Landmark legislation sees the Australian government committed to the novel step of child protection by banning social media for under sixteens.
So where exactly are kids supposed to go? People will go on about “they should just go outside” but kids have literally had the cops called on them for the crime of walking around their own neighborhood “unsupervised”. I’ve seen calls to ban kids from all sorts of places - planes, theme parks, restaurants, libraries. I’ve seen these “mosquito” things put up to drive kids away from public places. Kids are spending all their time on social media because they have nowhere else to go.
They will create their own places… which might not actually be desirable the government lol
If only this applied to the parents as well… No more using your children online to make a buck as an influencer.
Now kids will be forced to hide being a victim of cyber-bullying from their parents. Great work!
If their parents are social media
If they don’t have an online presence and neither do their peers, how would they be cyber bullied?
I’m sure bullying will go on, old school, in the streets, but cyber bullying is one of the things that will go away with this
I think this is great. There are about one or two generations worth of people that had social media while being kids and I think they should stop acting as if it’s the end of the world if it would go away. I fully understand that you grew up with it and don’t know any netter but believe you me: you can do without, you can survive without, you will be better without.
Go outside, touch grass, have fun, be a kid again.
A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.
It’s unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the “are you 18+” checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.
Oh those poor kids.
I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.
This is my favorite argument against government regulation.
Anything not foolproof definitely isn’t worth doing at all.
Theres a scale of influence, with a big difference between foolproof and entirely unenforceable.
In this case, it’s effectively unenforceable, so what’s the point in wasting time and effort drafting something that won’t actually make any difference?
Good luck with that.
It doesnt need to be 100% effective.
It’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.
Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.
If they’re expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples’ government ID’s, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.
It’s just apparently all anyone can come up with when they’ve got government-brain.
I recently switched from 1 January 1900 to 1 January 2000. It feels good to be young again.
What will be interesting for sure is the difference of this approach vs. the porn approach in the southern US. In this case in Australia? Social media companies will tip toe any line they can because there is so much money to be made and they want every dollar.
PornHub? They just blocked access in 17 states instead of even trying to worry about age verification. They’re still getting their users, but now they’re coming over VPN.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/pornhub-florida-vpn-google-searches-skyrocket/
And, Pornhub can probably play the waiting game in those states as well. Enough people in those places will probably get pissed off enough eventually to pressure their legislators into walking those laws back. It might just take a year or two. I imagine everyone involved already knows, but the idiots who wrote the laws need to wait for the headlines to cool off a bit before they can backpedal, in order to save face.
I imagine Facebook or someone of similar size could do the same in Aus. All they have to do is refuse to serve anything to Aussie IP addresses except a message that says, “Sorry, we can’t serve your country anymore because of a law passed by [legislator.] Remember, this is all his fault.”
Politicians infamously do not give a flying fuck about the opinions of minors, but if they piss everyone else off too the people responsible will either be out on their ears next election or buried under an avalanche of nasty letters from their 40-and-up constituency.
The commissioner is supposed to come up with guidelines for what is a reasonable check, so we find out when they come up with it I guess 🤷
it’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.
“Awww shucks everyone, looks like we don’t get to have internet privacy after all. Don’t worry, it’s FOR THE CHILDREN.”
Another way to think about this: Why should you have to give random companies your ID because Australian teens need to prove their age?
Yeah, someone should tell the guy at the bar checking IDs to piss off too. And what’s with these fucks at the pharmacy demanding to see my medical license. They shouldn’t be hassling me because someone else might be writing illegal scripts.
They’ve set it up so it’s a legal mess. The platforms aren’t given any mechanism to actually perform verifications (no double blind id system, for example) but are legally on the hook for each and every under-16 on the platforms. A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, “Nah mate, we just won’t do business in Oz anymore. Bye.”
Vanishingly few business make a “New York only” version of their product because it’s simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.
It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.
Platforms love to use this threat… “if you regulate us we’ll just withdraw services in your jurisdiction”. They never do, and governments shouldn’t respond to threats like that in any case. If one or other platform were to restrict services in Aus, it would just increase the potential revenue for some other platform.
Sure, but on the flip side I’m fine either way. Watching either a megacorporation or an out of touch nanny-state government get fucked is just about equivalent in my books. We could use a lot more of both, and I don’t even live in Australia.
Meta, for instance, wants to cease operations anywhere on the planet? Insert Willy Wonka meme here: No, stop, don’t… Bye…
A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Why?
Because how would you do that on desktop? Or on a degoogled phone? Or if the download was via an apk from elsewhere?
Probably because the internet isn’t an app store
… I didn’t say it was.
The quote says that app stores should be responsible for verifying age, but social media is not limited to apps - they’re just one of multiple user interfaces for interacting with social networks. So that alone cannot solve the problem.
Sorry for the confusion
Because the app store isn’t the only way to install an app. It is trivially easy to side load apps and it’s well within the technologic skillset of the average 12 year old.
They can also just use a web browser.
Magic. That is the only way they can enforce this drivel.
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Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.
An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.
What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.
Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn’t disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn’t really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that’s a very real issue.
I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.
Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn’t going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It’s just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.
This is a false dichotomy.
You can regulate social media platforms and have great infrastructure.
Your own childhood sounds tough, but advocating for social media as a way to mitigate shitty communities is a weird take.
This is false false dichotomy.
Privacy protection laws do regulate social media.
Based on what I’ve seen over the last few years, it’s the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
Now do 16+
In case you forgot, Lemmy is social media
Honestly - fine with me, tear it all down.
Sounds like youre deleting your account soon.
Goodbye.
You’re talking to a person who likely deleted their Reddit account, don’t test them, they’ll follow through
😆
Old people can use Tor
antisocial media
Let’s ban centralized for profit social media.
Le bad
Huh? It is a kind of forum. Not even close to social media.
It’s exactly social media, just because it’s the one you like doesn’t make it less so.
“websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” -oxford
“forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)” - Merriam Webster
Lemmy and forums fit the bill pretty clearly.
That’s sounds like everything on the world wide web if not the entire internet.
I mean, not really. Your online banking or bill pay site isn’t social media, neither are (most) storefronts. A simple site disseminating information ( https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a bit of a contrived example ) has no direct engagement or content creation between users and no community forming.
But it makes sense that most of the hobby/fun website and applications will be social media because the primary purpose of the Internet is to connect computers and by extension humans and humans like to interact with each other, the main thing the internet does is let us talk together. It’s not implicitly a bad thing that we do it.
While the term didn’t exist at the time, I would also classify newsgroups and BBS’s as social media as well.
And forums predated the term “social media.”
I wholeheartedly and respectfully disagree. Social media focuses on following individuals, not topics. There is no incentive to follow or be followed on a forum, and being pseudonymous really kills the “social network” part of that definition.
Edit: typos
I’ve had this discussion with many people. Just because that’s how you define it, doesn’t mean that is how it’s actually defined. We aren’t talking about your definition, we are talking about a government’s decision.
I think it would be foolish to expect any governing or organization to classify sites/services like lemmy or reddit as something other than social media, when they are literally completely made up of users interacting which each other with all of the content being posted by users.
Also, you can argue about your definition all day, but the Australian government’s decision included Reddit, lemmy likely has not yet been affected due to the gov just not knowing of its existence.
Do you really want 15 year olds on lemmy?
Do you think they aren’t?
It feels like half the people posting here are <16.
On ml it’s a requirement.
I’d prefer 17+. I think it would be fun to have only 1 year on social media.
Right as they reach peak awkward jagoff.
😁
It has been 3 hours as of this comment, and Spitzspot has yet to delete their account. I guess they don’t really believe what they say.
I’m not Australian
What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?
My instance is in Australia, and the new laws affect social media like Lemmy. The hard part is that there apparently isn’t much guidance on how to follow the law. Do you have to use ID? Is a location-specific popup making you state that you’re 16+ enough? Nobody knows.
If you are the sole user on your own ActivityPub site running on your own server, can it even be called a social media site?
I think a mastodon instance started asking aussies to send a pic of them with a bottle of vodka or a pack of smokes.
We are yet to see. My guess is they charge the kid for providing social media to an underaged user (themselves). Will be very interesting to watch ngl. Also idk how they gonna implement it cos i sure as shit aint handing over my id to the social media companies.
I’m not sure that a self hosted ActivityPub site with a single user could reasonably be called a social media site. I wonder how the law defines a social media site.
The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.
Yes.
Fair dinkem mate. How are they gonna regulate this?
Dinkum
Cheese mate
Are they still allowed on Lemmy?
Australian legislators probably don’t even know that Lemmy exists.
If the law was well made, it wouldn’t applly to websites under a certain threshold of active users.
I mean you can’t expect octopusforums.co with 40 cephalopod enthusiasts to ID check australians can you.
I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but here in the USA the large websites write laws like that specifically to prevent competition from small websites.
Better make an octopus Facebook group instead.
Yes, big companies have lobbying which makes rules basically horrible for small companies.
The Megacorps don’t mind “red tape” because all they have to do is hire a lawyer and bribe the right people but small companies suffer the actual consequences.
Ie. In the country I live in, if I want to sell chicken eggs from my backyard chickens, I need to submit 3 forms that are basically impossible to without hiring a lawyer every YEAR, and pay for an inspection check every 2 years which costs a lot. That kind of environment which applies to basically any action a company wants to do makes it impossible for anyone but mid-large companies to do things.
I’m just waiting until they remember why borders are a thing that exists.
this isn’t for the safety of kids; it’s to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.
Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you’re right that loss of community is a byproduct.
Like, I’m not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry
No offence but that’s shortsighted to be generous. I feel like half of lemmy will carry on about social media being cancer, the frequent articles citing negative effects of SM on mental health and the fact that multiple social media companies are accused of propagating misinformation (Zuckerberg face sure is in lemmy a lot lately for some reason). Like Zuck has all but greenlit harassing lgbt+ people on FB and the SM ban is to stop gay kids finding a community? Please. Corporate SM is a blight and before someone says lemmy/reddit check the mod logs or the fact that lemmy only got CSAM under control relatively recently before suggesting it’s fine for kids.
Besides, LGTB kids aren’t the only ones who need the internet to find refuge
