Unenforcible Law.
Gotta require ID verifications and ban all VPNs in order to actually be enforcible.
Surely, the website owners would never sell your information, right? Right?
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
792 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
60520 readers
3864 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The ID verification is the purpose. Keeping minors off is a smokescreen, tracking every citizen on social media is the real reason for this law.
Banning the Three Letter Word is unenforceable too. If you ban Open*** and Wireguard - too bad, China has done that and people developed obfuscation methods. Even if you try to ban talking about them, they won't go extinct. If there's a supply, there's a demand.
Preach
Gotta require ID verifications
that's exactly what they are "evaluating" now along with "biometric (age and voice) estimation".
government, politicians and media are constructing a parallel reality for themselves.
Introducing friction with massive population groups like this is actually effective at bringing numbers down.
Take the porn ID stuff in the US. Yes VPN usage is up but traffic is down as well. Not everyone is going to take the extra steps.
Put it on the parents. That's enforceable, and the root of the problem..
The problem is not teens accessing social media, they’re just bored or don’t know any better
The problem is what adults post on those social media.
If anything teens should have social media of their own, where no elder boomers are allowed
There was a German social network a few years ago that did exactly that (before Facebook was available in German)
They had SchülerVZ for kids/teens, then they had StudiVZ for university students and finally they had MeinVZ for adults. The problem was, that they weren’t interconnected at all apart from the option to move your account to the next platform. So if you were just starting to study but you still had friends that were in school, you could’t keep in touch with them.
They need them to get indoctrinated in the public education system first.
Should be left up to the parents.
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.
It boggles the mind how many times a higher up comes up with some idea (in any context, not just politicians), and never stops to answer the question: "how is this going to work?".
She'll be right mate, don't worry about it 🇦🇺
The plan is their mygov id system and this has been years in the making.
Australian governments (both lib and labor) are on board with this and have been salivating over the idea of an internet more locked down than South Korea’s.
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.
load more comments
(15 replies)
load more comments
(12 replies)
Now do 16+
load more comments
(5 replies)
Oh those poor kids.
I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
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.
Outside. It may take society a bit of time to adjust, just like it took a bit of time before kids not being outside became normal, but it will happen. Kids run around my town all the time unsupervised, nobody is calling the cops, and parents are looking out for each others kids. Just because some places have gone off the deep end doesn't mean everywhere has.
You can message your friends without all the misinformation and self-harm promoting algorithms
They didn't say anything about that
They asked what they can do
It can be the same as they do now just without the damage
Social media is harming them in that case.
They should go the fuck outside, what you said isnt true at all. Also, kids arent buying their own phones and internet, the parents are.
Hang on. Where I'm Australia have cops been called on kids walking around the neighbourhood? The kids around my neighbourhood go around on their bicycles, skateboard and play in the parks. A few of them graffiti and others put up ads to walk dogs for a fee.
That said, this law is dumb. Australia is so hostile to the tech industry.
Even excluding everything other than computers, you can still play games, talk to friends, code etc.
load more comments
(10 replies)
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.
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.
Good luck with that, people and politicians love cars, parking lots and highways, and the media is demonising kids as criminals.
Exactly, which is why they're doing performative shit like this
load more comments
(4 replies)
Australia is the first nation to fail to ban social media for under 16s.
Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
view more: next ›