ah yea that’ll work
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.
i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything
you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.
if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.
i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly
so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed
but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?
that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.
but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.
As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.
100% agree. I think it’s a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.
thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path
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.
I mean, yeah. But also, this isn’t really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.
And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.
Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it’s an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).
But it IS different. If you compare to alcohol for example, age checks are performed in shops. No record of those is made or available to anyone. There is no centralized infrastructure related to age checks that could be abused in the future to track everyone who buys alhocol.
Yeah but if you think about to, from a law perspective that’s an implementation detail. Sure, from our perspective it’s a really important one, but from the perspective of a lawmaker it’s about whether it should be done, not how it’ll be done in execution (different branches of state, basically).
You are correct that from juridical point of view the difference does not seem great.
Hopefully politicians listen to experts of different fields.
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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
It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.
Well we agree but it’s only as much better as it is effective…because when it’s not it’s giving the impression of doing something while in reality it’s legitimizing the stripping of the autonomy.
“best worst case?”
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?
I’d assume the law would include federated social media. And while that wouldn’t prevent underage Australians to sign up with instances hosted elsewhere, it will impose restrictions on local ones, thus hurting the federation effort.
Take this social media law, plus the software backdoor nonsense from a few years ago, and I can’t help but see a clear message emerging from legislators to Australian developers who’d seek to build great digital spaces and tools: Do not domicile anything in this country. Do not host anything on servers in this country. Expect hostility from authorities toward the anonymity, security, and privacy of the people using your code.
I hope you’re wrong, and they’re going to arbitarily apply the law to King Doge and Zuck, with everyone else getting ignored.
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.
Wait what? The NDP supports this?!??
Unfortunately. NDP have lost the plot in multiple ways under Singh.
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.
Like what?
Often the things that seem mundane actually aren’t
Like vaping is just tobacco 2.0… and we don’t need everyone to have easy access to guns (especially not kids). Networks like Facebook are so unmoderated at the moment they should be held to account.
Asbestos and engineered stone? Enough said
And that’s mainly everything I can think of that’s banned that I can think of…
Like vaping is just tobacco 2.0
What is this, govern me like a strict old nan?
Is dancing allowed down there as well or is it a gateway to thievery or something?
Oh, I forgot, Lemmy is only lefty and free when they aren’t being told what to boycott by someone else. I guess we do have something in common with Trump voters.
Nooo, imposing our will on the public is ok under some circumstances!
FUCKING SHEEP
My life. My way. Fuck a government telling me what to do.
I guess I am the crazy one. It’s just human nature to want to be controlled and be told what to do. Viva authoritarianism. Dom me harder, Donny.
Vaping companies like Vape4life were writing petitions on Facebook arguing that Vaping was great to help smokers stop smoking.
Meanwhile, the same dodgy companies were selling vapes to 10 year olds online (they had NOTHING in place to stop underage people buying them). What possible health use could underage people have for vapes?
Meanwhile, every vaping fuckwit around was smoking vapes illegally on trains and in heavily populated public areas. And every asshole (including my ex housemate) was vaping inside (I literally told her not to. I want to do high altitude mountaineering in the future so I need my lungs. And she was getting super cheap rent). When you tell them to do it outside, they always say “vaping is just water, it’s perfectly safe”.
If you want to “eat the rich”, you should be telling Smoking companies to fuck off. They’re lying to their userbase, whilst their exec’s become wealthy millionaires. And when their clients get cancer (or the people around them get cancer), they run down the clock on the lawsuit so they don’t lose any money.
Fuck Tabacco and cigarette companies.
Also, I had some absolute wanker the other day throw a lit cigerette on my nature strip (I was amazed, and I was sitting in the car), on a hot day. I’m lucky I saw him do it and he didn’t start a grass fire (and yet, if one was started, he’d be responsible, not the tobacco company). Everyone in cigarette companies knows this happens and could provide a way to extinguish them in the box, but instead, they know people are chucking them on the ground
i have attached the photo of the guy (if anyone in Victoria happens to recognise him)
And it is super common for people to throw cigarettes out of their car, leave them on the ground, or throw their vape cartridges on the ground. Smokers and Cigerette companies had EVERY opportunity to be respectful. There might be some respectful ones, but, there are plenty who aren’t
The vaping industry likes to argue that they are safer than other tobacco products, and don’t deserve to be regulated the same way, but the evidence suggests otherwise. It’s a fine example of why we should be happy that regulations exist at all.
No part of my argument had anything to do with safety or health.
A person’s autonomy is their business. Leave them well alone. Their life, their path.
Or I guess alcohol doesn’t have a purpose then, and we can get rid of it too?
Everyone is really concerned, GHiLA. We think you might have an addiction. But we’re here to help. Please remember the bans are only for under 18s. You have to remember. Look at your wife, she’s dying of… asphyxiation or something. Because you keep hotboxing the bedroom.
Oh I’ve got like three at least, that I know about.
You guys are one of them.
uwu
The fact is it impacts everyone else, the public services will have to deal with the fall out.
For real. A whole fucking country infantilizing themselves. Pathetic to see bootlicking at this level.
And it’s not even a good government. I guess I could empathize, if the government was not corrupt and delivering fantastic quality services. But they’re shitting on these people, and telling them to say thank you for it.
Wow. You’re such a rebel. /s
If you want to fight authority, start by fighting against the rich assholes causing 30% of stonemasons(and others) to get silicosis from engineered stone. The guys making the money aren’t the ones getting sick. Help them live long enough to get justice and get paid.
Fight against the companies and rich assholes who are still giving lots of people cancer by using asbestos products to save money (and are putting asbestos in products and not declaring it). The people manufacturing this shit are getting rich, not the people installing it (or who have it installed)
And fight back by helping people live longer, so they can get justice against tabacco companies for lying to them and making shitty claims like claiming menthol cigarettes are medicinal. Companies like Vape4lyf had nothing in place to prevent sales of vapes to kids whilst starting petitions claiming they were needed for quitting smoking (what possible use could kids have for vapes other than to START vaping). Every shitty vape company out there is basically advertising their products as safe
Do you think the execs give a shit if your kid dies? Nope, they have lawyers on retainer, and they’ve become increasingly good at fighting any lawsuits and running down the clock. Do you think they give a shit if the people around other smokers die from second hand smoke? Nope, because you can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt a specific company caused an issue. People are suffering.
Nothing says “badass” like a guy who is willing to fondle the balls of the marlboro man whilst he lies to you and dodges responsibility. Vaping is Tabacco 2.0. They’re making the exact same claims they did in the past for other products.
I’d suggest you grow a pair and stand up for people. That takes courage. It’s not bootlicking. What you’re doing is bending over for millionaires who give no fucks about you, and defending them
Prohibition never works. Even if you put an anti-corporate spin on it.
How do you figure?
Seems to be working against Asbestos companies.
And if anyone tries to cut up engineered stone onsite, it will be obvious. In fact, companies are getting actively fined. And my mate who got silicosis I’m fairly sure got a payout.
Seems to be working fine with our Gun control.
Seems to be working for lots of food items
Seems to be working for lots of things. You simply don’t realise it works, because you’re not aware of them.
If Vaping is banned, shitheads aren’t going to be vaping in public blowing smoke in our faces. And, if they’re smoking at home, people like myself can kick them out. I’m not too fussed about the ones who are respectable (I had a housemate who smoked weed, but they did it outside).
Do you really think allow free sale of highly addictive drugs like meth is a good idea? Fuck No.
You keep telling yourself you’re a badass fighting against bootlickers or whatever. But you’re actually just a pawn for the multi-billion dollar Tobacco industry
The fact that you think banning asbestos in construction is similar to prohibition is evidence your education system is fucked too.
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’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, we need better terms than “social media.” Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don’t think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.
I don’t know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the “personal social media,” not glorified internet forums.
I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.
Those kids already have exploiters; their parents. The right to communication should be granted to all, and especially the most vulnerable.
They have schools, churches, neighbors, other family, etc etc. There are plenty of organized groups online looking for kids to exploit.
You’re assuming that they’ll find good people online. If they don’t they’ll end up much worse than when they started.
Kids are people and they deserve a chance to try.
I live in New York City. Old timers here remember when 42nd Street was called ‘the Minnesota Strip.’ It got that name because thousands of young people [some as young as 12] would jump on buses and come to New York to live the dream. They’d be met by pimps who routinely patrolled the bus terminal and quickly gathered up as many as they could.
Ok boomer
So, you’re saying my point is relevant, but you’ll ignore it because it involves historical facts?
What they consider as “social media”? Is it every site where you can communicate with others?
This seems fucked if its so.
While specific platforms haven’t been named in the law, 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.
Youtube: offers Shorts and aggressively markets them at any demo that responds well to Tik Tok, competing for a more toxic comments section with years of experience.
WhatsApp: all the group chats and online bullying that you banned facebook to get away from, 1:1, day of the ban.
Should we identify society root causes and address those? 🤔No. No, it’s the kids who are wrong /s
It’s the parents who are wrong.
Parents shouldn’t allow their kids to use social media until they can handle it. Some kids don’t have issues, whereas others end up experiencing severe depression largely as a result of too much or too little social media exposure. Parents should be the ones responsible here, both for deciding the age and for culpability if they knowingly contribute to problems by either intentionally over or under exposing their children to social media.
But at no point should the government be deciding things like ages, because enforcement would necessitate privacy violations of either the parents (if they need to allow an underage account) of the children. Screw that, let the parents decide and hold them accountable for any abuse.
You are arguing against yourself. In the first paragraph you say that the parents should keep kids from social media.
In the second, you say that it would be a violation of privacy if parents would keep kids from social media.
Kids need policing, it’s going to need to be done by the parents no matter what the laws are. Personally, I don’t think the laws matter much in this regard.
In the first paragraph you say that the parents should keep kids from social media.
Not necessarily. It’s up to the parents to know what their kids can handle.
Keeping kids off social media doesn’t have to be a privacy violation. If you don’t trust your kids to follow the rules, don’t give them access to devices they could use to violate them. If I give my kids access to a device, it’s because I trust them with that device. I don’t put any parental controls on it, either I trust them or they don’t get the device. It’s none of my business what they do with devices I trust them to have.
Kids need discipline and trust, not policing. If they break the rules, discipline them (take devices away and whatnot), but don’t surveil them.
And yeah, the laws don’t matter as written because good parents will help their kids circumvent bad laws. My problem is with the government thinking it has a say in how I raise my children. The government should only step in if there’s abuse, but other than that, they should stick to advising parents by providing high quality research to parents.
I basically agree, with the caveat that Youth Liberation requires buy in from all the adult influences in the Youth’s life and all that follows…yeah otherwise no notes
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?
In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.
The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.
Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.
So the bussiness won’t have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.
What if I’m also uncomfortable with the tech company knowing what country I’m a citizen of?
They know it already.
IP reveals general location.
Sure, and my IP is something I can control (VPN). I also travel, and I’m certainly not a citizen of each country I visit.
This kind of control tend to be ip based, like cookies in the eu. So if they don’t know they won’t know. And if they know means that they knew. Nothing changes on that regard.
That depends on the law. For example, it’s possible that the US could require Meta to verify ages regardless of nationality, so you the EU (for example) would be subject to it.
I’m not saying that’s how any of these laws work, I’m merely saying that it’s possible. If enough people sidestep the law by using a VPN, I could countries use a heavier hand (e.g. verify everyone or don’t do business here).
I will always oppose these types of laws. I set up my WiFi to connect over a VPN to the next state over because my state has ID laws for porn and social media. It’s annoying and increases latency a bit (only like 10ms), so I’ll oppose them even if I can sidestep them.
Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.
I DGAF about your kids.
I DGAF about your kids.
Preach!
One of the craziest wtf moment of my life resulted from an oversharing parent.
At a hot summer day a few years back someone posted a picture of them barbequing in their backyard to our company’s “off topic” teams chat. Nothing unusual. I was over at a friends place so I send back a picture of us sitting in lawnchairs having a beer. In comes the third colleague, first time father with a roughly 1.5 year old at the time. So he posts a picture of his kid running around in his backyard. Completly naked, full frontanl nudity.
It took me a minute to recollect and I messaged him to please take down the picture. I know he didn’t mean any harm and was just sharing his hot-summer-weekend expirence … and he did realise his blunder and took it down. But wtf mate?
After that I immediately googled how to clear my teams’ app image cache …
Yeah I agree with you on this. It’ll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don’t have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.
Frankly, decentralized networks make it even harder to take content down.
Wouldn’t it be easier to take content down if the app was not federated? I don’t know for sure but couldn’t you have a completely private instance only for the people you know?
Sure, if it is already private. But if it is not, then it gets copied to different instances and so if the original post gets removed, it is up to each instance to follow and when.
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.
I don’t know how they are going to do over there.
Here the plan for the same goal is force any social media company to request a digital certificate when entering, or directly overtaking the ip of the social media and force a certificate check to let the user through. This certificates would be expedited by the government to people over certain age.
The haven’t implemented yet, as they were going to start using the system to ban porn for minors and got a lot of backslash.
It’s technologically doable, some kid will always find a way to enter but vast majority will not (next to a bunch of adults that will stop using them because they cannot be bothered with the same system). Moral considerations aside.
It’s technologically doable
I’d disagree here. Sure in theory you could design some system that authenticates every user on every connection but in practice it would be impossible to maintain without complete authoritarian oversight like North Korea. Even closed authoritarian countries fail to achieve this (like Iran or China).
This would cost billions of not trillions in implementation, oversight overhead and economic product loss. That money would be much more effective in carrot approach of supporting mental health institutions and promoting wholesome shared culture, anti bullying campaigns etc.
It’s not a new problem either. We know for a fact that the latter is the better solution and yet here we are…
Come on, this is silly. You can disagree with it politically but technically it would work fine. I already have a digital ID issued by the government for doing online tax returns. Validating a social media account against that ID would be no more difficult than letting people sign in with Google or whatever. There will always technically be a way to get around it but 99% of people won’t bother.
Nah not a good comparison. Once there’s market people will find a way to easily corrupt this. Remember that this is a 3 way interaction: government, private company and private citizen - the opportunities for bypass are basically endless here. You are comparing it with a 2 way market between government and private citizen which has no incentive to break the system.
teen go to website
please enter your birthdate
1/1/2000
welcome!
I’m well old enough to satisfy these checks and I also do this. If I’m feeling productive, I’ll pick a random date.
Lawyer sues tech company
But we asked for the birthday
Lawyer points to law text
Company fined
I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
Facebook/Meta has developed software to estimate the age from a video.
I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
Comes with the territory. The point is to control who has access to what information so that they don’t get wrong ideas.
Trusting your face to Facebook is just as terrifying, thanks.
(Plus I have concerns as someone who still looks teenage in her 20s)
if you think AI software will be able to differentiate between a 15 year old and 16 year old then I have this cool bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.
This is delusional to the point where it feels like we’re literally devolving.
I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
The senate inquiry outlined the two likely solutions :
-
Uploading ID to the website.
-
3D face scanning. This will include continual monitoring so if another person comes into view they will have to face scan in. Remember, its prohibited for chidren to even watch prohibited content with their parents.
Lol those options harm children
How can it possibly be legal to 3D face scan a child, especially if it needs to be authenticated by a remote server somewhere.
I can only ever see option 1 working
-
A large part of this will help maintain liability for harm to young people. How ages is verified is irrelevant
How ages are verified are irrelevant? Until a whole collection of faces or government IDs inevitably leaks!
Are you over 16: Yes/No.
That wasnt difficult.
If this would indeed be the case, I would be really happy.
They have no specified otherwise so its a case of why would they waste money doing itherwise
Problematic for who, the tech companies? They’re practically printing money. Let them spend it on actual solutions to issues that are causing problems for the World.
It forces them to implement solutions that make having anonymous accounts impossible.
it’s not a problem that can be solved by tech.
Problematic for the children who are having their rights taken away. This change bans children from connecting with their friends in other countries, other states, and even other cities.
Even something as simple as hopping in a voice call with your squad to play Deep Rock Galactic is now illegal for 15 year olds. That’s ridiculous. The fact that they can break the law is great, but they shouldn’t have to break the law in order to do something so harmless.
What about using Zoom to speak to a doctor or therapist? What about contacting queer support resources through social media? What about using a text based suicide hotline? According to the law, that’s social media.
