semitism or Russia's explicit
| promotion of influencers targeting Western youth. Why on earth
| would we let our kids be brainwashed by foreign intelligence
| agencies? There is no reason to assume this is some "hidden
| agenda", this is as big of a public issue as the mental health
| of teenagers. The United States used to have media rules that
| limited foreign ownership in companies with a broadcasting
| license, and now 14 year olds get their political lessons
| straight from Moscow, it's ridiculous.
| feb012025 wrote:
| I would reject the notion that shifting public sentiment is a
| result of foreign influence campaigns, which is not to say it
| doesn't exist to an extent.
|
| I've seen plenty of real information, from non-anonymous
| American journalists that I'm certain are the largest factor
| in any sea-change amongst Americans.
|
| And despite the claim, I've yet to see solid evidence of
| large, pakistan-based accounts wielding massive influence on
| twitter. Most anonymous accounts that focus on current events
| tend to be located in America, Europe, or Canada from what
| I've seen.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| To be fair, "anti-semitism" claims have been 90% bad faith.
| Gaza was the internet's Vietnam.
|
| We got just as mad at the internet letting our citizens at
| home see the brutality as we did with Jane Fonda and calling
| her "Hanoi Jane" after she traveled to Vietnam to bring light
| to the conflict(not a war).
|
| I don't think there's any merit in being upset at dead
| children being reported because it messes with our national
| security goals. If the goals don't have public support with
| truthful reporting, they're basically illegitimate.
| realityloop wrote:
| All the ban does is stop kids from having accounts, if the
| service allows anonymous usage then they can still find
| somewhere to doom scroll. My teen son has been blocked from
| Snapchat, and was this evening doom scrolling on Tik Tok until
| I blocked it on our home network.
| Extropy_ wrote:
| I'm curious to understand why your approach to TikTok is
| banning it. Why do you think this is the right solution? Are
| you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope
| independently from oversight and control?
| rwmj wrote:
| I'm actually glad to read about a parent taking
| responsibility. There's nothing important about Tiktok that
| won't wait until the child is 16/18.
| realityloop wrote:
| No, it's that he will spend hours doom scrolling whatever
| they feed to him.. I've tried to lead him down a path of
| watching more educational stuff on YouTube but he will just
| end up doom scrolling shorts.. I'm trying to figure out
| ways to enable him access but not have him waste hours with
| shorts.. I know there must be short form content that's
| good but I've not seen any evidence watching over his
| shoulder.. I block shorts on YouTube for myself even.. at
| this point the best I can think of is allowing access in
| short windows of time with longer chunks of blocked
| access.. if anyone has ideas I'd love to hear them.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Short-form content (if you can call it that) is a weapon
| of mass attention span destruction. IMHO the doom-
| scrolling loop it creates should be illegal, regardless
| of the audience.
| realityloop wrote:
| 100% It's this that I have the problem with TBH.. not
| using services per sae
| awesome_dude wrote:
| Serious question: Do you now have, or have you ever had,
| children to raise?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of
| the last step.
|
| I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to
| the kid, or more intermediate steps.
|
| > Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope
| independently from oversight and control?
|
| Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very
| hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to
| give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world
| that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or
| hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate
| them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok
| the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any
| number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to
| handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for
| most. With other things like sports, we know that there is
| the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated
| and the benefits far outweigh the risks.
| Sevrene wrote:
| I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where
| the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent
| content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this
| content is packaged up to them and commodified.
|
| These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax
| Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral
| obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or
| seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent
| the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of
| content.
|
| Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it
| is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but
| the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping
| children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says
| this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we
| shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.
|
| If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were
| introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID
| requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were
| eerily similar. We haven't changed much in that regard, but now
| people wear seatbelts, children can't buy cigarettes as easily
| as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think
| these are noble goals.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws
| were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when
| ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against
| were eerily similar._
|
| If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like
| you haven't really been listening to the arguments against
| these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
|
| I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think
| there are some very stark differences.
| Sevrene wrote:
| >I feel like you haven't really been listening to the
| arguments against these types of age-verification-for-
| websites laws.
|
| Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because
| I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no
| stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are
| important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom
| should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for
| these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites
| have become, not how uninformed I am.
|
| > I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think
| there are some very stark differences.
|
| Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to
| imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong
| simply because people in the past were, but it does make me
| think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.
|
| Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an
| example, the question isn't "should we have all or no
| freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have
| valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle
| somewhere in the middle.
|
| Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers
| in UK (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_tqQYmgMQg
| jfindper wrote:
| > _" Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to
| you?"_
|
| Whatever your conclusion is, it's sort of beside the
| point I was making, which is that the many of the
| arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol)
| are meaningfully different than the arguments being made
| today about age verification for websites.
|
| >" _So if I 'm for these laws, consider that a sign of
| how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I
| am._"
|
| This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first
| comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these
| types of laws aren't based on the premise that these
| sites aren't bad. I haven't seen anyone saying that
| TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.
|
| I'm saying that the main arguments are different. I am
| suggesting that there are more differences between the
| seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites
| debate than there are similarities. Which is why I
| thought your comment of "eerily similar" was off-base.
| palata wrote:
| So you're using many, many words to say that you
| disagree, and none of them to explain how you disagree?
|
| I (not the person you're disagreeing with, BTW) would be
| interested in your demonstration of how you disagree.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| My takeaway is that jfindper is saying that seatbelt laws
| had a justification that does not have a parallel with
| this action regarding social media.
|
| IDK if this is how they would say it, but I think
| argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum
| disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other
| rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty
| unambiguous.
|
| The idea that I have to give up privacy, expose myself to
| additional risk (by having my identity logged), increase
| the chances that mentally susceptible people will have
| more exposure to fraud in order to get a solution that is
| not clear on how effective it will be makes the parallel
| a bit academic, if not an out right straw man.
| Sevrene wrote:
| They are different laws with different contexts but the
| type of rhetoric and logic used to justify them are very
| similar, right? I already agreed they are not 1:1 nore
| was it meant to be. I agree with you there. If there's a
| more specific point you want to make, I'm keen to hear
| it!
|
| > the arguments against these types of laws aren't based
| on the premise that these sites aren't bad. I haven't
| seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost
| everyone agrees there.
|
| There's people in this thread talking about jews being
| behind this ban to ensure zionism continues, using only a
| social media agitprop post to justify it. We are in the
| mud at the moment, so I'm sorry but I'm not taking that
| for granted, people have diverse views.
|
| > I'm saying that the main arguments are different. I am
| suggesting that there are more differences between the
| seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites
| debate than there are similarities.
|
| Let me try explain this figuratively:
|
| A doctor might give free care to someone in a medical
| emergency on a plane after all they have an ethical
| responsiblity to do so if they can, but that doesn't mean
| they're obliged to care about your canker sore.
|
| Now imagine a doctor not treating one or the other
| because "It's not that serious". It's the extent of the
| harm or risk that actually indicates how insane or sane
| that doctor's response is, just as much as the doctors
| actually response to it is.
|
| We can sit here and say "yeah it's not that serious" but
| one patient is dying and another basically fine. Just
| like those people that thought drink driving wasn't that
| big of a deal, people think social media "oh yeah that's
| bad but what you going to do", it's the same shrug and
| 'oh well' attitude. That's what I think is eerlie
| similar. Now whether or not that's appropiate or not
| depends on whether you think the patient is having a
| heart attack, or just has a sore lip.
|
| I do agree people aren't generally saying TikTok is good,
| but people are saying TikTok isn't so bad as to regulate
| age verification. Do you see how these things play into
| each other?
| colordrops wrote:
| > I don't think we should normalise children on platforms
| where the content contains political agitation, sexual and
| violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially
| when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
|
| This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the
| person you are replying to said.
| biophysboy wrote:
| The original comment suggests that the policy is
| politically motivated. The commenter replied with other
| reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I
| think its a valid response.
|
| I also don't buy the implied claim from the original
| commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive
| with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech
| platforms control political thought/speech on a regular
| basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in
| the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by
| nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.
| colordrops wrote:
| No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which
| states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban
| is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the
| point.
|
| Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct
| in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for
| these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about
| this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter,
| went viral recently about how social media needs to be
| banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist
| movement.
|
| https://x.com/jennineak/status/1992395176283922767
| biophysboy wrote:
| The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does
| not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense
| that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens
| without social media, given their actions over the past
| few years.
| Sevrene wrote:
| I think this is a bit of a conspiracy colordrops,
| honestly. It's the same sort of stuff as on Infowars.
| colordrops wrote:
| Is that all you got? Ad hominem?
| Sevrene wrote:
| No sorry it wasn't a dig at you: the video was posted by
| someone who appears on Alex Jones' Infowars, talks jewish
| conspiracies. I just don't take that stuff seriously,
| doesn't make it wrong and if there's an argument you want
| to make I'll listen.
| Sevrene wrote:
| > 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with
| preventing harms"
|
| > 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent
| them"
|
| Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're
| being a too obtuse here, especially when the original
| person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them"
| (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good
| faith discussion of our opinions.
|
| > This may be true
|
| Do you think it's true?
| yfw wrote:
| If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms
| moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of
| favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread
| misinformation
| fizwidget wrote:
| The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party,
| which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If
| it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won't have been
| deliberate.
| joahua wrote:
| Murdoch media killed a story critical of Labor government
| member so there is not _no_ evidence of support here.
|
| https://archive.is/Hlr4l
| yfw wrote:
| You mean this guy?
| https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/08/29/albanese-murdoch-
| meetin...
| biophysboy wrote:
| The traditional outlets you are referring to are now worse
| _because_ of social media.
| bdangubic wrote:
| nothing is worse than social media - absolutely nothing
| Sevrene wrote:
| I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media
| than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all
| over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from
| social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.
|
| Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the
| landscape of social media provides.
|
| I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This
| legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about
| the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all
| ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies:
| "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your
| platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if
| it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you
| get there that has the contention).
| Hizonner wrote:
| > I don't think we should normalise children on platforms
| where the content contains political agitation, sexual and
| violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.
|
| You mean like the outside world?
|
| What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach
| whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still
| with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to
| lose?
|
| I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very
| many parents, worrying about doing much to actually _prepare
| anybody for adulthood_. It 's always about protection, never
| about helping them become competent, independent human
| beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at
| least they think it is... whereas preparation requires
| actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking,
| and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions
| about your own ideas.
|
| ... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from
| _politics_? We used to call that "civics class".
| roguecoder wrote:
| If your children are being exposed to sexual and violent
| content in the real world, that is called an "Adverse
| Childhood Experience" and it is predictive of everything
| from poor adult earnings to heart disease:
| https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
| pizza wrote:
| The platform operators have a responsibility to remove
| garbage from their site. I don't see how it's better if
| adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I
| definitely don't see how the platform operators are going to
| clean up their act if -- rather than being penalized -- they
| can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air
| because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de
| jure disappeared.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients
| of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still
| not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds
| for when people have some capacity to take responsibility
| for their choices.
|
| Not saying those thresholds are always right and should
| definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien
| or non-obvious concept.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding
| what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this
| stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
|
| The second problem is that the medium itself _is_ garbage.
| Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and
| sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the
| dynamic.
| dlisboa wrote:
| So, do absolutely nothing is your plan?
| behringer wrote:
| Yes. The internet is awesome and the government will
| destroy it.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just
| delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind
| of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_
| behringer wrote:
| genocides are happening online? That's pretty remarkable.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to
| do. Not everything can be improved through top-down
| intervention, and many things can only be made worse.
|
| The comment you're replying to raised the idea of
| empowering the users. That's probably the way to look,
| but the danger is always if we do that using top down
| enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm,
| including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
|
| My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA
| was our original sin. The Internet was better when it
| wasn't divided into a few centrally managed private
| social media silos. It's better to have a vibrant, messy,
| competitive, and very grass roots public square.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that?
|
| There is also the problem that making platforms responsible
| for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted
| political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in
| the field, which is also very undesireable.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > rather than being penalized
|
| The problem is, currently doing any kind of content
| filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and
| having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the
| noisy fuckers brigade.
|
| If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16
| year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds,
| offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage
| the children to hide away from their parents as they watch.
| it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good"
| content I put in there.
|
| People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that
| age to such things.
|
| Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.
|
| The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them
| smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is
| because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able
| to live a long an illustrious life as _part of society_.
|
| Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait,
| and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people
| _in america_ seems somewhat misguided.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm glad when I was a teenager the adults in my life were
| less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought. Are
| modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of
| information than adults, I wonder.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Where did you grow up? Because America in the 80s was all
| about shutting teenagers out of violent video games and
| music with naughty words.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I grew up in DC in the 21st century.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Things used to be more scrutinized. e.g. look at the
| Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and
| legal fallout over sexual content that existed in the
| game data files but could only be accessed by modding the
| game, at which point you could just mod the content in.
| Porn websites also used to generally put anything
| explicit behind a credit card barrier, and there was an
| attempt to require that that the supreme court struck
| down.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less
| concerned with protecting me from wrongthought
|
| V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf
| magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed,
| censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the
| living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)
|
| All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just
| that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a
| person's social/sexual education being shaped by
| misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for
| themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All
| for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
|
| > Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers
| of information than adults, I wonder.
|
| The first example of something that you see is normally a
| big opinion former. If you see the local big city
| constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to
| stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the
| utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the
| time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough
| through school to develop research skills, or critical
| thinking skills.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just
| that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a
| person's social/sexual education being shaped by
| misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for
| themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All
| for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
|
| Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet
| and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased.
| "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from
| the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.
|
| None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the
| same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet.
| I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant
| in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.
|
| The answer to my question is that teenagers today are
| obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives
| and you can see this every time you interact with older
| adults.
| 9dev wrote:
| It's not about wrongthought, but manipulation and
| deception, blended with advertisements exploiting child
| psychology, coupled with peer pressure.
| roguecoder wrote:
| In America, we haven't made it illegal to assault
| children. We should, but we haven't.
| paganel wrote:
| > I don't think we should normalise children on platforms
| where the content contains political agitation
|
| Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults?
| I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after
| Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do
| very well remember all the political news and commentary
| coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it
| bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult
| world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a
| little bit later on.
|
| I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make
| me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV
| satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the
| early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I
| turned out ok.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| There's hardly any parallel between the type of political
| content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and
| what's found in today's social media. It's not political
| commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered
| manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial
| behaviour.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all
| types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small
| examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people.
| It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at
| least have brains that are fully-developed.
|
| Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social
| media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is
| mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes
| online that I agree with, most of the content online is
| deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.
| nemomarx wrote:
| You can guess exactly how authorities would define
| "political agitation", though. dangerous things to allow
| them to ban.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I don't think we should allow the government to ban
| political agitation, but I do think its fine to allow the
| government to ban children using social media
| Sevrene wrote:
| Small things I want to add or say:
|
| - It's not young adults, it's 15 and under. Personally I
| would classify 17-20something as young adult (it's a bit
| subjective isn't it).
|
| - The younger children don't really care about politics
| honestly. Curious if you have an age that you're ok with
| only ensuring irl politics for children? I think age to
| vote is a much bigger concern for me here in terms of civil
| liberties.
|
| - Parents can still make that choice for their child
| (unclear how this will work to me yet, to be fair).
|
| - I've become convinced no one really practises 'politics'
| online. People barely even debate anymore. They argue, they
| perform activism, they aggitate, its what gets attention
| (thanks to social media). I'm worried people think this is
| normal, it's not- political discourse used to be much more
| productive. I remember when fallacies were actually brought
| up logically on the internet and people actually cared
| about the accusation.
|
| - I did explicit rp with adults as 7 year old on MSN
| chatrooms back in the day :')
| plantain wrote:
| > These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian
| Tax Office) brings in a year.
|
| From their users in Australia? Clearly not.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like
| big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing
| or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the
| only way they'll understand.
| xethos wrote:
| > I don't think we should normalise children on platforms
| where the content contains political agitation, sexual and
| violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially
| when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
|
| I hope we can agree that allowing every social media site to
| devolve into the above is the bigger problem. There can be
| some places that are adults-only; just like reality though,
| the world is better when open-by-default, with some places
| gated to adults-only.
|
| Shifting focus to "Why are we letting some of the most
| profitable companies the world has ever seen get away with
| being a cesspit?" lets us keep kids safe by default, doesn't
| attack E2EE, and doesn't default to the internet becoming a
| surveillance state.
|
| If we start by getting Facebook and Twitter (et al.) to clean
| up their acts, we can all work, yell, and _vote_ together,
| instead of some yelling about their kids being shown
| unexpected pornography, and others yelling about the internet
| becoming a surveillance state.
|
| Because both can be real concerns - but a starter solution
| can get the vast majority of voters on-board, and garner real
| progress, instead of giving Facebook more data and control,
| or governments a turn-key dictatorship.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I don't think we've shown that that cleanup is possible.
|
| Whenever platforms have taken even the smallest steps in
| that direction, the right-wing authoritarian political
| parties freak out and blackmail them into stopping, or in
| the case of Musk simply buy them out outright.
| whompyjaw wrote:
| Maybe. Do you forget that people use to not have phones or
| social media and they still had independent thought? Just
| because kids aren't introduced to videos and comments about
| politics at a young age, doesn't mean they're going to be
| brainwashed by the ruling government. Societies operated just
| the same before social media.
|
| Edit: Dont get me wrong, there could be ulterior motives, but
| kids will have other ways to educate themselves on the
| happenings of the world beside social media
| mbix77 wrote:
| Maybe they will use more common sense then getting manipulated
| by bot farms.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Meta == Phillip Morris - This is a public health issue and will
| likely need to be treated like tobacco. Kids can't vote so I
| don't see the political motivation.
| josho wrote:
| Good analogy.
|
| The solution, however, isn't prohibition or age restrictions;
| it's either regulating the algorithms or holding these
| companies responsible for the adverse outcomes their
| platforms contribute to. Safe harbor laws made sense when
| tech wasn't filtering/promoting content, now that they are
| influencing the material we see, these laws must no longer
| apply.
|
| This may mean adopting a modern equivalent to libel laws.
| Something akin to: if an algorithm pushes false information,
| the company behind the algorithm can be sued for harm.
| Disallow terms of service that force arbitration or cap
| liability limits.
| thfuran wrote:
| I think the solution is banning accepting compensation for
| third party advertising.
| qu4z-2 wrote:
| I know all the reasons it "wouldn't work", but I'd love
| to see somewhere try this.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| They'll vote eventually, and preferably won't be damaged in
| irreparable ways by then
| lisbbb wrote:
| I just can't get behind any of it, sorry. The puritanical
| moralizing feels so good until you cause a revolution or the
| species goes extinct.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Any of it? You can't get behind cigarette bans for kids?
| roguecoder wrote:
| Social media has caused at least two genocides so far, and
| their data centers and AI slop are helping drive us towards
| an earth incapable of supporting human life.
|
| So what you are describing is just the base case.
| cmxch wrote:
| Handwaving "public health" doesn't make it so.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Suppressing the evidence of it doesn't make it not so:
| https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/meta-project-mercury-
| sh...
| roguecoder wrote:
| That makes me wonder, if only teenagers could vote would they
| ban adults from social media?
| lawlessone wrote:
| Just my anecdote addled opinion but i seems like most of the
| people being mentally "cooked" by social media are in their
| 30's ,my generation, and up to maybe late 60's.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| There's no motive other than "easy politicial win". The kids
| aren't gonna vote against you (they don't vote), parents will
| vote for you, you get to show people you protected children and
| passed legislation. Politicians support anything that keeps
| them in votes and campaign contributions.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| A conspiracy theory? This time of the year? In New
| hampshire????
|
| Apologies, you might be right, you might not, but unless you
| have some actual evidence you might as well be saying "The Moon
| landing was a Hoax"
| gspencley wrote:
| In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally
| allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that
| working out?
|
| The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with
| government mandated age verification. Few people want that as
| it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively
| makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.
| oblio wrote:
| It could be designed to be anonymous.
|
| Government runs authentication service that has your personal
| details.
|
| User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks
| government service if your age is >18, service says y/n.
| Platform never finds out your personal details.
|
| OAuth for age verification.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The government still knows your identity in this scenario,
| so it's a pretty limited form of anonymity (i.e. only
| suitable for activities the government isn't hostile to)
| oblio wrote:
| I know Americans don't want to hear this, but once the
| government turns hostile, internet anonymity won't save
| you, just like how guns won't save you (hello propaganda
| and a large and very active brainwashed minority that
| also has guns).
|
| The only thing saving you from a hostile government is a
| well educated populace that really wants democracy and is
| willing to fight for it (through constant activism,
| peaceful & other types of protests). This is where many
| democracies are failing now. No amount of technology or
| rules can replace large amounts of constantly vigilant
| eyes that understand how democracy is subverted.
|
| I would rather optimize for not giving companies too much
| power and end up with a Kafkaesque patchwork of corporate
| abuses and regulatory captures.
| tim-- wrote:
| Can't you just put a middle man on there then? Get a non-
| profit organisation like Mozilla to ask the govt. on
| behalf of the user.
|
| The organisation asks the govt, and gives back a signed
| token.
|
| The the only thing the government knows is that an age
| verification was requested. Once verification has been
| done once for one site, it can be used for future
| verifications.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| The government then knows all the services you use. No
| bueno.
|
| There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but
| you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do
| some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.
| osn9363739 wrote:
| Let's be real. Unless you're putting in the effort, the
| government already knows. Especially so on the sites
| listed in this ban.
| padjo wrote:
| Some concerns: - government gets a list of every website
| that requests your age - every website has to register with
| the government to initiate age verification checks
|
| Which pretty much puts an end to any notion of an open
| internet. But maybe a system I prefer to one where a bunch
| of random startups have my age verification biometrics .
| Froztnova wrote:
| Would zero knowledge proofs work here? I'm not enough of a
| cryptography nerd so I don't know if it would be a
| practical use-case.
| thfuran wrote:
| >The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with
| government mandated age verification
|
| Yes, that's what they did.
| lisbbb wrote:
| I don't see the danger of pornography, tbh. Oh, much of it is
| sick, sure, but violent video games are far more harmful.
| Would it be better to depict loving, caring relationships?
| Hell, yes! But there are so few of those these days.
|
| My teenage son struggles to have any meaningful dialog with
| any of the girls his age. It's like he doesn't exist. The few
| kids who are "dating" is basically the exact scenario that
| MGTOW depicts--girls only go for the elite jocks and ignore
| everyone else like they don't even exist. Everyone is
| miserable. Many will eventually grow out of it, but I don't
| think the females will ever view themselves as doing anything
| but "settling" because of the nonsense programmed into their
| heads. And yes, social media is largely responsible for how
| extreme the situation has become. In the 90s, girls were
| picky, but nothing like now. So all that young men have left
| is like AI chatbots and porn and it's better to not take that
| away from them, too.
| triceratops wrote:
| The insistence on _perfect_ age verification requires ending
| anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes
| or booze does not.
|
| Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-
| use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social
| media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are
| locked out.
|
| In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer
| despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a
| code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a
| minor.
| pryce wrote:
| > Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a
| single-use token, good for one year, and access your
| favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...
|
| Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is
| maintained by this scenario...?
|
| The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is
| hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to
| acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat
| ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple
| times
|
| So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone
| creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the
| use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution
| as though they've sufficiently thought about the people
| affected and the harms involved.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is
| maintained by this scenario...?
|
| Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a
| surveillance database, one or two people that are
| probably going to forget immediately"?
|
| > The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is
| hazardous for a good chunk of people
|
| What chunk of people?
|
| Are you trying to imply that this chunk includes women in
| general? It's really easy to find random women without
| looking at an ID. If this is about addresses, anyone
| taking actions based on "a woman probably lives here" has
| about the same effect as picking houses at random.
| pryce wrote:
| > Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a
| surveillance database"
|
| No, instead she is likely to avoid talking in
| abstractions and instead talk about personal experiences
| of getting stalked online by multiple people she has had
| to show her details to in the past, who may include
| storekeeps, police, university staff, etc, etc. Eva
| Galperin is an excellent source on the way many of our
| procedures are designed in ways that do not at all
| account for the potential of stalking and harassment,
| though her focus is on how this continues to unfold in
| the technology space.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| It's also a massive propaganda channel. We can argue about
| whether any one particular state is involved in that or not but
| gut reaction is that if this were the real concern, their
| solution would be to regulate and censor what is posted online
| rather than kicking them off the platform and thus detaching
| them from the teat of (alleged) indoctrination. (that push for
| censorship also exists).
|
| Maybe Australia and the US are not involved in any social media
| propaganda campaigns but, at least in the case of the US, there
| is most certainly an abundance of precedence.
|
| I don't know the sincere feelings of these types wrt the safety
| and well-being of children but I don't think the goal is
| "getting them back" wrt policy or whatever.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > It's also a massive propaganda channel.
|
| The problem is that school curriculum is as well. I remember
| going to school in Texas and hearing the phrase "Northern War
| of Aggression" to describe the Civil War.
|
| Censorship is never about cutting off information, it's only
| ever about cutting off information that the censors don't
| like. Given how openly hostile both AU and the US's
| governments are to progressive politics and worldviews, I am
| dubious that this isn't about controlling kids' access to a
| more open view of the world than their schools will give
| them.
| bamboozled wrote:
| The Australian government isn't banning books. It's banning
| access to harmful content for people under 16.
|
| One morning I logged into Reddit and saw a video of Charlie
| Kirk get his head blown off. I didn't want to see that, but
| for some reason it wasn't taken down yet. I'm really glad
| my 12 year old daughter didn't have to see that...
| papichulo4 wrote:
| Why does the motivation matter so much? It's not a global ban,
| it's not a permanent ban, nobody is going to jail. It's like
| seeing if moving the smoking age to 18 will improve health
| outcomes.
|
| It's ruining their lives as far as we can tell, and at the end
| of the day it's just one country testing it out. It'll be
| stastically significant, culturally close enough of a sample
| set for us to learn from.
|
| I'm curious to see what the 1-2-3 year effects are. We need to
| let some real life experimentation happen, somewhere, instead
| of accepting what every conglomerate wants.
|
| I get that "it's easy to say" for me as someone completely
| unaffected by this law.
|
| The study that was posted last week regarding at school banning
| of phones was enlightening. It improved scores within two years
| after a bit of resistance. Boom!
|
| I want them to have a chance at being healthy and well-
| educated; we can't stop teens from smoking altogether but we
| can sure limit their access by default.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Don't you know this is the end of democracy as we know it
| because kids can't easily look at toxic content online
| anymore ?
| stevage wrote:
| > We've been hearing politicians complain for years that
| they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign
| policy positions
|
| I have literally never heard this.
|
| The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like
| tik tok. Your argument seems like quite a stretch.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content
| like tik tok.
|
| That is _exactly_ what the ban aims to do? TikTok is
| literally listed in the article as one of the platforms
| ordered to ban access by under-16s
| XorNot wrote:
| The ban is on having an account. Tiktok video is publicly
| viewable.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Tiktok video is publicly viewable
|
| Is it still publicly viewable without age verification in
| Australia? It's a little unclear from TFA whether the ban
| is purely on account creation, or also applies to
| viewing.
| XorNot wrote:
| I'm in Australia on a phone without VPN and do not have a
| Tiktok account: googling "Tiktok" just now direct linked
| me to Tiktok's Web app and started auto playing.
|
| AFAIK this is strictly on having an account.
| feb012025 wrote:
| I'm very surprised you've never heard anything like this.
|
| Here's Hillary Clinton onstage a week ago:
| https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1995961131215847749
| observationist wrote:
| It's four horsemen of the infocalypse 101. Look at the
| platforms they allowed to continue - discord and roblox, the
| specific worst of all socials with the most predators, least
| effective countermeasures.
|
| The purpose of a thing is what it does. Australia's policies do
| not protect children. They quite brazenly and blatantly leave
| children vulnerable and exploited. The question of what those
| actions accomplish has a simple answer - narrative control,
| censorship, and weaponization of public discourse against
| dissent.
|
| The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want
| the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family
| environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence
| and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing,
| negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families
| are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education
| and more information.
|
| None of the policy Australia crafted does anything good. It's
| just another power grab using "won't you think of the
| children?!" as the excuse. Next year it will be terrorism or
| drugs or money laundering, and they'll keep constricting around
| civil liberties until they have absolute control.
|
| They'll also put various racial and ethnic officials in
| prominent positions, so that you may not criticize anything
| lest you be deemed a racist or bigot (super effective social
| engineering.)
| vablings wrote:
| > The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you
| want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving
| family environments, empower a culture of resilience and
| competence and capability, impose accountability for
| wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers
| and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is
| better education and more information.
|
| This is just complete bullshit. Ah yes, my solution to this
| problem is just to require every single family to be
| infinitely better in every way imaginable. What is the
| proposal if that can't happen? We just execute people who
| don't meet the "stable loving family environment" No doubt in
| my mind you are from the generation of a stiff upper lip
| observationist wrote:
| You fix it with better culture. You don't throw away your
| principles and liberties because "bad things are happening
| to children, quick, burn the system down!"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocaly
| p...
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a
| good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with
| socialization.
|
| I mean... you can say that about most of things in life. Behind
| every social movement or policy, it's always a mix of good
| faith, cynical fearmongering, and opportunism by people or
| organizations who stand to gain something from it. Does it
| matter?
|
| If you think that social media and smartphones are harmful to
| the youth, you (a) should probably be glad that someone is
| doing something decisive about it; and (b) you get a large-
| scale experiment that will hopefully prove or disprove that.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This is an extremely unethical experiment.
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| Non-American countries are also importing a lot of American
| politics. I'd rather that didn't happen and is alone worthy of
| curbing in my opinion.
| dalemhurley wrote:
| Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan
| support and the Labor government has a significant share of the
| young voters who are over 18.
| bdangubic wrote:
| unfortunately there is _nothing_ we can do in any society
| without seeing comments like this... whatever "move" is done
| comments like this will be there with endless "analysis" about
| "motivation" for the move... it is what it is...
| feb012025 wrote:
| The nature of democracy and open dialogue I suppose.
|
| But really, when banning a large portion of the population
| from social media, political motives should absolutely be
| entertained. Politics is inextricably related to social media
| in 2025
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I think adults are barely able to take reasoned political
| positions in today's online environment, but at least an adult
| has the experience to make the attempt. Exposing kids to the
| type of online political persuasion we have today means that we
| are exposing them to something they have not got the tools to
| navigate. They just get swept up into whatever the popular idea
| of the day happens to be. To me, the argument that separating
| kids from social media separates them from today's political
| onslaught is one of the best arguments in favor of it.
| gary_0 wrote:
| This worldwide push for online ID verification is _absolutely_
| not in good faith, and I 'm shocked at how few people on
| "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on
| 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling _those_ folks they 'd have
| to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep
| using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this
| Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
| serial_dev wrote:
| But think of the children! Or the terrorist! Or communists!
| Whichever makes you accept the surveillance state.
| gary_0 wrote:
| The nanny-state control freaks used "think of the children"
| so often over the years that it became a meme, and yet here
| we are. What a workhorse!
| bamboozled wrote:
| America had all the access to free information and voted in
| an authoritarian anyway so what's it matter ?
|
| I don't care anymore about this emotive argument that you're
| putting forward. The government knows everything about you
| because you pay for internet. Maybe you pretend to yourself
| you're someone anonymous because you use a VPN but if they
| want to know who you are, they know.
|
| At least maybe this ban will stop some of the idiocy bleeding
| into the next generation.
| XorNot wrote:
| The policy has like 70% popular support.
|
| "What are they _really_ doing? " is a stupid conspiracy brained
| question: trying to win the next election obviously and
| whatever you may think, representing the electorate.
|
| (I hate the policy personally)
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a
| political or commercial context, but it should not be the only
| one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the
| motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.
|
| I get the sense this is supposed to signify something; don't
| know the name, but looking at their profile, great career,
| Obama's chief of staff. What's the implication?
| solumunus wrote:
| I think not letting children get barraged with misinformation
| and foreign propaganda might help them.
| pryce wrote:
| The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an
| organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard
| Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts
| to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content
|
| I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding
| harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of
| social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a
| benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the
| solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful
| effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous
| work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
| msuniverse2026 wrote:
| That is just a thought-stopping reference. Why does this
| literal nobody who nobody has to listen to have the total
| backing of both major political parties? That is the real
| question and it obviously goes back to narrative control and
| the move from democracy to an authoritarian managerial state.
| pryce wrote:
| moral panics are useful for creating authoritarian states.
| If a moral panic is not presently available, in 2025 it may
| be easier it's ever been before to cultivate one.
| immibis wrote:
| ?Por que no los dos?
|
| Current social media is _terrible_ for children (and everyone,
| but we let adults drink and smoke) - this is known. They 've
| been told many times they need to change or they'll get banned.
| They have not. This is known. It reminds me a little of when
| Australia banned Amazon because Amazon refused to charge GST
| (their version of VAT or sales tax).
|
| The surveillance part is about adults having to upload their
| identity. This concern is entirely separate from the part where
| children are banned.
| endgame wrote:
| Of course they aren't. If they were actually helping kids, they
| would be going after algorithmic feeds in general and the most
| predatory platforms like Roblox (especially given its recent
| scandals), doing something about kids being exposed to gambling
| advertising, etc.
|
| The bill was put up for public comment for less than one
| business day before being rammed through Parliament. Australia
| is just sending out one of the horsemen of the infocalypse so
| that other countries have an excuse to follow suit. Like how
| our "Assistance And Access" Act was a test run of the UK's
| "snooper's charter".
|
| This law will just lead to:
|
| 1. kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these
| filters
|
| 2. platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts
| since "children are banned anyway"
|
| 3. everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading
| ID (which will inevitably get leaked)
| palata wrote:
| > kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these
| filters
|
| The real question is: how hard does it make it for them to
| pretend to be adults? We just need it to be hard enough that
| most kids won't do it.
|
| > platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts
| since "children are banned anyway"
|
| If the law forces the platforms to properly ban children, I
| don't see how they can do that. If you're thinking that the
| platforms will just say "it's illegal for children to join,
| so we don't have to do anything because they shouldn't come
| in the first place", then I don't think the law is made like
| this.
|
| > everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading
| ID (which will inevitably get leaked)
|
| Some countries have been working on privacy-preserving age
| verification. I find it's a lot better than uploading an ID.
| Animats wrote:
| > We just need it to be hard enough that most kids won't do
| it.
|
| Silly though that sounds, it might work. Because it's
| social pressure from other kids to be online that drives
| many kids into being constantly on Instagram and Snapchat.
| If you're not online, you don't know what's going on. The
| big social networks monetize FOMO.
|
| If a sizable fraction of kids aren't on social media,
| that's not where it's happening any more. The pressure goes
| away. Or goes elsewhere.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Validating your comment.
|
| Freakonomics did a podcast about what you are describing.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-you-caught-in-a-
| social-...
| roguecoder wrote:
| Kids pretending to be adults know they are doing something
| wrong. They are likely to practice acting like adults, don't
| pressure each other to join, and are harder for predators to
| find.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| >going after algorithmic feeds
|
| This is such an older person take. Users really like
| Algorithmic feeds and see the removal of such a feature to be
| platform destroying. Cronological feeds are still easy to
| game and abuse.
|
| >predatory platforms like Roblox
|
| What makes roblox a predatory platform and what would you
| change to make it not a predatory platform? To me Roblox is a
| predatory platform because of the age group of people not
| because of the platform design.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The enemy (AUS) of my enemy (social media's effect on kids) is
| my friend (this ban). Their motivation is only mildly
| interesting.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| Australia is a huge contradiction.
|
| "Kids" are no longer old enough to use social media as they are
| "kids". At the same time Australia states are updating laws
| believing "kids" are old enough to be treated as and tried as
| adults in a court of law.
| girvo wrote:
| Indeed. We will stick them in prison, but they can't use
| social media. It's a farce.
| nextstep wrote:
| I don't think the US will ever enact a similar ban. The power
| to shape young minds is too great, even if these service also
| increase suicides in children to some degree.
|
| The same algorithms that showed IDF war crimes compilations and
| turned a generation against Israel can be reshaped to push a
| different, right-wing narrative. The David Ellison's of the
| world have too much power to allow regulation getting in the
| way of this.
| jimbokun wrote:
| TikTok is not going to make kids better informed about foreign
| policy.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the
| kids" unfortunately
|
| We don't need laws for most things, and yet we've built
| ourselves a society where everything is a law.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a
| good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with
| socialization.
|
| Really! My experience is quite the opposite. I see a lot of
| people explaining why it's a bad idea.
| xedrac wrote:
| Both can be true. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the
| consequences? I'm of the opinion that parents need to help
| regulate teen exposure, not the government. It does feel a bit
| like censorship.
| epolanski wrote:
| > We've been hearing politicians complain for years that
| they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign
| policy positions, etc...
|
| What's the alternative? Going back to TV lying that Iraq has
| weapons of mass destruction and that in Libya there's a genuine
| rebellion against Gaddafi?
|
| I'd rather have multiple actors fighting to push their views on
| social to be honest.
|
| I also don't like how quick is social media to jump on
| labelling anybody with a different opinion as a troll or a bot.
| This is especially common on Reddit where basically every
| single subreddit is heavily biased in some direction, heavily
| moderated to push some views and some views only.
|
| Instead, what we should teach in school is how to treat news
| (any news really, even your friend telling you he's got a
| Playstation 7 but he can't show it to you): questioning it,
| verifying the sources, questioning the possible motives and
| biases of the source.
|
| I'll be frank: I didn't mind Russia pushing their own news
| through channels like Russia Today globally. I always thought
| it was very important to get the views of the other side.
|
| But my view also requires my (normal to me) attitude: question,
| question, question, verify.
|
| Problem is: it's hard, it's exhausting. Claiming something
| false takes 5 seconds, debunking it can take hours. Most people
| already got their problems, and just don't do any of it.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| > they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing
| foreign policy positions
|
| It's well known that foreign actors are all over social and
| that the west's foreign policy is (rightly so!) hostile to
| them.
| aus_throwaway wrote:
| The Australian government didn't do this because of any concern
| about children; it's to punish (mainly) Meta for backing out of
| the Australian Social Media Bargaining Agreement [1]. Other
| social media companies are collateral damage.
|
| News Corp wanted Meta et al to pay for the privilege of sharing
| links to News Corp articles (imo, ridiculous). Meta played
| along for a short period, but has now refused to engage, which
| has clearly upset News Corp (and their shrinking top line).
| It's slowly changing, but it's an unfortunate truth that News
| Corp still has incredible influence over Australian
| politicians, hence this had bipartisan support.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/12/meta-
| coul...
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a
| good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with
| socialization.
|
| Most Australian schools banned phones a while ago. Attempts
| were made to measure the outcome. For example, South Australia
| saw a 72% drop in phone-related issues and 80.5% fall in social
| media problems in early 2025 compared to 2023 [0]. Other states
| reported similar results. These early figures are a little
| rubbery, but overall look very good. The social media ban is in
| part a response to that success.
|
| The only major concern I have is de-anonymization of the web.
| It's worse than just de-anonymization. They've opened the gate
| for organisations like Facebook to demand government ID, like
| say a photo of a drivers licence. It contains a whole pile of
| info these data vultures would like to get their hands on, like
| your actual date of birth and residential address.
|
| The sad bit is I doubt de-anonymization was goal, in fact I
| doubt they put much thought into that aspect of all. If it was
| the goal there far more effective ways of going about given the
| corporations permission to "collect whatever data you need to
| make it work". They could have implemented a zero knowledge
| proof of age service. But given the track record of their other
| computer projects, a realistic assessment is it had near zero
| chance of being implemented at all, let alone on time and on
| budget.
|
| But if they had of insisted the providers implemented some sort
| of ZKP themselves, I would have found it hard to argue against
| given the past experience in schools.
|
| [0] https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/school-behaviour-
| im...
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Future generation of hackers.
| macic wrote:
| Just what we need, even more government censorship.
| amatecha wrote:
| Saw a screenshot last night of someone who can't get into JIRA
| (or some other Atlassian product) until they either submit two
| forms of government ID or record a face scan. Seems like a great
| and effective initiative /s
|
| Text of the screen:
|
| "Your Atlassian account is not age verified.
|
| Laws in your country require us to verify your age before
| accessing some products, including Jira and Confluence. This
| process takes 5-10 minutes. This can be done using two pieces of
| government ID or by performing a face scan."
| systemtest wrote:
| Sounds like a great excuse to not have to partake in office BS.
| plantain wrote:
| No Atlassian products are included in the ban. I think you have
| seen a joke.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| You can view your own tickets but the scrum board and comment
| sections dont work.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| Been seeing ads all over NYC for a teen edition of Instagram.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Age verification, digital IDs and no more anonimity... coming
| soon to your country too!
| artur44 wrote:
| Honestly, this feels like another case where the headline sounds
| bold, but the real impact will be minimal. Any age-based
| restriction ends up in the same place: platforms are forced to
| collect more data just to "prove" someone's age. When the target
| group is teenagers, that's basically a privacy disaster waiting
| to happen.
|
| From a technical perspective, this is impossible to enforce
| cleanly. Anyone with even basic internet literacy can bypass it
| with a VPN + fresh account + throwaway email. And of course, the
| teens most determined to get around it will be the ones the
| policy is supposedly protecting. The bigger issue is the false
| sense of security. Parents and politicians get to feel like
| something has been "done," while the actual online risks don't
| disappear -- they just move somewhere less visible. If the goal
| is genuinely improving teen mental health, digital literacy and
| real support systems work far better than regulations that will
| inevitably leak.
| gen6acd60af wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208058
| taejavu wrote:
| What, because they used a single em--dash?
| artur44 wrote:
| Got it, thanks for pointing it out.
| miroljub wrote:
| The only appropriate comment here would be invoking Goodwin Law.
| Everything else is too mild to describe the journey of former
| democracies to totalitarian regimes.
| oersted wrote:
| Let's not go overboard. While I don't agree with this law, it's
| not much different from other underage laws that are
| commonplace: alcohol, tobacco, driving... I don't think it's an
| indicator of totalitarianism, it's just the same-old lawmaking
| philosophy updating to new developments.
| themk wrote:
| My personal favourite analogy is gambling. The constant
| microdosing of dopamine to get you to hang around and spend
| just a little more ~money~ attention.
| nexawave-ai wrote:
| All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
| wnevets wrote:
| The aussies are huge fans of big brother
| themk wrote:
| I thought Meta was "the Party".
| rpmisms wrote:
| Discord and Roblox exempted. This is a joke.
| robryan wrote:
| To include discord you have to extend it to messaging services.
| To include Roblox it should be all online games with chat.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| When I was a kid, online games with chat were a no-no. Most
| of the ones designed for kids specifically avoided having a
| chat feature aside from preset phrases, like Toon Town.
|
| Then of course by teens, most boys were in the notorious MW2
| lobbies.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Absolutely, Roblox should not exist given the problems it
| caused.
|
| Goes well beyond scamming kids to work for scrip. =3
| daedrdev wrote:
| Despite how little they pay their game devs, offering like
| 20% I think, Roblox itself continues to make a loss so there
| case that they are scamming their devlopers isn't the
| strongest
| poly2it wrote:
| Roblox is making a loss? How is this possible? I've always
| thought it was perfectly maximined.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Most their users are don't pay, their services are all
| hosted by themselves, development of tooling for games
| and the platform itself is costly, legal issues, etc.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Must be awkward discussing how "AI" is supposed to solve
| the Roblox "problems".
|
| GTFO, no kid under 16 should be on that platform
| unsupervised.
|
| The feds should have section 7 that firm years ago. =3
| barbazoo wrote:
| > This only protects 90% (made up number) of children so it's a
| joke.
| akersten wrote:
| To suggest this protects children at all is the real joke.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Are you saying there is no harm to children, especially
| girls using social media or are you saying it will not
| protect enough of them?
| akersten wrote:
| Correct, in fact I strongly assert the benefit of being
| able to communicate with a global audience and
| participate early in the information economy far
| outweighs any alleged and poorly-articulated harm from
| the same.
| justatdotin wrote:
| 'participate early in the information economy' is one way
| of putting it
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Exempting what in my experience are the places where children
| are the most likely to interact with strangers make it a
| joke.
| hedayet wrote:
| Controlling access to any substance is a long process, and the
| motives aren't always clear at the beginning.
|
| I'm not sure why Australian policymakers chose to take this step
| now, but regardless of the motive, it feels like a meaningful
| starting point. Social media's engagement-driven echo chamber
| model has contributed to a deeply divided world, and governments
| stepping in can at least make parents' jobs a little easier.
| flipbrad wrote:
| Hacker News is social media, isn't it?
| ares623 wrote:
| I don't know why they don't just ban or restrict the hardware.
| It'll be easier to enforce.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| So Australian teens will finally learn how they computers and
| home wifi works.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Ban kids, implement identity verification checks, remove ban on
| kids, keep identity verification checks.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Ban kids
|
| yep, done
|
| > implement identity verification checks
|
| nope, not done so what's your point?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| How are kids banned without an ID check?
| hermannj314 wrote:
| My belief is that late stage capitalism pushes democracies to
| fascism and the overton window requires politicians to break-
| up unpopular changes into a smaller changes. I am
| prognosticating why politicians would pretend to care about
| the mental health of children.
| Aloisius wrote:
| "Late stage capitalism" is a term used by socialists to
| describe the period immediately before Nostrad.. er Marx's
| glorious socialist revolution.
|
| Predicting it will lead to fascism instead is... humorous.
| stOneskull wrote:
| not yet
| jjcm wrote:
| I've said this before, but if countries want to mandate
| compliance, they should be required to provide the mechanism for
| compliance.
|
| The rollout of this has been pretty rough all things considered,
| much of it because the mechanism for compliance is flawed.
| Anthony Albanese's latest instgram posts are full of comments
| from teens saying things like, "how am i still on instagram if
| you banned us". The primary reason for this is most providers are
| leveraging age-estimation techniques, because the law
| specifically states: > 63DB Use of certain
| identification material and services > (1) A
| provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not:
| > (a) collect government-issued identification material
|
| In an effort to prevent identity theft, the bill as originally
| written(1) was updated(2) to forbid platforms from collecting
| government IDs as a proof of age. Even if you support the intent
| of the bill, the design-by-committee approach made the
| requirements so easy to circumvent that it's effectively security
| theater.
|
| (1) Original bill:
| https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
|
| (2) Bill that passed after rewrites:
| https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
| daedrdev wrote:
| So how does someone locked out wrongfully prove their age? Some
| people just look kinda young
| jimmydorry wrote:
| The platforms all seem to have a fallback "support a ticket
| with your government ID, and we pinky promise to delete the
| ID after verifying you".
| daedrdev wrote:
| But thats what this law does not allow according to the
| head of this chain, specifically government ids are not
| allowed to prove age, even if you delete them unless I read
| it wrong
| justatdotin wrote:
| it is theater. they acknowledge as much.
|
| not to exert absolute control, just enough to give the clear
| message: not for kids.
| gloosx wrote:
| "It's just kind of pointless, we're just going to create new ways
| to get on these platforms, so what's the point," said 14-year-old
| Claire Ni.
|
| Claire Ni concluded it best. They are just going to find new
| ways. Imagine a kid stopping using something because of the law
| or government ban. Those lawmakers are just delusional if they
| think they can pass a law and the kids will stop using social
| media.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| If it has no effect, why complain?
| stevage wrote:
| It can still be worth making a law even if some people find a
| way around it. Some teens will stop using social media as a
| result. That's enough.
| theshackleford wrote:
| That's like saying we should let children smoke because as a
| fifteen year old I was able to acquire cigarettes.
|
| I might have taken up smoking (to be fair I took it up when
| homeless from being around older homeless people who smoked)
| but a large cohort of my generation didn't.
| guyomes wrote:
| Here is an overview of related restrictions in other countries
| [1]. Actually, in many European countries, Google does not grant
| access to Gemini for people under 16yo [2,3].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/clyd1dvrll1o
|
| [2] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409
|
| [3] https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16109150
| Californiasober wrote:
| Look. As gen z person who basically grew up with tech and social
| media and had it since I was ~12, there is no way that any ban
| that is not direct id verification will work, this will instead
| make the forbidden fruit more tasty and teens more tech literate
| since they will look for ways around the ban. It feels like a lot
| of older people are more detached to the times when they first
| got access to Internet and social media and assume that its all
| dopamine hits and brain rot, while in reality its curiosity for a
| bigger world beyond school and limited things that you can do
| while being underage, cheap entertainment, knowledge.
| ianbutler wrote:
| This bit a community discord server of mine where I am a mod last
| night since we have a large oceanic contingent, somehow NZ got
| swept up in it too and we scrambled a bit to change our
| onboarding and other general policies.
| dkobia wrote:
| I have kids and I like this but as we know, prohibition only
| makes the drink stronger and the thirst deeper.
| duxup wrote:
| I suspect kids just find their way around things.
|
| And then they're on platforms with zero protections because
| nobody knows they're a teen... end result is worse.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| This is a pretty common cycle.
|
| Government steps in to "fix" a "problem" and then:
|
| Solve nothing.
|
| Create problems with their "solutions."
|
| Implore the populous to reelect them to fix all the problems.
|
| Rince. Repeat.
| rajamaka wrote:
| Exactly, this policy is from a government that taxed tobacco
| products so much that cigarettes are now cheaper than they have
| ever been in ~15 years because the black market stepped in and
| have nearly completely taken over the market.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Excessive social media is detrimental (to everyone). Age
| restrictions are not a good solution, it effectively categorises
| it as an adult activity, and glorifies it further.
|
| Kids are very good at identifying hypocritical behaviour and
| scare tactics. It'll end up counterproductive like the D.A.R.E.
| program.
|
| If the kids are forced out, the adults should be too.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| I actually feel that teens shouldn't be on social media at all.
| But I also don't think I should be able to lord that opinion over
| other people via fiat.
|
| Sugar is pretty bad for teens as well but I don't think banning
| that will solve health issues anymore than this will help teens.
|
| Personal decisions > a government trying to be mom
|
| Governments always end up doing the most damage when their
| control is "for the good of their constituents."
|
| This might seem like a good thing while they're parenting for you
| on things you agree with, however, there will likely come a time
| when they do something you don't and by then it will be too late.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| If it's bad for teens it's bad for everyone. Banning for only
| teens makes little sense
| bloppe wrote:
| I agree with you when I believe a choice can be freely made.
| But peer pressure as a child is extremely intense, and if
| you're the one weirdo you know whose parents don't allow them
| on Snapchat, it can cause lots of strife and probably be
| ineffective anyway.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| So I'm assuming weed laws have put an end to the "peer
| pressure" of teens getting other teens to smoke it?
|
| Life always comes down to personal choices and it's always
| the hard ones that are the most important. No law will ever
| change that.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Not saying that laws are the reason, but there isn't much
| childhood peer pressure to smoke weed. There _is_ peer
| pressure around iMessage in some countries just cause of
| Apple, rather than kids finding the obvious workarounds.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| how Corporate/Gov knows who is Teen on these account???? isn't
| this is just precursor to digital ID ?????
| fortran77 wrote:
| While I'm not sure about this ban, _something_ is causing
| normally nice, peaceful Australia to be somewhere I don't feel
| safe anymore. My relatives in Melbourne have left, after being
| physically attacked and had their property vandalized by mostly
| young "activist" types who, no doubt, get all their news from
| social media.
| jgilias wrote:
| Kids being banned from social media is just one side of the coin.
| _Everyone_ else being forced to KYC with random websites is the
| other. I can't help but wonder, which of the two outcomes is the
| actual goal here.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's wet dream of politicians that think the key to reducing
| crime is invigilation. So, that goal
|
| I don't think there is all that many politicians gullible
| enough to think that kind of massive breach of privacy is a
| worthy tradeoff
| denkmoon wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to use facebook
| zmmmmm wrote:
| A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be
| technically watertight. But the key is that it doesn't have to be
| watertight to work. Social media is all about network effects.
| Once most kids are on there, everyone has to be on there. If you
| knock the percentage down far enough, you break the network
| effect to the point where those who don't want to don't feel
| pressured to. If that is all it does, it's a benefit.
|
| My concerns about this are that it will lead to
|
| (a) normalising people uploading identification documents and
| hence lead to people becoming victims of scams. This won't be
| just kids - scammers will be challenging all kinds of people
| including vulnerable elderly people saying "this is why we need
| your id". People are going to lose their entire life savings
| because of this law.
|
| (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks
| that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places
| very quickly.
|
| Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough
| attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these
| laws.
| spullara wrote:
| very few laws and law makers take into consideration secondary
| (and beyond) effects.
| downsocialmedia wrote:
| b) This was always the case in past too, but I think this is
| handleable.
|
| But most importantly, there's no expectation of kid to be on
| social media anymore, which is much more important than whether
| they are actually there or not.
| basisword wrote:
| Curious about your thoughts on (a). I understand privacy
| concerns but not your point about scams. How are people going
| to lose their life savings? A photo ID is useful because you
| can compare the photo on it to someone human. Passports contain
| mirochips. If losing your ID was so dangerous people would be
| in trouble all the time, because people lose them all the time.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I guess it comes back to again not whether things are
| technically watertight, but how socially normalised something
| is. People are used to giving their ID out for significant
| transactions. This law says now that pretty much any random
| website has a good reason to ask you for ID documents. So
| when someone seeking to steal your identity already has two
| forms and is just trying to fill in that 3rd document to get
| over the line to where they can call up the bank to reset
| your password - the bar just got lowered. They no longer have
| to trick you into thinking it's a message from your bank or
| anything else significant. It can literally be "oh my cousin
| sent me pictures of their grand kids, let me just get my
| passport to upload so I can see them".
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > a) normalising people uploading identification documents and
| hence lead to people becoming victims of scams
|
| The reasonable approach to solve this problem is verification
| protocol that mandates integration with the apps chosen by
| users. You have your wallet with digital ID and you use only it
| on any website, sharing the bare minimum of details. No uploads
| of anything anywhere. Independent wallet providers ensure
| privacy and prevent state overreach.
|
| > (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe
| networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark
| places very quickly.
|
| Unfortunately dark places existed in mainstream social media
| too. It's something that should receive sufficient attention
| from law enforcement, nothing has changed here.
| pajamasam wrote:
| > sharing the bare minimum of details The reasonable
| approach, yes, but the approach most in the interest of the
| governments and corporate players driving these laws...?
| wrxd wrote:
| a) is solvable by a system that instead of collecting IDs
| reveals only the single bit of information required b) parents
| still need to do their job
|
| Arguably parental control should have been enough to avoid all
| of this but the regulation still helps parents. It's way more
| difficult to ask kids not to have social media when all of
| their friends have it.
|
| I would have preferred stricter social media platform
| regulation for everyone forcing tech companies to take
| responsibility for what happens on their platforms. It's not
| that they are dangerously only for kids
| anon84873628 wrote:
| In other words it solved the multi-agent coordination problem
| amongst parents, which otherwise would require the majority
| of them to be rational and good (a tall order).
| yladiz wrote:
| In the EU you don't need to upload your ID anywhere, the
| service can use the government's portal for ID verification. In
| the case of age verification they can get a yes/no response if
| the age is above some threshold. This is opaque to the service
| so they wouldn't get any additional ID details.
| petcat wrote:
| > This is opaque to the service
|
| The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust
| Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their
| business interest. But now they have to tell _your
| government_ about all the times you 're visiting Porno Hub.
|
| And nobody should trust their government.
|
| Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each
| other. There will come a time when Australians will try to
| enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the
| AUS government shared that this particular individual visited
| Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times
| in the last 30 days. Red Flag!
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| To be entirely fair, a government that would abuse your
| vague "am I allowed to access porn" history seems well into
| the territory of a government that would just make it up. A
| nefarious, powerful entity has no real requirement to be
| _honest_ in their maliciousness.
|
| They also have more direct means of accessing more specific
| data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| That is an assumption. The games the powerful play
| leverage truth and provable things. I think there is a
| lot of need for privacy and abuse of dragnet information
| before you get to the government framing people.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Like January 6th and vaccines causing autism and climate
| change denial and election rigging and Haitians eating
| dogs and Venezuela drug boats?
|
| Are you and I living in the same reality? They're
| constantly just making things up out of nowhere from
| nothing and refusing to back down. Now to the point of
| arresting US citizens with a secret police and committing
| international war crimes in open waters.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| I didn't say people don't lie and do bad shit. Not sure
| where that came from.
|
| Just because people lie, doesn't mean we need to shrug ok
| lets just hand over all our private data everywhere.
|
| But I dig ya! What the current US government does is
| abhorrent.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| You mean like Epstein? We've got a bunch of truths about
| rich people and nothing happens.
|
| The fear of an evil government misusing something, more
| often than not, is a thought terminating cliche. It means
| we cannot regulate, or create any laws about anything,
| because evil people could abuse those laws. In reality,
| evil people do evil shit, irrespective of the laws
| available for abuse.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Right... but I don't think I was suggesting anarchy.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I think the government making stuff up is worth
| considering, but isn't it a kind of different threat
| model?
|
| The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up
| about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a
| tourist or something. They statistically don't care about
| me. However, the US morality police might decide to
| statistically care about everyone who watches porn.
|
| But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential
| whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a
| government might have a specific motive to do me dirty
| and not care about being honest.
|
| I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a
| "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about
| and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious
| treatment.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| Cops do it all the time even when bodycams show otherwise
| simgt wrote:
| > And nobody should trust their government.
|
| Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's
| why we have democratically elected governments. All these
| power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some
| extend at least.
| monksy wrote:
| Not just the US, but image entering Qatar or Indonesia with
| them having that knowledge of your access to "adult
| content".
| BoppreH wrote:
| That's a very good technical solution, but socially it can be
| foiled by an official-looking alert saying "failed to scan
| card, please do X instead".
|
| And that's assuming the technical solution is deployed
| everywhere. I'm in the EU with one of those IDs, and I still
| had to upload photos of my passport and scan my face to open
| a bank account. The identification process even had its own
| app that I had to install.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Exactly. I'd concede this point if I'd seen a giant public
| awareness campaign informing people which official sites to
| use and general safety awareness about it. I can tell you,
| literally nothing like that has happened. Not an
| insufficient effort at it - no effort, nothing. It's clear
| the people in charge are just head in the sand about this
| aspect of it.
| 9dev wrote:
| But then again, should the EU follow up with a similar
| policy, it could mandate the use of these checks and
| prevent/penalize ID photos. I'm very optimistic here.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > In the EU you don't need to upload your ID anywhere, the
| service can use the government's portal for ID verification.
| In the case of age verification they can get a yes/no
| response
|
| The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing
| online, and that should never be allowed to happen.
|
| I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook
| even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games,
| regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some
| extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these
| freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet
| less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to
| pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language
| of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient
| excuse.
| hintymad wrote:
| I'd even go one step further: it does not have to be
| enforceable at all. This has to do with teen's psychology. For
| whatever reason, kids just fight their parents but listen to
| their schools and government a lot more. Of course, there are
| exceptions, but I'm talking about trend. The kids in my school
| district were generally angry towards their parents when they
| couldn't get a smartphone when their peers did. However, when
| my school district introduced the strict ban of electronic
| devices in school, the kids quieted down and even bought the
| same reasons that their parents were saying: attention is the
| most precious assets one should cherish. Kids complained that
| the problem sets by RSM (Russian School of Mathematics) are too
| hard and unnecessary (they are not by the standard of any Asian
| or East European country), yet they stopped complaining when
| the school teacher ramped up the difficulty of the homework.
|
| So, when the government issues this ban, the kids would listen
| to their parents a lot more easily.
| jen729w wrote:
| > normalising people uploading identification documents and
| hence lead to people becoming victims of scams
|
| We've long lost this war.
|
| I'm in Italy, staying at my 3rd Airbnb. I was surprised when
| the first asked me, casually, to drop a photograph of my
| passport in the chat. I checked with Claude: yep, that's the
| law.
|
| (I'll remind you that Italy is in the EU.)
|
| On checking into this place last week, the guy just took a
| photo of our passports on his phone. At this point I'm too weak
| to argue. And what's the point? That is no longer private data
| and if I pretend that it is, I'm the fool.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Well, even there, you're doing a transaction worth hundreds
| to thousands of dollars probably.
|
| This pretty much lowers the bar to any random website on the
| internet can ask for ID to do something as trivial as look at
| a photo.
|
| In a world where social engineering is the last unsolvable
| security vector, this is significant even if it is just a
| matter of degree.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well, yes but the other problem is this is putting
| authoritarians in charge of more stuff. I had a comment
| comparing this to allowing people to eat too much food and that
| is literally where the logical outcome of this sort of thinking
| goes - it happens in practice, that isn't some sort of
| theoretical risk. The more the government decides what people
| can and can't want to do the worse the potential gets when they
| make mistakes. And this is further normalising the government
| making decisions about speech where they have every incentive
| and tendency to shut down people who tell inconvenient and
| important truths.
|
| The risks are not worth the rewards of half-heatedly trying to
| stop kids communicating with other kids. They're still going to
| bully each other and what have you. They're still going to
| develop unrealistic expectations. They're probably even still
| going to use social media in practice.
| bigfudge wrote:
| The attempt is to remove the market do exploiting the
| attention of children for profit. This doesn't have to be
| perfect to be worth it.
|
| What's more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of
| authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown
| us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine
| authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling.
| Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| So are we banning all advertising to children? Or only
| banning them from communicating and posting with each
| other?
|
| If it's about monetizing child attention not about speech
| control why isn't every single toy ad, food ad, movie ad,
| also banned?
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Because all those aren't close to being as harmful as
| social media is.
|
| We do ban the things that consume children the way social
| media does.
|
| Alcohol, addictive drugs, etc.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| The data on social media harms is mixed at best. We know
| for a fact fast food, cosmetic ads for girls, are
| strictly more harmful.
|
| This is nothing more than speech control under the guise
| of "won't someone please think of the children"
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > So are we banning all advertising to children? Or only
| banning them from communicating and posting with each
| other?
|
| Kids are not banned from communicating and posting with
| each other; the ban exempts a number of direct messing
| apps, as well as community apps like Discord:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/dec/10/social-
| media-b...
|
| If I had to over-simplify it, then the ban appears to
| mostly target doom-scrolling apps. I say mostly, since
| I'm not sure why Twitch and Kick are included
| awillowingmind wrote:
| Twitch & Kick are likely included because they can breed
| parasocial relationships between streamer & viewer.
| samename wrote:
| What about future governments in Australia? This is ripe
| for abuse and scope creep. It also ties a uniform ID to an
| account, simplifying tracking and surveillance by
| corporations and governments.
|
| Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up
| their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or
| link your government issued ID to your social media account
| (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are
| being arrested for simple tweets against the government).
| Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect
| the kids"
| 9dev wrote:
| > It also ties a uniform ID to an account, simplifying
| tracking and surveillance by corporations and
| governments.
|
| That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is
| happening in the area of cryptographically verified
| assertions; for example, a government API could provide
| the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without
| the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the
| government never able to tie you to the service requiring
| the assertion.
| lukan wrote:
| Does that work already? If so, how?
|
| If the API asks for a users minimum age at a certain
| time, how can the government not know which data set it
| has to check?
| pryce wrote:
| It is not that simple: Authoritarians that want to
| "protect" their gender-questioning or orientation-
| questioning children from having online access to trans and
| gay spaces online are not only enthusiastically backing
| Australia's social media ban, they are involved in the very
| creation of this legislation, and are delighted in its
| negative affects on LGBTQ teens.
|
| There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe
| to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer
| Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU
| who were instrumental in creating this legislation.
| nuggets wrote:
| There's not really any plausible explanation as to why
| referrals to pediatric gender clinics became so skewed
| towards girls who want to be boys, other than social
| contagion.
|
| The sticking point is that it's politically controversial
| to point this out because of progressive beliefs about
| gender identity as an unquestionable facet of someone's
| being.
| yosame wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this take is incorrect on multiple
| accounts. Trans demographics tend to skew towards trans
| women by about a third, not trans men - at least in all
| the research I've come across.
|
| And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of
| different gender identities can very plausibily explain
| increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a
| contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs
| here.
| nuggets wrote:
| Regarding the change in sex ratio for childhood
| referrals, this is well documented. See for example this
| paper:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324768316_Sex_Ra
| tio...
|
| "Social contagion" is social science terminology. It's
| meant as an analogy not a pejorative.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| On the contrary, that has nothing to do with the LGB.
| Shrier believes the T concept, specifically, is a social
| contagion like anorexia.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| If you read the rhetoric it is not about removing
| commercial exploitation of children. It is about removing
| child bullying, grooming and algorithms that lead to things
| like misogynist content and eating disorders.
|
| I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will
| be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small
| number will go through fringe social media even less
| policed or normalised than the big American ones and have
| much higher risk on some of these issues than before.
| delbronski wrote:
| Come on dude, you are on HN. You probably know that social
| media is no longer about free speech. It's a targeted
| advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and
| teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It's a
| technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible
| to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults
| are, and adults are already really susceptible. This is what
| this ban is trying to shield kids from. Not from them talking
| to each other.
|
| The Social media platforms of today are very clearly harmful
| to our youth. Just like alcohol and cigarettes are to a
| developing brain. Why can we ban those and not this?
| FpUser wrote:
| >"You probably know that social media is no longer about
| free speech, It's a targeted advertising machine"
|
| Youtube for one is an advertising machine. On the other
| hand it is one of the few places where one can find some
| amazing educational and entertainment content. Prohibiting
| it I think is a crime.
|
| Besides, lately Politicians stick their noses everywhere.
| It is just way too much.
| osn9363739 wrote:
| It's not banned for under 16s, they just can't sign up.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Which means they also do no longer benefit from family-
| grouped Youtube Premium, which means MORE ADS ... which
| is exactly what we tried to prevent, right?
| devmor wrote:
| Why do we have to ban networked communication for teens
| instead of regulating it?
|
| Nearly everything about it that's bad for teens also sucks
| for the rest of us.
| sardon wrote:
| hey they can still use networked communication - e.g.
| whatsapp, signal, etc. This ban is only concerning the
| following services
|
| Facebook Instagram Threads Kick Reddit Snapchat TikTok
| Twitch X (formerly Twitter) YouTube
| DocTomoe wrote:
| First they came for Facebook, and I didn't protest, I was
| not on facebook.
|
| Here's what's going to happen next:
| Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly
| popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to
| ban those as well 'for the children'.
|
| We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the
| pattern.
| hedayet wrote:
| Still, even the most libertarian among us generally won't
| oppose restricting youth access to tobacco, or restricting
| recreational access to hard drugs.
| armenarmen wrote:
| As one of the libertarian people here, my concern is that
| this "what about the children" will force IDs to post.
| Because how else could it be done?
|
| That said smoking and Instagram are probably best avoided
| by kids
| owisd wrote:
| It's already a solved problem- load a digital ID into a
| wallet app, the operating system can then perform a zero
| knowledge proof for each website that the user is over
| 16. The government issuing the ID doesn't know which
| websites it's being used for and the website only gets a
| binary yes/no for the age and no other personal info:
|
| https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-
| age-id...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem: it just defers it. Who's
| allowed to have a digital ID?
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > restricting recreational access to hard drugs.
|
| You might want to double-check your definition of "hard
| drugs", "libertarian" or both.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| So, considering there is a clear health issue with fast
| food and television, shall we ban them from having anything
| other than fruit and books (but not too complicated ones,
| we don't want them to get potentially suicidal ideas)?
| hedayet wrote:
| You're framing this as an all-or-nothing choice. The
| logical inverse of your argument would be: "should we
| unban hard drugs for everyone, and allow alcohol,
| tobacco, or porn for kids?"
|
| That kind of binary framing doesn't really move the
| discussion forward.
|
| A more constructive approach is case-by-case. Different
| things sit at different levels of harm, and "ban
| everything" vs. "ban nothing" isn't a workable model for
| society.
| jmward01 wrote:
| These are exactly my thoughts as well, both the positives (it
| doesn't need to be air-tight) and the negatives (providing
| documentation). I don't know that there is a great system here.
| The best I can think of is having independent third parties
| that people can register with and that can provide a 'proof of
| eligibility' token tied to an e-mail address or something
| similar with the explicit, backed by law, understanding that
| sharing more than that proof of eligibility with a third party
| is a criminal offense. The money side of things would be that
| FB and the like would pay the proof company a service fee so
| they make money and FB gets the proof without getting access to
| your documents. Just a thought.
| freefaler wrote:
| Social networks aren't that social anymore. Around 65% of the
| facebook content is not shared/generated by your friends in
| your social graph. So they're all just a Tik-Tok clones
| basically. Short dopamine addiction info-snacks with more and
| more AI generated slop. (and some of the slop is interesting
| like Cold War military tech stories from books read and
| visualized by AI).
|
| The network effects doesn't matter that much for the Tiktok's
| of the world.
| chillfox wrote:
| Australia has APIs that can be used to verify ID without
| uploading them, but American tech companies has always refused
| to use them.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| "the Social Media Minimum Age legislation specifically
| prohibits platforms from compelling Australians to provide a
| government-issued ID or use an Australian Government accredited
| digital ID service to prove their age.
|
| Platforms may offer it as an option but must also offer a
| reasonable alternative, so no one who is 16 or older is
| prevented from having a social media account because they
| choose not to provide government ID. This includes situations
| where other age check methods return a result the user does not
| accept."
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Australia already has a government digital ID verification
| service, so this social media ban is just a first step towards
| legislators realising they can force people to just integrate
| and use that, then there is no user data changing hands.
|
| Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID
| service to prove their age
|
| Here you go. If you're concerned about your personal data, only
| use platforms that integrate and use this.
| indymike wrote:
| Father of five here, and founder of a social media marketing
| company (exited). Our kids are up against problems we didn't have
| during the great expansion of social. The three big things:
|
| 1. State level actors and well funded not for profits are
| fighting an information war to influence our kids. And they are
| very good at it. Down to having troll farms to talk one on one.
| Every time something new happens in the world, my younger kids
| ask me about what they saw on Tik-Tok and their initial
| understanding is shaped by a well funded actor, and is often
| completely a false narrative. The solution is be open and talk
| about it with your kids.
|
| 2. Criminals are even better at social than state level actors.
| They are smooth. And they are on platforms you wouldn't expect -
| like games. And criminals aren't all about fraud. They sell
| drugs, they try to physically steal in real life from your
| kids,they'll try to get your kids to do something embarrasing and
| blackmail them with it, and even can be human traffickers. Again,
| the solution is be open and talk about it with your kids - and
| make sure they know it's ok to ask, and it's especially ok if you
| think I shouldn't share this with Dad or they person is saying
| not to show your parents.
|
| 3. Sexual predators are even better at social than the criminals.
| The difference is that the predators can't hide behind national
| borders so they are very careful. Same solution as $#2, but this
| one is really tough because when your kids come to you about it,
| they may have shared something with the predator that the
| predator is using to extort them into hooking up. Don't attack or
| blame your kid, focus on making sure the predator never gets to
| them
|
| I do not believe for a minute that social media was good for my
| kids as they grew up, but I'm not sure that you can even begin to
| fix it the way AU is trying to - regulating speech, association
| using prohibition is dipping a colander in the river to filter
| the silt.
| gertlex wrote:
| Am I wrong in feeling like the solution you outline is only
| applicable to an individual's kids? But at the societal level,
| it clearly seems we can't depend on enough parents to do what
| you talk about. Something else is needed.
|
| I don't have answers to give. Certainly not a fan of the
| government approach of "everyone must prove their age online
| now", which I believe is how the AU law is done. (casual
| listening to Security Now podcast about this for a long while
| now)
| indymike wrote:
| "Everyone must prove their age online now" creates a trail of
| identity that kills anonymous speech dead. Anonymous speech
| is very important to maintaining freedoms... such as freedom
| of speech and freedom of association.
| lovich wrote:
| Hard disagree on anonymous speech. Individual humans should
| have free speech but that is divorced from anonymous
| speech.
|
| With anonymous speech you don't even know if you're talking
| to a person or a program.
|
| If you want to say something, then say it with your
| identity. You don't get to be anonymous when saying
| something to my face so why should it be allowed across a
| screen?
| Doxin wrote:
| While what you're saying sounds like a reasonable enough
| stance on the face of it, keep in mind that this would
| _deeply_ fuck over closeted queer folks among other
| marginalized groups.
| squigz wrote:
| > If you want to say something, then say it with your
| identity. You don't get to be anonymous when saying
| something to my face so why should it be allowed across a
| screen?
|
| My face is not my identity. Do I have to tell you my full
| name and address when I talk to you? I sure hope not!
|
| Beyond that, what about the threat of violence for saying
| something? As another commenter points out, this is a
| real issue for marginalized groups, but also could easily
| become an issue for your average citizen sharing their
| political opinion.
|
| While I agree it would be nice having some level of
| assurance that you're talking to a human, particularly
| going forward, the only way I could support such a system
| is if no party involved would be able to track what I
| visit or pin an actual identity to me as a user - but,
| perhaps more importantly, it also needs to not be easily
| broken by those actors who it's trying to stop. Otherwise
| it's useless and just hurts your actual citizens.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Yes, this is one of those game theory traps like the
| prisoners dilemma, because it requires coordinated action
| across a large group of people. Unfortunately the lowest
| common denominator parenting is not able to handle the
| problem, because the parents don't understand the situation,
| are addicted to platforms themselves, and just generally
| don't have the necessary skills.
|
| Government regulation is a ham fisted approach that risks
| unintended consequences / secondary effects, but it is
| generally good at breaking the game theory traps because it
| changes the playing field for everyone. That is fundamentally
| why we have government at all - to solve coordination
| problems.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| If you think we can't depend on parents for the kids
| education, school should handle it.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Our kids are up against problems we didn't have during the
| great expansion of social.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with this. Our societies globally have
| become hugely polarised and are manipulated daily because of
| social media. The damage done by social media is 100x greater
| than any good that came from it and the lives of adults have
| been affected by on it a societal level at least as much as the
| danger to kids.
|
| It isn't possible, but if social media was suddenly completely
| unavailable I think the world would get a lot better in a very
| short period of time.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Our societies globally have become hugely polarised and are
| manipulated daily because of social media.
|
| Watching 18 year old kids getting drone striked every other
| day has done more for the anti-war movement than a hundred
| years of post-WW1 globalist utopianism. The only demographic
| of war hawks you find online anymore are psychotics and
| boomers, both being unfit for military service.
|
| This is the fundamental reason why western countries are
| turning on social. The TikTok ban had less to do with Chinese
| influence campaigns and more to do with it being a platform
| where Israeli war crimes were openly discussed without being
| hindered by shadow algorithms.
|
| You're seeing Zionists like Larry Ellison make plays in the
| media space for the same reason; military-aged white are
| going off the plantation, and Zionists feel threatened by it.
| That is literally all these bans are intended to remedy.
| phantasmish wrote:
| I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out
| any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all
| possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social
| media", which has worked so far. They can message people they
| actually know IRL, somewhere _without_ a feed full of crap from
| people they don 't know. That's plenty.
|
| Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd
| let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I
| intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or
| TikTok on anything like a regular basis is _zero_ , and the
| likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if
| I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also
| probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since
| it ain't happening supervised.
|
| Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave
| them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent?
| Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally
| as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that
| they'd need an account or anything.
| indymike wrote:
| > I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang
| out any place where that stuff you report is common,
|
| A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are
| committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not
| leave our children with our family alone?
|
| The best move is to teach your children how to not be
| victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself".
| My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood
| because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to
| pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They
| taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let
| me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be
| responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to
| navigate the internet safely.
| phantasmish wrote:
| > A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud)
| are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should
| we not leave our children with our family alone?
|
| But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with
| family aren't crime.
|
| > Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet
| safely.
|
| No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing
| feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in
| poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once.
| Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero
| value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with
| "just enough to notice it's _one of those_ so they can run
| the other way ".
|
| [EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an
| _extremely reasonable_ middle ground for Internet targeted
| ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks
| would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of
| liability for content they promote, which amount would
| surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see
| their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I
| 'm not gonna send my kids there--I'd rather see them _gone_
| , period. I _will_ tell my kids what they are, and how and
| why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away.
| But I don 't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or
| something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of
| social media feeds is to _avoid them entirely_.
| 9dev wrote:
| That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either
| not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves
| lack the skills for it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you
| report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it.
|
| You're talking about cutting kids from all online services,
| including multiplayer games and community wikis.
|
| It also means your kid has no experience of online
| interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which
| also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.
| polalavik wrote:
| I really really hate the term "troll farm" it completely
| minimizes nation state level propaganda machines down to
| something that sounds like its just one big internet joke for
| gags.
|
| The cutesy 'fun' language of 'troll farm' itself deflects
| accountability from what are coordinated psychological
| operations. It makes it sound like some rambunctious kids in
| basements having a little weekend fun.
| skwee357 wrote:
| The next step is to outlaw social media in general, and maybe the
| world will become a bit better.
|
| Edit: in case someone decides to disagree with me, here is a non-
| exhaustive list of issues that social media has created:
| isolation from the real world, unrealistic expectations in terms
| of looks/status/success, dehumanization by turning people into
| likes-dislikes, dehumanizations by creating influencers whose
| sole purpose it to pump cheap crap to their "followers", a vessel
| for state actors to spread the current flavor of
| propaganda/racism supported by "the algorithm" that creates echo
| chambers rather than promoting diversity of opinions, dopamine
| producing machines that glue us to the screens.
|
| There is nothing social in social media, in-fact, it should be
| called the "anti-social media".
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| There is nothing that social media provides that a private
| group chat with your closest people doesn't fulfill.
|
| It could be banned with nothing of value lost.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| The whole world seems to be hooked on TikTok, reels and
| shorts for entertainment.
|
| Reversing that would take some doing.
| morgengold wrote:
| There will definitely be hellish withdrawal symptoms.
| crowbahr wrote:
| You do know that HN in in the category of social media right?
| deadbabe wrote:
| HN is an anti-social media. It is not inclusive. If you are
| not a tech geek or cannot articulate well you are not welcome
| here, and will be ignored.
|
| You cannot follow or be followed. There is no attention drawn
| to your username or profile. Everything about HN is designed
| for you to just read a comment and move on, not caring much
| about the human behind it.
| skwee357 wrote:
| No, it's not. It's a link aggregator and a discussion
| platform, it is not centered around social aspects like user
| profiles and followers.
| reassess_blind wrote:
| Discord isn't banned, but Twitch is? Interesting.
|
| Surely Discord harbours more bullying than Twitch (where image
| sharing isn't even a feature).
| 0x_rs wrote:
| An absurd decision with dangerous second order effects, many of
| which lead to VPNs and other privacy tools being next, just look
| at UK hyping and building that up right now. I hope they will
| vote accordingly when they're of age, not forgetting what
| liberties were taken away from them in the name of very dubious
| benefits, easily circumvented, and prone to exposing them to
| _greater_ danger going through unofficial channels. Trying to
| really address the issues younger generations are facing is
| clearly too difficult for the geriatric, decrepit ruling class
| that just won 't let go, and this helps them further every
| government's ambitions of increasingly regulating the means of
| communication between people. Actually, it's not that it's
| difficult, they simply don't care.
| rarisma wrote:
| now do the rest of the world
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| A bunch of people in local LGBT community Discord servers that
| marked themselves as NSFW have been locked out of those servers
| and now need to prove their age to get back in.
|
| These communities already had active mods that would remove
| anyone underage that they found, so it doesn't really make sense
| in this case that Discord is now requiring them to prove their
| ages.
|
| Meanwhile kids are finding ways around the ban. Kids are asking
| their older looking friends to pass facial scans for them.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Alternative to archive.md, archive.ph
|
| Text-only:
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S3fVC...
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S2nVb...
| echo url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-
| social-media-ban-under-16.html \ |curl -K/dev/stdin
| -Agooglebot > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm links -dump
| 1.htm|sed -n '/Effect/,/region./p'
|
| More
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S5G8h...
|
| https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S5sYp...
| roguecoder wrote:
| I feel like just making kids lie about our age was pretty
| effective back in the day. Those of us who lied knew we were
| going into adult spaces, hid our irl identities, and learned how
| to behave.
|
| Then Facebook convinced people social media was supposed to be
| about your "real" identity, which made us sitting ducks for
| scammers and propaganda. Now we have governments demanding we
| provide our identity papers before we are allowed to participate.
| morgengold wrote:
| I am so glad a country finally took action. Can't wait to see
| data on its effects. At this point in time I lost interest in
| nuanced discussions about the details here. We are in one big
| experiment and it might end in catastrophy. We need counter
| experiments and hard data fast.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I support this greatly. But I think instead of debating whether
| this makes sense or not, or speculating, let's consider that it
| is already in effect and consider it an experiment. Let's see how
| Australia is doing in 10 or 15 years, will those kids be
| resentful or regret the ban when they're 30?
|
| Extremes are bad on either end. unrestricted internet access,
| even to those who can't defend themselves against harmful content
| is an extreme, some balance is long due. Since most other western
| countries chose to risk their kids in the name of liberty, let's
| wait and see whose trade off works out for the best instead of
| speculating what will or won't happen.
|
| I wish more countries would experiment like this, and even more
| countries would learn.
|
| You can't argue for UBI or drug decriminalization because some
| country experimented and succeeded and then oppose this sort of
| stuff. In the US, states are supposed to experiment with laws
| like this, but they don't have enough power to regulate
| interstate communication or commerce.
| justatdotin wrote:
| I enjoy participating in wildly diverse online communities and I
| hate censorship.
|
| I have seen the way heavy social media use changes some peoples
| personalities. it's scary. these platforms don't just home
| communities: they're engines, with tendencies. including numerous
| ways in which these platforms are implicated in youth suicide.
|
| I am absolutely convinced that children should be discouraged
| from these engines just as they should be discouraged from
| alcohol.
|
| I totally recognise that if that means these platforms demand
| proof of ID, that changes their privacy profile and some people
| will choose to stop participating.
|
| perhaps this can offer some stimulus for other ways of online
| community forming. Thanks everyone here: I've participated in a
| few online conversations about the topic this week, and this is
| the only interesting one :)
| nish__ wrote:
| I support it.
| macleginn wrote:
| Makes one wonder if/how quickly they will come for closed
| WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels next.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I grew up without television. We had a TV until I was 7, but it
| was never left on, and I was rarely allowed to watch it.
|
| When I was 9 we had a cheap TV for about 3 months and it broke.
| Family decided we didn't need one.
|
| At 36 I got a TV for a couple years. My kids watched Blue's
| Clues, etc.
|
| At 38, I again got a TV for a couple years. Then decided dumb
| late night shows were not helping the insomnia, so cancelled
| cable, but started streaming HBO.
|
| Since then, I have enjoyed high quality streaming series on
| occasion. But no live TV, no TV "news", and strictly avoid
| anything with ads.
|
| When I see a live TV on, with the strange voices and non-logic of
| ads, and the bizarre posturing they call "news", I get a little
| sick. Even "nature" and "history" shows have strange pacing and
| repetition. The transparent sucking sound of ads needing tamed
| attention-providers warps everything.
|
| I think being sheltered from regular TV, TV ads, and TV news, has
| been tremendously positive for my mind and life.
|
| Not being exposed to "social" media sites, which are often not
| actually social, and often unhealthy when they are, is a great
| win. Quality can sometimes survive in rare small social-
| conversation sites, not driven by ads or agenda.
| timoth3y wrote:
| I think if we are going to ban people under 16 from social media,
| we should also ban people over 70 from social media.
|
| At least as much mental and societal damage is done by elderly
| falling for bigoted, scammy, manipulative nonsense online than by
| teenagers having their self-esteem lowered.
|
| As recent holiday gatherings have shown us, the young handle
| social media far better then the elderly.
|
| /s
| delis-thumbs-7e wrote:
| So-called social media is proven to be just a huge scam operation
| and manipulation mechanism for the ultra-rich robber barons at
| Silicon Valley. Denying it from kids is same as denying tobacco
| or alcohol companies sell amd advertise to them. Hopefully future
| generations have spend their childhood reading, studying and
| socialising with other kids, not living fake lives and being
| hunted by slimy adult men. Hopefully they take a one look at this
| shot and go "nope, not for me" and do something with their lives.
|
| Good for you Australia. I hope EU follows suit soon.
| cjpartridge wrote:
| Absolute joke, most Australian parents will just ID for the kids,
| if the kids don't figure out how to get around it themselves,
| especially the typical ipad-kids and their parents.
|
| The average Australian punter is getting absolutely screwed by
| our current government and all involved parties.
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