Australia bans social media for under 16s

What the government should be doing is mandating that a social media/drugs literacy course is taught in schools. Kids should fundamentally understand that things are not black or white, good or bad; things are grey. They have upsides and downsides; risks and rewards. Kids should be taught that Social media is a great way to connect with your friends, but you are also susceptible to being influenced/manipulated/addicted in X, Y, Z ways.

Is anyone talking about the fact that it's the predatory, short-term-quarterly-gains oriented behavior of the platforms themselves which is in fact rampaging though democracies, massively affecting and survielling Adult's behaviors on a loop of ragebait-induced dopamine/seratonin manipulation?

Because Kids are going to connect with one another, on whichever the next platform is that's not banned. What's more, the institutions they attend will inevitably ask them to do so as...things like Youtube arent exactly 100% avoidable.

Pretty pathetic to clamp down on Youth Liberty in a society that has basically none, when centrally-hosted platforms owned by corporate behemoths are all-but-physically trampling the landscape like some kind of fucked up gentrification-glorifying-voiceline-repeating Megazord

I don't think there is a technical way to implement this without privacy issues and potential for future misuse and scope creep.

Government doing parenting instead of the parents never works.

ah yea that'll work

What they consider as "social media"? Is it every site where you can communicate with others?

This seems fucked if its so.

I feel like every law I see coming out of Australia is just telling their citizens they’re not allowed to do something else mundane. All while the government services get worse, and the corrupt become more entrenched.

What a shithole.

For a second I thought the headline said Australia banned social media for 16 seconds 🤣

Ah fuck. Canada is likely to copycat this, we love copying Australia's homework. NDP and Cons BOTH already favor this idea except it's also all 18+ websites. Gov ID to wack off. Puritans are on every wing and I wish we could shake them off.

maybe banning it will lead to kids pretending to be 27 and the platform and government having no idea who they are anymore

What I find intriguing is the potential for fediverse/decentralized service uptake amongst Australians, should the corporate providers decide it's too much bother implementing an identity solution for 26m people and simply rangebans them.

In an alternate universe, parents are devoting 10 per cent of their doomscrolling time to studying their router manuals and determining access windows for social media on their LAN. But why obtain a gram of education to address a serious parenting issue when a ton of democracy-threatening legislation driven by politics will achieve a quarter of the same thing?

As of now, there hasn't been a formal ban in Australia on social media for individuals under 16 years old, but there have been growing discussions about stricter regulations on social media usage, particularly for minors. Concerns around online safety, mental health, and privacy for young users have led to calls for platforms to enforce stricter age restrictions and introduce more safeguards for children and teenagers.

On the upside, people who sometimes wonder if the person arguing with them is a high school sophomore won't have to wonder anymore.

teen go to website

please enter your birthdate

1/1/2000

welcome!

Now everyone gets to hand over their ids to the tech companies.

Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.

I DGAF about your kids.

Some mastodon instance has it covered already. https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113519360107067092

The second i have to hand over my id to a tech company is the second i leave and never come back.

Also how they gonna manage the fediverse? Can someone get fined for providing social media to themselves if an under 16 sets up their own federated instance?

the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister.

Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.

The law does not require users to upload government IDs as part of the verification process.

Sounds like a pretty weak law. It will require a birthday when creating an account and accounts under the age of 16 will be restricted/limited. As a result users (people under 16) will lie about their age.

Companies don't like this because it messes with their data collection. If they collect data that proves an account is under 16 they will be required to make them limited/restricted. However they obviously collect this data already.

I wonder if Facebook and other apps will add/push education elements in order to become exempt.

The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.

There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.

It's a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we've seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.

From 63C (1) of the legislation:

For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:

• a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
  • i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
  • ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
  • iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
  • iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
• b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).

Here's all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.

China Video Game Ban v2.0: Electric Boogaloo

Parents should be parenting, not delegate their responsibilities to a nanny state.

This is technically feasible, and bussiness don't need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.

But I'm morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.

But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it's too late.

I support this move. Some here are delusionally arguing that this impacts privacy - the sort of data social media firms collect on teenagers is egregiously extensive regardless. This is good support for their mental health and development.

The fact that people even considered this with a straight face, discussed it and passed it is just indicative how tech illiterate we've become.

performative nonsense which does nothing for kids or their mental health and harms queer kids who lose one of the first places they can find community.

This is just abstinence education all over again

Pssst! Hey kid, wanna buy some memes?

I work tech in schools (in Australia) there are definitely tech savvy enough kids that will probably spool up their own fediverse instances

Papers, please!

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but this just makes kids look for VPN's and other ways to skirt this restriction. It may make VPN's less useful for the rest of us as a result when certain services are forced to comply with the law, breaking those services for those of us using VPN's. It sounds like a great idea but I don't know that the implementation will make a noticeable or effective difference.

Not a bad choice.

Obviously there are workarounds, but I suppose it provides a good justification for parents to deny their kids access to social media.

Only for 16 seconds? Why?

One way to implement this: https://chinwag.au/verification/

So what? There will be a "Yes I'm over 16" check box which will be as meaningful as the "Yes I'm over 18" one on porn sites?

Any hope of governments or social media sites enforcing this will come with big ethical and technical compromises and I dont think anyone is actually going to really bother.

We already have limits on what children do with other potentially harmful things like fire, sharp objects, heights and roads and they all come from parents. If this law has any real and positive impact it will be the message that it sends to parents.

Well that's not going to work out.

Eh, I don't think this is the best solution.

The assumption is as soon as you turn 17 you're smart enough and have the critical thinking skills to navigate social media without it negatively affecting you? Kinda dumb.

There could be an argument that at least try to block it while young peoples brains are still developing, maybe there's benefit in that.

Older people than 16 are still duped by propaganda, and become addicted to social media, and all the negative consequences.

What we need is regulation imo. Good, smart, progressive, altruistic regulation that is for the benefit of all. Ain't gonna happen though, because sOcIaLiSm and "mUh FrEeDoMs".

Then I read that chat apps and YouTube would not be banned, and scoffed

Literally chat apps are social media. You can post stories and pump memes and news. You can even have bots that scrape and post content. YouTube is just a matter of checking a box whether it's "for kids" and they already do that. Basically the whole thing is stupid

Now ban it for over 16s

Now ban everyone else (except Lemmy of course).

Not a bad idea all things considered

Edit: Save for the "Showing your ID" part, anonymity is healthy for the net and far too rare these days

So.... they banned social media for a whole 15 seconds?

Good. Now block Shitter.

Another way to look at this is a back channel method of breaking down the big tech oligopoly.

I'm all for this. Kids are smart. They start using the rest of the internet. They'll become tech savvy.

This is going to harm kids.

Imagine if this was done around the world. And then imagine how empty the Internet would be.

You don't need to ban kids from the Internet. You need to ban pedophiles from it.