As an Australian parent this is really pleasing to see. It's clearly inspired heavily by the work of Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge et al. The kids are not okay and the main thing stopping a worried parent from addressing it is that "all the other kids are on it". If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices? Collective action is needed and this is what it looks like.
We don't need watertight compliance, verification or enforcement - just raise the level of difficulty for kids to get on and create a culture among kids, parents and schools that social media is not allowed. This will be enough breathing room for parents to say no and kids not to feel like they're the only ones missing out.
> If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices?
Yes. That is literally your job as the parent. If there was some teenage trend of injecting heroin, nobody would accept "but my kid's social life might suffer" as a reason to not stop them from doing heroin. It similarly does not suffice as a reason to not stop your kids from using social media. If it really is that bad for your kids, you have a duty to stop them regardless of what other kids (and their parents) do.
Yes, but because the entire world agrees that heroin is bad (similarly to social media) governments have laws to restrict its access.
As for the job part. There is so much stuff kids don't need that other parents cave into, that unless you have the means, willpower and energy to find alternative peer groups, schools, teaching mechanisms, your kids _can_ become social pariahs if there isn't sufficient like minded parents in the community.
Of course you want your kids to internalise self-wort, a sense of confidence, and independence. Hoping they follow your mold and not a potentially damaging peer-groups. But that doesn't mean that some regulation from a body (government/school) isn't helpful. We live in communities.
Being a parent is not easy, and fights like these are really difficult. As a human you have only so much fight in you, and if a majority of parents adhere to the same rules this becomes so much easier to enforce.
Government rules set the moral bar, yes they are not enforceable but it creates a standard that most parents will adhere to.
As a dutch parent i wish we had the same rules, my kids are young enough that its easy to ban social media, but its getting harder as they are slowly becoming teenager.
As a parent I literally support bans of social media for under-16s AND I also do my job as a parent: my kids get a smart phone at 16, until then they have a feature/dummy phone (which they hide from peers because they are ashamed to show it).
Not having a smartphone would make my kids "social pariahs" for sure.
We gave them phones fairly early, but locked down. It was not really a huge problem when they were younger, but social media (no, we shouldnt even call it is, its is 110% ADS FOR CHILREN!) is getting to be a real problem now I feel.
Why dont you use any kind of adblock? Why don't you speak with them about harmful consequences of algorithms? Instead of ban that noone learn from, communicate issues.
The point is clearly that you are causing other serious harms by doing so, unlike with the heroin example. You can’t tear kids away from a huge part of their social lives without serious consequences. Coordinated action means it’s not a choice between two terrible options.
Social media is not social anymore. The algorithmic feeds messed up almost all utility.
Facebook was a great platform for local communities and democracy but later turned into a threat to civilization more or less when they introduced the 'algo' 2010 something and wanted to get money for 'promoted posts'.
Not only that, at some point the vampires will form a government for vampires which will be at odds and at war with the non-government vampire and there will be individual vampires that disagree with and feel a lack of representation from their vampire government.
Wouldn't be better to educate children about deadly consequences of using heroin and what does it makes to your body? Noone is learn from ban, and enforcement of regulation also cost much more money.
According the stats in Haidt's book, between 2010 and 2020 girls in the US saw a 188% increase in emergency room visits for self harm per capita - never mind the less extreme presentations of mental health issues. Imagine you have an anxious, depressed and potentially suicidal child. This is a horrifying situation. How do you feel about being the hard-arse parent knowing that they will be furious? Is that actually your best move in that moment? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to make that kind of choice?
Tell me you're not a parent without telling me you're not a parent!
This only works if there is broad support from the entire social group, meaning school and all (or most) of the other parents. If you try this all alone, all you can accomplish is to apply more suffering to your poor child.
For us, here in silicon valley, fortunately that broad support existed in elementary school. Not a single kid had a phone, so it was the norm.
In middle school the support is still broad, although less absolute. A few kids have phones, but they are outliers, so it's still normal not to have one.
> This only works if there is broad support from the entire social group, meaning school and all (or most) of the other parents.
Which there won't be. Most of these kids have "social media" accounts because their parents allowed it.
To be clear, "social media" for the purposes of this legislation is a VERY broad term that encompasses any almost platform that allows one user to communicate with another.
> If there was some teenage trend of injecting heroin, nobody would accept "but my kid's social life might suffer" as a reason to not stop them from doing heroin.
You know that's actually one of the reasons they made heroin illegal? So parents wouldn't be the bad guy when they stopped their kids from shooting up /s
And as a parent that duty can be outsourced into legislation and policework. Everyone has a fulltime job- and its okay to limit liberties and delegate.
Pro tip! If that is how you feel, don't have children. Wanting to outsource your childs upbringing to the government because it is "annoying" or "hard work" indicates that you are not ready to have a child.
If a parent forms that view, they should call Child and Youth Protection Services or the equivalent in their state, and offer to delegate the rest of the parenting to the state.
Parents are almost as addicted as children and often take dozens of photos of every tiny event and post it on IG without permission of other children who are there in the pictures. Many kids have their own channels which are promoted by parents and their identities are based around them. I do what I can (don't give them devices till they're 18 etc.) but it's hard when the whole society around you is pushing the other way. Some kind of societal regulation like what's happened in Australia will be a good thing. It will add friction to kids getting onto these platforms and that will significantly slow down adoption.
> Many kids have their own channels which are promoted by parents and their identities are based around them.
What kind of sociatal cast do they belong to? I'd imagine this is mainly a thing among wannabe elite, wannabe 'influencers'? Like failed pro sports parent forcing their children to go for it to.
This perspective highlights a key aspect often overlooked in debates about such laws: the social dynamics of parenting. You’re absolutely right that the “all the other kids are on it” pressure can make it almost impossible for individual parents to set boundaries without isolating their child
But all the other kids will simply be on the next thing. They're on social media because that's accessible, but the assumption is the demand for such things will vanish because you banned them?
I'm (apparently) one of the few millenials who seems to actually remember and empathize with my teenage self, because the early forms of social media were something I really wanted. I posted on Usenet, used ICQ etc. None of these things were easily accessible, but they fulfilled a need.
The situation being addressed is basically "I am taking no steps to limit my child from access to something I already disapprove of" and I don't see how this would address anything. You got them off Snapchat or TikTok but why wouldn't word of mouth just find a new service to act as a virtual third space? Social media works just fine in a web browser.
Basically there's a strain of assumption which could be summarized as "children aren't smart enough to use Mastodon!" as though to do so is not just "visit this URL here's the QR code".
It's a lowest energy state approach. The hope is that the hurdle will be raised high enough that enough kids will go to another outlet that is less harmful.
Personally, I think the cat is out of the bag. The information dense but fractured culture we are in makes it so kids will find otherways to communicate and share 'memes' (original sense of the world) and that this is whack-a-mole.
But, for many kids it will be enough to at least allow the parent's some appeal to authority to minimise their kids screen time and access to social media.
The internet still exists outside of social media sites designed to keep you there. I hope kids under 16 get addicted to anything else and don't turn to social media when they're old enough.
As an Australian parent myself, let me say this legislation is useless and you need to stop hiding behind stupid government legislation pandering to the lowest common denominator in place of your parenting.
The “the government won’t let me let you use social media” is one of the most stupid and ridiculous arguments I’ve heard a mature adult make to a juvenile. Your kid is likely to see it as spineless, then go ahead and make a fake login to their favourite social media site without telling you.
I have a 14 year old and a soon to be 17 year old. Just have a conversation with them about social media. Now they are just going to hide their use of it with you and you won’t be able to guide them when their use of it goes wrong.
I’m not for this legislation, but your argument doesn’t hold up.
If people are hiding it, that in itself normalises that people are not using social media.
That’s the point; taking someone’s phone away makes them an outcast. If no one at school is “allowed” to have a phone, then it’s normalised, it’s normal to not have one.
It is pandering to the minority, but your argument hides behind insults to avoid facing the reality which is that it will normalise people not being on social media, which will make it easier for parents to ban their kids from using social media.
This isn’t some black market crap where the kids are nipping down to the servo to buy some vapes and get a slap on the wrist if their caught; if they’re banned and they’re caught, their account will get suspended.
That's instant death on SM, because of early adopter network effects.
It really will do something. You don’t understand the dynamics on SM if you think otherwise.
Whether you agree it’s good or not, is certainly open to debate. What it will do is open to debate; hidden group chats and an escape to platforms that are “technically not SM”, who knows… but the current landscape of SM & TikTok follower accumulation will change, dramatically.
Except it wasn’t up for debate. It was opened for public scrutiny on the 22nd, submissions closed on the 23rd, then it was put through Committee (who asked for only 1 or 2 page submissions because they themselves didn’t have time to review it properly) and was initially put to the House on the 26th and passed on the 29th.
The Act has no provisions for checking ID (that will be decided by the eSafety commissioner with no debate or discussion on the mechanisms they choose), and it doesn’t even define which social media companies will be affected.
To say this was up for debate is ridiculous. There was no debate!
I didn’t take you out of context. You literally say that whether the Act is good or not is up for debate. Before legislation is passed, it needs public consultation and debate. There literally was no public debate and now this is law!
Things like:
1. It will be trivial to bypass the restrictions.
2. The argument given in support of this Act by the OP was that it gives parents an excuse to prevent their kids from using social media. That’s going to work out great.
3. The mechanisms for verifying ID are not defined and will be decided without public debate. Adults will be forced to get a government controlled digital ID, or alternately social media companies will need to collect your official documentation to prove your age. Neither of these are palatable.
None of this has been considered. None of these concerns were allowed to be expressed by interested parties and the general public with sufficient time for comment.
That more than sucks. This is a government who wants to shove badly flawed legislation onto the Australian people because they are immensely unpopular.
An independent. Labor is more worried about the Greens and Independents than they are about the LNP.
Albanese and Co, who I voted for and quite liked, have shown that they need to be forced into a hung parliament to prevent their worst excesses. A huge pity.
"The Act has no provisions for checking ID (that will be decided by the eSafety commissioner with no debate or discussion on the mechanisms they choose), and it doesn’t even define which social media companies will be affected."
As an Australian parent, congratulations: you are the problem.
I for one was on a public panel with politicians discussing how ridiculous this proposal was, a couple of months ago, before it passed.
The government gives all children email addresses while simultaneously banning them from social media. Only a bureaucracy could do this with a straight face.
IMHO as a technology-engaged parent the answer to complexity online (and in the entire world) for young people is education, not "ask the Nanny state to change the rules".
Timelessly compressed: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin.
> The government gives all children email addresses while simultaneously banning them from social media. Only a bureaucracy could do this with a straight face.
If you think it's email that is causing youth mental health issues then I see why you are confused about my enthusiasm.
Yeah sure, by that logic: what's next, ban networking for septuagenarians? Ban bingo as a dangerous gateway to online gambling? Ridiculous. Or perhaps the ultimate result: a brain license. You can comment online when you can construct a logical argument free of fallacy. Otherwise, stay in your hole. I'm sure society would be much better off with a Truman Show 'constabubble' for all, consuming rehashed and reverberated stereotypical pre-preference like spoonfed semi-souls locked in eternal preteen angst where the illiterati's pop-pinnacle of eloquence is dwelling on the artfully anticipative breathless pause before celebrating the only universally valid response: emotional offense and outrage at anyone or anything that can be construed as threatening the sacred illiterati-ignobubble. Stop being spoon-fed, grow the fork up, pick up the metaphoric knife and teach your kids to use it to pop their own bubble and dissect unfiltered reality: that's the one we actually live in.
It's very hard not to see the whole marketing of the legislation as an exercise in misdirection.
The media campaign was led by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd (who see a commercial opportunity in cutting a demographic from their competitors audience for advertisers), and the government's marketing of it entirely focused on children being restricted, avoiding until the last weeks an admission it actually meant all adults would have to undertake verification processes to use social media.
The gulf between the practical effect of the legislation (all adults are impacted) and the claimed intent (only children under 16 are the focus), is so large the claims shouldn't really be accepted at face value.
Combine that with the abuse of democratic process: what would usually be weeks of public feedback was shortened to 24 hours, and after passing the lower house the government attempted to force the legislation through in the senate with no debate, finally conceding to a brief 1 hour debate before passing it in the final hours of the last sitting day of the year.
When opposition arose earlier in the week to the idea this is about a backdoor mechanism to force the government's recently rebranded myId (from myGovId), the government hastily made changes to the bill and loudly said social media companies would not be allowed to ask for government id, in physical or digital form.
But that itself was misdirection. A clause was added saying this does not apply if an alternative option is also provided.
But age assurance based on biometrics from webcams has poor accuracy, as one senator argued in the final debate. Fresh-faced youths will have no option but to go for the myID solution on their 16th birthday - which as that same senator pointed out is the age at which you can apply for a myID account.
On the topic of digital id and myID: it was also apparent that the Government seemingly feigned ignorance that this system, designed specifically for this purpose, would be the ideal and primary solution.
Yet we know just how much focus and energy has been going into designing these systems and working out how to get the public to accept them: witness this piece from 2018 [1].
It's of course fine to argue pros and cons of digital id, both philosophically, and in terms of specific implementation details, but that's not what happened here.
Everything clearly indicates the legislation was designed to sidestep any substantial debates on this topic.
What was also sidestepped was any reasonable discussion of specific implementation options. Instead we have vague details of an age assurance trial being run for many more months, with no specifics that help us understand how this legislation may work, or fail to work.
But didn't you know that social media is causing all of the problems we have right now? Haven't you seen the graph that shows society with no problems until social media, and now we have all the problems?
There are some ads targeting parents running on TV in the US about special accounts for under 16-yr-olds on Instagram.
It appears Big Tech has reason for concern when anyone interferes with their efforts to indoctrinate young people into their total takeover of the www.
Expecting an aggressive PR counteroffensive from Big Tech in response to experiments like Australia.
While I appreciate the sentiment of this legislation, removing social media access for everyone under 16 years to address the concerns of a few is a nanny state act. As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government. Additionally, I would suggest it won't address the actual issue. The named/identified social media companies will comply as required, younger internet users will simply go elsewhere (the internet is a big place after all) and therefore the problem will ultimately go unaddressed.
It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
For children, it is very important for them to build their social skills based on interactions with other kids and adults, rather than from social media. They must learn about the world from the world, rather than through a commercial filtered lens of a big tech company, that is focussed on clicks, views and profits.
True, its a nanny state move. But, in my view, it is absolutely essential, as big tech seldom seems to worry about their products and their effects on children.
Sometimes, when the problem is big, the action must also be big.
> It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
Also true for television. Old Media had the monopoly on opinion-guidance back then. Part of the (encouragement of the) negative reaction to social media is it's threat to the status quo, much like Australia's previous legislation to force Facebook and Google to pay old media for linking to their news articles.
Different groups of people will have different lists of things they don't like about society and where it's headed; violent video games, advertising, music videos (that tend to be soft-porn these days), internet browsing tracking. Where does a government draw the line on what to act on and what to leave to the responsibility of parents? (how does this help other agendas? Will this look like we're "doing something"? Will this score votes? which way is the breeze blowing on this topic?)
Social media is a concentrator. I'm not convinced it's a 'cause'. There seems to be an epidemic of (social) anxiety, and maybe Facebook is the cause, but to me it feels societally deeper. World leadership is demonstrably not "the best of us" (I'm not just saying that because of Trump), to me, it feels as if there's a pervasive attitude of "I'll get mine and fuck the rest of you", which predictably trickles throughout the society whose leaders portray that attitude. Social media being one outlet of this, but I see plenty of 'us vs. them' polemics in traditional media.
Just my theory. I'm already poking holes in it mentally, but anyway. I don't have any useful answers. I guess we'll see if this ban makes a difference.
I think it has the potential to basically ruin society as we know it, the amount of hysteria, hype, division, lies, distraction and hate it breeds is enormous.
I look at some of the stuff on Reddit, especially some of the right wing stuff, it's actually alarming the stuff people say, and believe on there. I know they are extreme examples but holy shit.
The ability to amplify falsehoods and certain narratives is ridiculous.
I remember reading 1984, and being terrified, some of the stuff I read in online communities makes me at least that scared and worse.
It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.
> It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.
But they banned "social media" not smartphones. If they actually banned smartphones, this regulation would be much easier to enforce.
But by just banning a select few apos, kids are just going to move onto the next app.
And not only that, it only bans kids from having an account, they can still view content while logged out.
So Im going to bet that this not be effective, not be enforcable.
If you're not going to police that smartphone then how will this legislation do anything? What stops "US Mastodon" being the new place all the kids in your school are posting?
Like that is the goal here, because observably any phone with a web browser has social media access, it just can't be a company which tries to do business in Australia directly.
But 4chan has existed for years (that's not the end point, but certainly creating a selective pressure to push teenagers to less regulated, shadier social media services doesn't seem like it's quite the result people want).
The short version I'd say is, this move seems solely aimed at taking away a virtual third space for adolescents and doesn't plan to offer anything back. But people didn't go seeking it because it offered nothing.
...and no one talks about a toxic effect of comousory education in this context: your child is locked together with children whose parents you would never be friends with because of conflicting values.
maybe the peer pressure for phones issue would look completely different without compulsory education.
You can cast any regulation as a "nanny state act". Life is more complicated than that.
The ability of individuals to be aware and take conscious action against harmful behaviors is clear and should be used when possible. But that ability gets exhausted very fast in a hyperspecialized and complicated world. Most parents are digitally illiterate, can't protect even themselves online, let alone their kids.
Delegating to collective institutions that can pool the required expertise and weigh-in the pros and cons is the means to empower individuals to better handle these hard to evaluate risks.
If our institutions really dont produce good regulation the obvious thing to do is check and fix that, taking into account that the complaints about over-regulation, bad regulation etc. might be by the offenders or aspiring abusers that have something to lose.
I think the answer in implicit in my comment: When all the affected individuals can readily make their own judgement about the risks and benefits of their choices (1) they have all the relevant information, (2) they are able to comprehend it and (3) they can act on it using a menu of options.
99% of people are entirely clueless as to what happens behind the scenes in social media platforms because the information is not there, and it is doubtful they would be able to evaluate it anyway. Plus, there are hardly any differentiated alternatives available.
So when these conditions are not met, anybody throwing around terms like "nanny state" has ulterior motives to exploit vulnerable populations (ignorant, addicted, low information, trapped etc.) for their own gain.
Which is "fine" or at least understandable, moral values are not universal. But lets make clear the starkly different visions.
If TV were to be banned under similar reasoning would you believe that to be justified? TV programming is similarly opaque to the social media algorithms.
There are many TV channel alternatives, public TV is pretty transparent and there are regulations around when various programs would air, obligatory reporting of age suitability etc.
In what manner? As a kid I didn't know that the pokemon cartoon existed in order to make me buy trading cards.
Even in news there is an army of editors and producers making decisions all of the time. This leads to things like the state media adding sound effects to footage to make it more sensational and then after losing in court investigating themselves and finding no intentional wrongdoing [1]!
Australia has always been a nanny state though. Not even letting some games or movies in to the country because they think it's inappropriate for adults to consume for example. Ridiculous.
Curing addictions is very hard and some addictions are very strong. Some addictions are also guarded by business interests leveraging close to a trillion dollars to increase this addiction.
We didn't reduce smoking through personal responsibility, stop using "nanny state" tropes.
In democracies the government is an imperfect representation of the will of the people and sometimes it decides individuals can't fight some things.
I find it uncomfortable that so many of the arguments focus on practicality and that so few focus on liberty. It almost seems like a forgotten concept.
I agree parents should have the choice for kids using social media, but this example of impracticality is a bit off: cigarettes are illegal for kids in nearly all developed countries.
And yet the things they have done have gone a long way to reducing the real harms caused by smoking.
A 5% spread of harm in a population is better than spread across 80% or 90%, etc. Taking action to reduce the surface area of harm, even if 0% is impractical, is beneficial to a functioning society.
The idea is to make a group decision to stop all the kids from using social media rather then get your kid alienated by just blocking him. Some people on hackernews want their kids to have zero friends and play SNES games but that's not what we should aim for.
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, driving and many other things are heavily regulated for children. Should a parent be able to allow his 12yo daughter to drink, smoke or marry 40yo guy? We're living in a society. Social media is just another item in the list.
I’ve seen many people make comparisons between these things and the social media ban, but I actually think they’re quite poor comparisons.
The main concern is around enforcement, which is still TBD for this ban. I assume you mean illicit drugs which are banned for everyone so I’ll skip that as it’s not relevant. For sex/marriage, these are basically not enforced until people notice or they cause a problem so again are not relevant. Driving is an interesting one but I’ll come back to it. The closest comparison here is alcohol and tobacco.
For alcohol and tobacco sales the rule of thumb staff are trained on in Australia is if the customer looks younger than 25 they ask for ID. The customer present their ID, the cashier visually checks the DoB, and the sale goes through. This does not affect the majority of Australians who either do not smoke or drink, or look old enough that no ID check is done. Enforcement for a social media ban would be onerous on all Australians who use social media (I don’t have numbers but I’m sure it’s more more than (smokers ∪ drinkers)) plus the scope for potential abuse or infringement of rights is far greater. Compare this to social media. How would such a ban be enforced? The kids are not stupid, they will find a way around whatever the enforcement mechanism is. So either the enforcement will be a) trivially circumventable to the point where the legislation is completely useless for its ostensible purpose, or b) devolve into an endless cat-and-mouse game trampling Australians’ rights every step of the way. Depending on how eager the Aus gov is to enforce this it could easily extend to VPN bans, destruction of anonymity online, and yet more means to eliminate free speech. These things are all extremely important for a functional society where people, especially vulnerable and marginalised people, can speak up without fear of retaliation. A cashier checking your ID at the shop is nowhere near the top of a slope as steep, nor slippery as this.
Driving is a really interesting comparison here actually. I’m not sure I would be opposed to a social media license. In the same way the purpose of a license is to ensure that road users can do so in a safe manner, maybe something similarly focused on education would be more helpful here than a ban. I’ve actually long blamed a kind of tragedy of the commons for the sorry state of the modern internet. Most users are simply not savvy enough to know better than to use it in all but the dumbest ways, fall for the dumbest scams, and basically allow themselves to be corralled like cattle into the sterile advertiser-friendly pens big tech companies have constructed for them. So in anger I’ve sometime said we should only allow licensed users online. Anyway that’s a bit off topic but a social media license is an interesting concept.
The votes are strong majorities of both houses - great to see a functional democratic government act on such an important issue.
They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications. It really would be great to see the government act with expertise to solve the problem in a way compatible with a free and open society.
I’ve seen the Australian government accused of many things, but that’s certainly a first. This is the same country whose prime minister once said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.
That was back in 2017 when the govts were all up in arms over encryption. Apparently they don't mind it too much now, which means it all must be back door'able for them.
The problem is Australians are fine with it. They might be the population with the most people saying "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" in the world, by a large margin.
> They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Hard disagree. We do not need an internet driver's license. Australians are supposed to have a right to interact with organisations with privacy protections under the Privacy Act 1988, like APP2 which allows individuals to deal with organisations anonymously or pseudonymously.
Social media companies are doing a great deal of harm to society, but banning under-16s is tackling the symptom, not the problem. All people should have more rights and protections, like opting out (or better, opting in) to infinite scroll and algorithmic content suggestions as opposed to subscribed content. Algorithmic content today is akin to spam in the early 2000s which governments regulated and has had some impact on bad behaviour by local companies (of course I am not under any pretense that spam will ever really be solved). Social media users should be able to opt in or out of content categories which AI could potentially help with that categorisation, ideally in an uber-transparent way.
I'm young enough that "modern" social media was just starting up when I was a teenager. It's not clear that banning under 16s from modern digital communication would provide any benefits (which, by the way, social media is very loosely defined under the amendment).
> Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications.
The big issue is that we are importing the UK model which will see identity outsourcing to companies like Yoti and AU10TIX, the latter which was hacked in 2021 and led to some pretty serious implications for affected users.
Of course the reality is that Meta is already doing age and identity verification on users who use privacy-protecting technologies like Firefox Container Tabs, at least in Australia, and has been for a number of years. This usually leads to an account being blocked until the user provides their ID via a photo. This will become formalised so that accounts that are detected as possibly being U16 (via various techniques like profiling and data matching against external sources) will be requested ID, and Yoti will likely be used to actually perform that verification.
Another big concern will be that this is forced onto smaller operators like Australian Mastodon sites, internet forums, mailing lists and others.
They can opt out, by not participating with the site. No one is mandated to use social media. But I would also want to see things go the other direction anyway, default to non-algorithmic feeds. Those with the awareness to opt-out are not the people at highest risk.
I agree with basically everything else you said, and I think social media is generally a blight on society. But we can opt-out already, if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you. You need to accept that responsibility in the same way it's up to ourselves not to drink 40 beers a day at home.
Reddit is among the range of sites deemed 'social media' per the article. Reddit is practically a glorified forum where users directly influence which submissions rise above others via personal voting and self-curation of communities to follow. There's no voodoo there forcing non-subscribed things in one's feed unless one is logged out (ie: non-participating anyway).
Given the timeframe to come up with how it's meant to be practically implemented it's not hard to imagine on various services all users of all ages from the region would be required to submit standard ID rather than an idealized age verification the GP suggests that prevents either storing or leaking identity (in either direction). If it went that way it'd be a major blow to user privacy and data security concerns.
Looking at criticism of the legislation there were a range of organizations pointing out such issues, including UNICEF.
I am not sure, phones are a device on a network, and robocalls are an abuse of the network to get to your device. It's an intrusion made by someone else. Social media seems to think it's a network, but it's more like a bar or club with a TV in it. You choose to show up each day and watch the TV.
> They can opt out, by not participating with the site
The definition of social media under the legislation is essentially any form of digital communication that allows two or more people to communicate, as decided by the minister.
> No one is mandated to use social media
OK, I'll bite. What if you want to join an interest group (crafts, technical, political etc) that organises meetings digitally on a social media site? Sure, you have the choice to not use a social media website, and if you do, in all likelihood not join your choice of interest group. The point is that Meta long used unfair and anti-competitive means to corner the market, and obviously not to interoperate so that it is difficult for people to leave. This might surprise you but the relationship between platforms and users is usually coerced and not really consensual. If you do not find yourself in this position, good for you. I'm a very firm believer that anti-competitive social media companies should be regulated in positive ways, like forcing interoperability and forcing companies to making algorithmic content opt-in.
> if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you
Yeah except people are usually on those platforms for many reasons, like access to group chats and messages, as the platforms have a wide reach. A lot of people become outcasts by quitting social media, myself included, because our friends choose to continue to use it.
I don't think we disagree, perhaps even on the point of responsibility for how we got here. I do certainly blame the social media companies for the software they built. I guess my only point is that the personal responsibility shouldn't be understated, as we all have agency over the issue, but it is too tough to rip the bandaid off for most which I understand.
I will say there are many ways to mitigate without leaving entirely, but it will be up to one's own discipline to disengage from the platform and manage your own behaviour while you visit.
Only for now. After requiring an ID to sign up is normalized governments will inevitably try to eliminate any anonymity to “protect children”/catch criminals/censorship/etc.
>the government act with expertise to solve the problem
Do you have an idea which problem did they solve? Did banning certain psychoactive drugs solved the problem of drug abuse? Maybe banning alcohol removed it from the streets during great depression? Banning gambling? Kids will find a way to get into their social media accounts anyway, and then these democrats will tell you they need to ban every VPN service and set-up Deep Packet Inspection devices for every ISP, make their own govt CA, and trust me all of it will be done in the name of people and child safety.
Sad to see a dysfunctional govt. which bans and calls it a solution to the problem. When I will be in the office I would ban the whole concept of banning itself once and forever, and any politician who proposed a single ban in his life would be banned from service. I will of course step out for proposing this ban immediately.
For all the proponents of the ban here – I will just tell you what works – for your education. It is endorsing and subsidising healthy and active lifestyle, supporting and promoting strong family wellbeing as well as upholding public psychological and physiological health. Only doing these instead of issuing bans would really contribute to kids choosing virtues of real life over screen time, but unfortunately addressing root causes takes more effort and time than issuing a ban.
That's great for those that can implement that, many cant (don't have the time, education, willpower, etc...), maybe the majority.
Given the challenges of rebuilding a proper society, maybe this is a step in the right direction (maybe).
We don't allow kids to have other addictive substances, there's definitely an argument (and the co's agree, with 13 yo minimums?) for restricting an addictive medium.
Social media is similar to a drug because it is dopaminergic, and banning it is very similar to War on Drugs scenario, just a knee-jerk reaction, not an expertise-driven policy
Of course it all works. The world now has no drunk drivers, and it is impossible to buy a gun. Thanks to the loving government and caring politicians who had employed best experts, most brilliant minds they could find, to ban the bad things. bad things no-no. We're living in ponyland already just look out of the window!
Do you have data do back it up? From quickly looking at historical records online, I can't see any unfathomable amounts reduction, It's levelled on 20-30% of smokers among kids, and it remains a core challenge for child and adolescent health to the current day (according to 2020 WHO report[0]), plus they started to smoke vapes. So did the bans you sampled really work, or do they just smoke more discreetly and use tricks to buy cigarettes now, making the whole thing more inaccessible and desirable for an average child?
Well, in Australia at least, the number of smokers in the 18-54 age cohort has almost halved in the decade upto 2022 (older smokers still tend to smoke), and more than halved in the 15-24 category.
A "national tobacco strategy" was introduced in 2011/2012 that brought plain packaging, increased taxation and a bunch of other measures.
At least in the US, smoking rates dropped substantially by the 1980's, long before many anti-smoking laws were in effect (you could still smoke on planes in the 80's!).
> In 1970, Congress took their anti-smoking initiative one step further and passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio starting on 2 January 1971. In April 1970, President Nixon signed it into law.
Can you guys research this stuff before posting, please?
Only worked for Australian politicians to pat themselves on the head. They are still getting money from tobacco companies, and they know where it is coming from. Kids in Australia still smoke a lot, exploring other ways of inhaling addictive substance, and no ban can really solve this problem
There are many articles and documentaries about the impact of smoking adoption due to tobacco companies advertising primarily to kids.
Even if we disregard all the science, the fact that the very companies themselves were targeting kids shows that they knew where their money was coming from.
I highly doubt they have the expertise to implement anything remotely 'cryptographic.' Their level of competence seems stuck in the 1950s, stamping paper forms, while anything more complex is handed off to consultants in Australia. These consultants appear far more interested in lining their pockets than in understanding technology or math.
The far more likely scenario is they piss a couple of hundred billion away on the first company that shows up with a slick-sounding, half-baked platform, claiming it can magically solve all their problems with just a few "minor" tweaks.
I'm an interested party, I have a 13 year old daughter who would benefit from a little less time on social media. But that's my problem, and my belief that these idiots in our government could help me with that is zero percent. I am probably in the .1% of households where dads know more than kids.
(If photometric id comes in, I want to be in the fake moustache business).
There is myID (formerly myGovID) which would be the logical vehicle for a government provided age verification service. I've heard (but can't find a source) that it's build on OIDC/OAuth, so extending it to be an IdP exposing only specific claims (ie, age) shouldn't be a huge leap.
myID as it stands is a bit of a farce. It uses OIDC under the hood, but it only supports end users that download the myID app on their smartphone via the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Security is effectively outsourced to Google and Apple as the user's identity is "pinned" to their smartphone.
Take myGov in contrast which is web-capable and supports users to use a Yubikey or Passkey/Webauthn-capable device to authenticate.
Under the Australian Digital ID scheme myGov will likely be usurped by myID, which is, in my view, an inferior scheme which blatantly ignores basic standards.
> national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age
Nah, this is an antipattern we've seen before. A veritable Pandora's Box whispering to be opened. There is a much simpler and safer solution:
1. A disclosure law, which requires sites to somehow (e.g. HTTP headers) show their nature as a social media site, porn site, etc.
2. Parents can choose to purchase devices/software for their children with a parental-lock, set those filters and permissions to match their own locality or personal preferences, and whitelist any necessary exceptions.
This way the implementation costs of the shifting, complex, never-ending demands will fall onto the groups that actually want to use it, instead of all sites in the world being potential legal jeopardy for failing to implement all the censorship rules of every possible visitor.
It also means that most enforcement (and exceptions) move out into a physical realm which parents are at least able to see and control.
> without leaking identity
Leaking identity to the site is only half the problem, the other is leaking activity to the government. I'd ratehr not have a Government Internet Decency Office with an easy list of every single site I ever tried to view or register-for, without any kind of warrant or other due-process.
If your concern is that some parents will be able to afford to give their children their own devices, but not afford any parental-control software with them... Well, that's better-addressed with an explicit "Digital Tools For Needy Parents" program.
If you mean some parents will choose to give their kids more autonomy... Well, isn't it proper for that to be their decision? I have little sympathy for neighbors who use the logic of: "You are banned from giving your child $thing, because I'm tired of hearing my kids whine that they want it too."
> Nanny state is a term coined by tobacco industry in their lobbying against tobacco laws. Is it really a term you want to use here?
Sure, because most people h ave no idea where the term originates from and it now has a life of its own. It's the standard term for this sort of thing.
Who cares? Whether or not it applies in this particular case, it's a useful term. Rejecting ideas because of who they come from is the very antithesis of intellectual maturity.
ASIO has been able to track you for decades since they have real-time metadata feeds from Telstra, Optus, NBN etc.
They have access to your location estimate, URLs of sites you've visited, people you talk via email/phone etc. And we know that this dataset is shared to the Five Eyes.
So if you are concerned about being tracked I would strongly recommend leaving Australia.
And now they’ll be able to see the groups you go to within pages, read comments, see what we write, etc etc. It also goes from being a defence capability to used for all sorts of things and eventually leaked.
It’s not bad enough to leave, better to engage with the politics and try to get some rights before it spreads further outwards
For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.
Ha! We have compulsory voting but unlike many Anglo countries we don't require voter ID, vote registration etc. In fact you do not need to provide any ID to vote, because voting fraud is so statistically low (see https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/voting-fraud-negli...). We simply provide a name and address and fill out the ballot.
We have so many issues, but compulsory voting is not one of them, in my opinion. If you feel so strongly to not vote you can abstain by an informal vote like roughly 5% of the country does on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/Informal_Voting/) or simply pay the AU$20 (roughly US$13) fine like apparently around 5-10% of Australians do on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm).
In my view, and in the view of many Australians, people encouraging further "freedom" to not vote are attempting to suppress votes, a major issue in the United States and other countries with optional voting.
In Australia they ask to see your ID but you can say you don’t have it on you. I think they mostly just ask for ID so it’s easier to look up your name with the correct spelling.
You wouldn't be doing anyone a favour by committing electoral fraud.
But that aside, although Australia doesn't require any ID on election day, Australians do register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) with their name, address and date of birth. AEC workers have a printed copy of these records on election day. Obvious anomalies like someone with a different age can be reported. Otherwise anomalies like multiple votes from the same address are investigated, I imagine by interviewing the person at that address.
The AEC provides transparency about how it detects fraud and the penalties that can be imposed for people who are caught doing it. The point is that this is quite rare. The AEC's aim is to lower barriers to voting in the first place so that all people can. By detecting anomalies and using tipoffs the AEC estimates the impact of voter fraud and takes a scientific approach to recommend against raising barriers to vote.
You won't win any arguments with Australians on forced voting. The major parties would love to kill it, but it is something the (forced) voters will refuse to give up. It may not be 'free', but it helps keep things free.
If you are going to cite sources about 1960's Australian culture, back in the oppressive dark ages of 'White Australia', make sure you compare it with other 1960's cultures. Or try some sources from this millennium that have come to terms with not being part of the British Empire.
Forced voting is a net benefit, the biggest being that it forces parties to the center rather than having to say/promise stupid stuff to appeal to the fringes that have firm political positions (see: USA). Mandatory voting + preferential voting, alongside a well-run independent election commission has resulted in very high trust in our democratic process.
Compulsory voting means that a large part of the electorate that doesn’t pay attention to politics is easily frightened by scare campaigns.
An example of this is that Australia is sorely in need of tax reform, but any party that pushes for it at state or federal level is damaged at the polls, often fatally.
You have to remember, Australia as a nation is young, and has an interesting history - forced migration of convicts, high levels of immigration (IIRC 25% of the population are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants), and of course the difficulty of dealing with colonial treatment of the Aboriginal population. "No culture" is patently absurd; everywhere with people has a culture.
And on mandatory voting: yes, in one way, that's a curtailment of freedom, but in another way, it's enshrining freedom.
In day to day life we are fairly free but for example we have much weaker freedom of speech/opinion than the USA. For example if you raise your arm at a particular angle you can now be sent to jail [1].
We also had some of the longest/harshet COVID lockdowns in the world in my state.
This is the opposite of democracy - a group imposing rules "for their own good" on people it doesn't represent who have no recourse. If they had any integrity they'd be banning it for adults not children.
Save your breath, Australians don't have the same views on government or individual rights as America (or even Canada!).
I lived in Singapore for a while and it's a "flawed democracy" where the government has stacked the deck against any opposition party to a degree that's breathtaking.
But a poll in Singapore showed that 70% felt that "social harmony is more important than democracy". Even if Singaporeans knew how undemocratic the government was, they wouldn't care.
None of these sound like they are a very big problem compared to many alternative things people do. People talk about social media as though it's lead paint.
I particularly liked that one Facebook study that is usually taken out of context.
> young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
this made me lol so much. porn addition is not the cause, but the consequence.
do you have any idea how hard it is for males to find a willing mate nowadays?
most females have men fighting over them, while most men must always do the fighting to get even one low-quality female in their entire life.
just because thing A was (unjustly) demonized doesn't mean demonizing thing B is without merit, even more so when thing A and thing B are completely unrelated.
I agree with the OP that the ban is woefully undemocratic, and that banning it for children only is a grave misstep.
I think what they should ban instead is recommendation algorithms. If I subscribe to a source, and explicitly unsubscribe from another, it should be illegal to withhold some of the first’s postings and shove the second’s in my face. This should be a no-brainer and has nothing to do with the age of the user; but it's easier to just ban the people who, as OP correctly noted, have no representation and no recourse.
Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption? Do you feel the same way about those prohibitions too?
> Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption?
Up to a point, but AIUI there is credible medical evidence for those being disproportionately harmful (in physical, objectively verifiable ways) to the young. I think setting the same standard of harm and applying it to all ages is reasonable; maybe this law is based on some claim that social media harms children in a way it doesn't harm adults, but bluntly given how much the topic is biased and politicised I just don't trust today's social science establishment enough to justify this kind of law.
They are already mostly segmented off from their friends after school hours. They have killed off one of the final mediums for interaction and are preventing interaction with the rest of their generation's culture. They're also narrowing their world view to be more controlled by the state.
Hasn't that been the case for thousands of years? It's not like they can't see each other after school hours... I know i used to. And i still see my friends after my workday. I have much deeper connections with the 20 people i see in real life than the 1000 people on my linkedin profile.
Do people thrive more in their mental health when they are supposedly 24/7 accessible? Is it necessary? Is it wanted?
Actually this is a separate problem. If you look at the work of Jon Haidt who promotes the kinds of measures we're talking about here, it's only half the story. The other half is that we have become ridiculously overprotective in parenting in recent decades. Kids need independence and the ability to hang out and play with their peers away from direct adult supervision. The goal isn't to take away the internet and leave kids with nothing, it's to bring back the real-world contact and relationship-building.
No, we need to turn it WAY up. We circumcise AKA male genital mutilation to hundreds of millions of male children all across the world, including much of the USA and Australian populations.
That’s just one tiny example, and no one is calling for circumcison bans simultaneously.
Letting the mutilated children have some social media is the least the state can do for them. Australia is a tyrannical hellscape.
You missed the point. Tyranny of the majority is one thing if the minority can at least vote and participate in the political process. Shutting the minority out entirely is quite different.
We do have recourse. What you'll see is more independent candidates get voted in to overturn the law. Once the government of the day starts badly implementing it the conservatives who voted with the center left party will split off and start attacking for it's repeal.
It's a nothing burger law designed to look tough and do nothing.
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Is it? Last time I checked I thought that was only when parents or legal guardians do it to a small number of children in their care, not when politicians do it to all children in an entire country.
But even if I accept your premise, your comment makes me wonder if you've never heard of people who are bad at parenting, or who are downright abusive to the children in their care.
Let me ask you something: Do you support removing liquor laws banning underage people from being sold alcohol? Or removing laws that ban the sale of cigarettes to children? How about gambling or buying lotto tickets for childrenm
I think it's clear that as a society we have already decided that government has a role in establishing legal protections to prevent children from falling afoul of systems that are designed to be predatory
This is just another layer of that
Which also establishes a social norm that letting children drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or gamble is not a good thing, so people who are bad parents know at least some baseline of what they should not be doing
Who defines what a child is? Who defines what a elderly person is? Are these questions also jokes to you? You seem pretty flippant about deciding which groups shouldn't have political power.
Many countries already tried using objective criteria to decide who gets to vote, and this always results in policy that screws nonvoters at the benefit of voters. Do you think the housing crisis all around the western world is an accident? It's not. The electorate chose this because it benefits them. Is it an accident that the last 2 US presidents are pedophiles? Probably, but that would be much less likely with a younger electorate.
A decision was made about how children's lives should function without their input. Right now do you believe that the class of parent voters votes as representatives of the interests of their children and their future? Or do you believe that all persons under 16 have no concept of time or political interests and couldn't even understand if a politician was making them a good deal through a political ad?
Children understand brand new toys better than anyone; by high school, pretty much all of them understand that they get better teachers if you pay more. Are students not interested in getting better grades for "free"?
The government is not anyone's parent, it doesn't give a lick if your kid dies tomorrow, cause kids don't vote.
Hey, didn't you get the memo that teenagers know everything, have the simple & straightforward solutions to all of life's problems, and are never wrong?? ;)
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Children issue is just the excuse for government to get people obey. Sadly but "kids protecting" propaganda is one of two the most effective ones, works great and there are lots of alternatively gifted persons that do not get the real attitude.
> Acting like we should be seriously treating children and teens as an equal political group is a joke
Yeah this thread is wild, maybe because those speaking “on behalf” of children here are actually all children?
Age restrictions for social media are as logical and necessary as they are for driving, drinking, etc. It isn’t just a concern about self-harm. The general public has a stake in this too in the long run, and it’s a safety and security issue for them as well. (If you don’t believe this is true, just think about how much power Facebook already has over elections, and how much more they will have if literally everyone alive grows up on Facebook and doesn’t think that power is worth questioning)
Years from now we’ll all be surprised we didn’t arrive at this conclusion sooner.
You're far more optimistic than I about our government being able to implement a secure, reasonable solution for age verification.
COVIDSafe was the last technical undertaking and it was expensive and a completely inept implementation. The MyGov website is another failed attempt at keeping personal data secure.
Further, it seems likely that social media companies are likely to come out of this with even more information about us.
Government and tech do not mix well (at least in Australia).
People are far more worried about the government knowing that you're using a social media site, than they are about the social media site knowing who you are.
I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification. I'm assuming it'll be an openid type flow where the social media sites will have to register client IDs with the govt myID, in which case the govt will directly be able to tie a person to what social media they use. It won't tell them what account it links to on the social media side, but depending on what data is returned, they can easily just ask the social media company for this info later on.
I suspect that it is technically possible to make an anonymous identification service because the result to the social media site just had to be yes or no.
In the Netherlands you have a government identification service that identifies people to other government sites. And a bank service that uses the banks identification service also roll to identify to other sites.
Technically it would be possible to delete any trace afterwards.
However. I have never ever in my life seen any government choose not to take advantage of an opportunity to exert more control over their citizens if the possibility exists.
Plus rather than force it on everyone it should be a choice of the parents. Clearly not doing this is better but in the absence of that parents deciding is better for the others.
> I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification
Blind signatures. Briefly, a blind signature is a way for a party to sign a document without seeing the contents of the document. The cryptographic forms of this, at a high level, work like this:
1. You do a keyed reversible transformation on document D that produces a transformed document D'. This is called "blinding" the document.
2. They sign D' with signature S'.
3. You apply the reverse transformation to S', which gives you a signature S from them for D. This is "unblinding".
Use a random key each time you need to get something blind signed and throw away the key afterwards.
Even if they later see D and S they can't match them up with any D' and S' because they don't know the key.
For age verification D would be some kind of token you obtain from the social media company during age verification. You'd then have the government blind sign that with a signature that is only used when the government has verified you are at least 16. You'd unblind the signature and give that back to the social media company.
There are also protocols to do this using zero knowledge proofs.
lol - hardly! Submissions were announced on the 22nd, this closed on the 23rd, the Committee was so blindsided they literally requested submissions should 1-2 pages long, the bill was introduced to the House on the 26th and passed on the 29th.
That’s some really well reviewed legislation. Parliament sitting days close on the 31st.
It's going to be interesting to see how one can use cryptography to do this privately. I wonder if the cost and complexity of such a thing would result in big companies simply requiring some kind of "take a picture of your ID" style verification.
Estonia's ID card https://www.id.ee/en/ could certainly be a model; still not sure how to do age verification. My best guess would be some sort of cryptographic signing that refuses to sign if you are below a certain age.
Or, you know, don't keep going into this path of authoritarianism.
Your comment is absolutely disingenuous pretending that this Draconian move can be implemented with open society or transparency. This is the same nation that went absolutely bonkers with their COVID policies and their inhumane treatment of anyone who desired freedom or bodily autonomy.
The whole purpose of this is only to give parents a reason to say no. Often, a single kid in a class with an unrestricted iPhone is enough to poison the well. Now it's much, much simpler. Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
>Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
Jesus, were you born 40? I don't know a single person who didn't willingly pirate media, games and break other laws (usual suspects like trespassing, underage + public drinking...) as kids and teens. They will not care about the law if they want to do something it limits.
Wait, where? Not in my Australia. Saying our govt has any competency is also gobsmacking.
Yep, it's better here than other places (for certain groups) but when the notorious hate rag daily mail condemns (literal) neo-nazis marching and saluting in support of transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull you've really got to question what kind of functional democratic government or expertise leads and legislates this country. Literally the daily mail thinks our neo-nazi problem is a bit much. I genuinely can't wrap my head around that. The daily effing mail. That's the state of this country; what a healthy democracy that literal neo-nazi groups are free to demonstrate against human rights while the police force people doing nothing more for human rights than holding the pathetic signs back from the streets so the frog marching idiots can continue unimpeded. Utterly disgraceful state of affairs. It's so embarrassing.
This legislation isn't going to stop kids accessing social media or prevent any of the related social harms, unfortunately. It's just going to give licence to erode privacy even further. All our pollies are so dangerously incompetent, especially when it comes to anything relating to computers, it's just enraging. It's a disgrace. Our governments don't give a single shit about human rights or the welfare of the people in our country. This law is no different, but it sure is a great distraction.
Call me oldschool but to me a functioning democracy is where anyone can express their opinions. Neo nazis, zionists, anti zionists, jews, palestinians, socialists, globalists, communists, libertarians etc.
Yes, a functional democracy means neonazis advocating for genociding are protected from the vicious sign holders by the police. Yes, that is definitely a functional democracy. The state defending neonazis from people holding signs is absolutely the free marketplace of ideas in action. Genocide is acceptable if enough people vote for it. Wow, what a great idea!
I one day hope to be so privileged to actually think like that. Give me half a billion dollars and a lobotomy and that's as close as I'll get; I'm not sure it'll be enough.
you must be joking, that's exactly how communist government works.
Given strict laws but "don’t prescribe any particular ... methods" so one day law enforcements can extort a large sum of fine from companies as needed.
The only difference is Commie leaders invent bullshit "laws" by themselves and no voting.
Just so it's clear - this new law will require everyone over 16 to provide proof-of-age, and thus identity, to use the most popular portions of the internet. Saving the children is the voter-acceptable way of getting it past public scrutiny, and paves the way for a national DigitalID that will be required by all citizens.
Where does the legislation say that? My reading is that it specifically says that social networks have to provide an alternative verification mechanism that doesn’t rely on government ID.
Think of it this way - how will YOU, specifically, prove you are actually over the age of 16 without having some proof of age object that is tied to your device(s) or usage patterns?
If a 15 year old will have to prove they're 16 to use a service, so will a 35 year old. It's not just the kids proving their age.
> A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.
It doesn’t specifically require them to collect IDs. However it does say the opposite and that the site can only collect government ID or a digital ID information if:
> the provider provides alternative means [not involving IDs] for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is
not an age-restricted user; and
(b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances.
I’m not going to argue that the legislation is perfect. But it doesn’t actually do what most opponents are accusing it of doing.
To keep under 16s out, everyone over 16 needs to prove they are indeed over 16. It's like a nightclub/pub/bar - to get in, EVERYONE needs to prove their age, either with a real or fake ID.
IDs don't need to be collected and stored, but "reasonable steps" could mean that Meta, for example, may use services to verify a Driver's License or Passport number, or obtain a myID token that proves age.
How else do you keep kids out for their own safety?
The legislation for social media and alcohol sales are completely different.
There is no expectation of “reasonable effort” to not selling alcohol to minors. It’s flat out illegal and heavily penalised. Nor is there a requirement for companies to find a way to sell alcohol to adults without asking for ID.
I get the concern you have, but you’re arguing against a scarecrow version of the legislation.
You're either going to need to have a Digital Id, such as the Australian Govt myID, or something else to prove you're over 16. A burner email doesn't prove age, and that's what AusGov says they want to do.
Only for activation of a service, which has nothing to do with the actual user. Purchase a phone using cash from any store selling mobile phones, and then use free WiFi (however insecure that may be) anywhere you can find it. If you want mobile data, get someone to register a prepaid SIM card, then add money to it using a prepaid debit card from AusPost, which you don't need ID to do.
I personally welcome this change. Anecdotally, I experienced unimpeded and unsupervised internet access throughout my younger teenage years, and was exposed to some truly horrendous material courtesy of the bigger social platforms. My parents knew I used social media. They believed it was fine because it was "just MySpace and Facebook".
Meanwhile, I witnessed large amounts of open bullying between my peers, recordings of physical assaults, underage revenge pornography, and a massive decline of people physically spending time together outside of online contexts, culminating in widespread loneliness and isolation.
In recent times I have seen the dramatic failure of social media companies to moderate their content, actively promoting extremist content, and even openly protecting the originators of illicit material.
Rates of youth suicide skyrocketed shortly after the rise of smartphones, social media and always-available internet access as evident by published statistics. While none of these can be individually attributed as the cause of this rise, all are undoubtedly a contributing factor, as suggested by countless studies globally.
I started using the internet unsupervised heavily in my tweens in the early 2000's and came across some horrendous stuff pretty early. Despite that, for me I think it's been a net positive and I would like my children to grow up in a similar environment.
The lasting qualities I think it's given me are:
- An open mindedness and the ability to examine issues from multiple angles
- A thick skin against shocking material/online forms of bullying
- A stronger understanding of how technology interacts with society/power structures
I think the country needs to be building digitally strong youth, not trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
The "behind the scenes" of this was a repeated campaign based on News Corp's (ie. Fox News / The Murdoch's) newsrooms (TV, radio + paper).
The legislation was primarily based on their campaign - likely as an attack against TikTok and other social media companies, who are taking their viewership and advertising revenue.
I believe in the premise of the change (to protect young children), just not the motivation or interests behind this law.
There’s an interview on The Rest is Politics Leading podcast with the politician Peter Malinauskas the premier of New South Wales who started the introduction of this law in his state first. I think it was maybe then taken up by the federal government.
Even if they were, aren't they are unlikely to gain much from this. I.e, when the average teenager can't consume social media platforms anymore, they surely won't go back to a more traditional outlet?
Apologies you’re right, I looked it up but my brain had obviously already decided it was NSW as that’s what I wrote. It’s a great interview, he seems like a good guy.
I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos and the new corpos are more than likely aware of this from their own research so I don't think fighting over viewership is a factor in this.
No, because kids don't care about news channels. It's not a darn kids on tiktoks thing, before tiktok or twitter or facebook they were outside, or playing video games, or reading books, or any number of things because underage kids don't give a hoot about talking heads newsstations.
I've always wondered, when do policies become nanny state policies? If they have data showing that under-age use of social media leads to higher rates of suicide, why would that be a 'nanny state' policy? Does there have to be a gun or drug involved, rather than a phone?
I am sure someone else would point the origins of 'nanny-state' comes from. Yet, it has been used initially in the UK to support advertising of smoking, later for support of not using seat belts, and so on.
It's a rather ironic twist in this case... and a very favorable read.
This legislation has no teeth. There is nothing that forces social media companies to verify ID. In fact in the legislation social media companies can’t force users to provide ID.
It’s stupid legislation pandering to the lowest common denominator by a Labor government who have no vision and no idea how to deal with very real cost-of-living problems for Australians. The only problem is the LNP are even worse, an the Greens are nuts, so we’re stuck either anthem because they are the best of a terrible bunch.
This is a bad idea. We should be forcing demonetization of the platforms content creators instead of hamstringing children.
No I'm not joking. Content creators making money should be outside where I post about my cat. I'm fucking sick of engagement bait.
The money driven content creators are going to thrive on platforms that support them. If you don't want to have their content on the same feed as your cat pics, you're going to have to find some alt networks
When the laws come in, many Australians will get VPNs rather than provide ID to random websites.
If social media sites are compelled block VPNs, is that technically achievable/viable? Cloud providers and VPN services have predictable IP ranges, so are easily blocked (/majorly inconvenienced) by sites motivated to do so. But social media companies might not want to block VPNs since a lot of legitimate traffic comes through them (e.g. people anywhere in the world who simply wish to have that extra layer of privacy from their ISP and wifi owner).
Are there VPN strategies that will allow an Australian to reliably access social media as though their traffic is coming from another country?
I also guess Australians who try this might have to access social media sites via a browser on their phone (as opposed to native app).
This is a bad idea, and it’ll be very hard to implement. Better to ban old people from watching Sky News and using Facebook, that’s the real danger to our democracy
Perhaps we should also make it illegal to report on the war in the Middle East in case young people find it traumatising to see that that the western democracies are supporting dropping 2000 pound bombs on children in other countries. Can you image the damage being caused to young minds seeing that death and destruction visually through their own eyes ?
This is not about reporting or content. This is about the health outcomes of young people being negatively impacted by companies maximizing engagement metrics at all costs.
Reporting on war happenings occurred before social media was around.
I'm referring to the ridiculous concern about young minds being exposed to one sort of content, yes it is about content, whilst another sort there's no concern about in the slightest.
The choices are bizzare. I assume that discord channels relating to specific pieces of software will also not be allowed anyone under 16. So very clever young kids trying to build software will be disadvantaged now as well.
I had to correct my auntie that no, Morocco did not manipulate the weather to cause the floods in Spain. She didn't really believe me. The Facebook propaganda is intense
This legislation is a bold step, but it raises a lot of questions about implementation and unintended consequences. While protecting children from online harms is undoubtedly important, enforcing an age limit like this on social media platforms could be incredibly challenging
gambling is a little bit different, as you have to pay and receive money (easily enforceable bans). But here we are talking about a free service which is also offered by many foreign alternatives (which of course are not going to cooperate.)
A solution I would be very OK with is the following:
* Enforce the age limits only on smartphones and tablets. This solves >95% of the problem and still leaves a way for people to be anonymous.
* Smartphone OS vendors come up with a common age verification framework that's based on zero knowledge proofs constructed over the electronic certificate in your passport - there are already working PoCs of this on Github
* Each identity can only be installed on one device at a time. Then parents cannot share identity with kids (unless the parents completely give up on all social media)
* For people who don't have a passport, offer a manual and thorough process for age verification, after which you get issued a small plastic card with identity certificate readable by NFC.
They are not allowed to buy wine themselves. Most parents wouldn't allow them to drink when alone. Drinking small amounts of wine at the family dinner table makes the educational difference. Social media is consumed without any family interaction and can consume all free-time and more.
And no, privacy is not already lost. It is a lie often said. Sure you share a lot of data about you, but you are often not required, especially by law to share it. Big tech also do not know everything about you, they often lie to shareholders, or advertisers about amount of users, clicks.
Protect the children, and remove the ability to freely express your opinion. I vividly remember people being arrested because of social media activity during covid.
I'm not Australian and don't know the specifics if this legislation, so I cannot speak with any authority on the matter, but I think you're mistakenly conflating banning <16yo with identifying everyone.
Porn is also banned for <18yo and you generally don't need to id yourself to get access, you only need to claim you're 18 via button, checkmark or similar
This doesn't actually remove all kids from the platform, but at least they're no longer being served legally. This will make it less ubiquitous for them.
Relevant part of the article:
Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
Thanks for providing that last part info, but I think you misunderstand how the world works. The privacy is removed in erosion, not in one action.
First create a law, then require providing a button, then require debit card number, then require ID.
I am aware of slippery slope fallacy, but I think that is where this all is going to go.
Therefore it does not matter if "it is just a button" right now. Every change in that direction is not good. I worry about the trajectory more.
Let's also look at it from a different point of view. Does the button "I am over 18" protect the children? Really? Sorry, but this is not the final step in that road.
A couple US states are in the "ID" stage for porn right now. It's why pornhub and others have started blocking those states, they don't want the liability if there's a hack/leak.
In Sweden advertising aimed at kids is illegal, and has been for a long time. But "social media" is bizarrely aimed at kids, or at least kids are extremely susceptible to what influencers are doing. My 10-year old has a wish list this year with about 70 beauty products. It makes me kinda sick.
The problem: me banning social media completely (instead of limiting which we do now) would not help completely, since all her friends use it and would influence her anyway.
Rather than banning social media, we should be forcing social media companies to make their apps less addictive and promote more positive interactions. This only stigmatises social media more and gives them a ‘free pass’ to keep being a net negative contributor to society. It’s such a lazy legislation. Besides, what counts as social media? Texting? Gaming? The internet is inherently social.
I find it absolutely wild that we've managed to ban social media for under-16s, but somehow not pornography.
And so kids can just stream hardcore, violent porn on tap, as long as they click "I am 18 or older".
I am all for limiting social media (though not necessarily in this implementation), but just utterly puzzled why what seems to be an equally damaging influence for developing minds can't be limited.
Do we expect the social media ban implementation to be any different to the 18+ restriction on pornography? Personally I doubt it. Real enforcement will come from parents and schools now having authority to stop kids instead of currently being told “but all the other kids have it”.
There does seem to be an opportunity for a big tech companies like Apple and Google to introduce an over 18 verification that’s built into the browser but remains fully anonymous after initial verification.
Most over 18 verification schemes have faltered at the point where adults are asked to verify their identity to view among other things porn. If it was cryptographically proven anonymous there’d be much less resistance.
> The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts
Unless the fines accumulate, it seems the law is rather toothless? US $33M is a parking ticket for companies at this scale.
I think you’re right about the relative scale of the fine, but theres a part of me that believes the companies will try to comply with the law, similar to how pornhub is blocked in many US states. They could easily ignore the regulation but choose not to because thats ultimately what Australians want. Companies of this scale by and large try to follow the law, especially when the affected cohort is relatively small.
1. Those in favor of identity based control over using electronic devices, attaching a real world identity to your computing use. (Including up to signed software only allowed to run on devices).
2. Those in favor of the restriction of access of the internet by a government entity (Including up to regulated speech).
This is similar to the break up Google arguments. Instead you just have to out-code it. (For the counterarguments, this applies to code-based companies, instead of infrastructure based)...
If a social media is harmful, then parents can put those restrictions already on devices. But letting the government do this gives much more freedoms away than initially thought. Not just this, but if there happens to ever be a social media that is 10 times better than all existing ones, where even more real speech discussion and conversation happens, or whatever form it is, it will still be regulated and controlled using the same methods.
I usually don't comment often, but I would usually expect someone here to bring up these concerns... which is unusual to not find them. And I mean the specific two points are the argument. Those must be flipped to allow this law to be just, which is to say, most likely not.
And a third point, even in a perfect implementation, (imagine a perfect world), you end up with the first two points still being an issue. The technological ability to restrict devices by signed software, and speech to a central authority, allows the attack surface for anyone to have the ability to control the entirety of the devices on that system, in ways that would be hard to discern. Extend this technology to other devices, like VR, and see the domino...
If everybody in western societies agree that under-aged are forbidden to access a Casino or a brothel and also shouldn't do paid work; why should the same societies install easy doors for children to casinos, brothels and sweatshops, in every school, and children room?
What is a definition of social media? If there will be another platform, that is not listed on banned platforms, will they add it to regulation later... And later again, another...?
I think kids that wont be able to use YouTube until they are 16, might miss some good stuff too, like they might find hobbies there, learn programming.
If anyone wants to know just how rushed this bill was pushed through parliament, here is the text of the public consultation announcement:
“On 21 November 2024, the Senate referred the provisions of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 to the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee for report by 26 November 2024.
The closing date for submissions is 22 November 2024. Due to the short timeframe of this inquiry, the committee would appreciate submissions being limited to 1-2 pages.”
How’s that for well written? They announced the bill on the 21st and closed the date for submissions on the 22nd. It then went to parliament in the 26th. It has passed on the 29th. Parliament sitting days end a few days after.
Pathetic. That’s why the Committee that scrutinises the bill asked for “1 or 2 page submissions”.
The point of this isn't to keep kids off social media. It's an excuse to require ID for adults so they can arrest us for criticizing them.
They also recently tried to pass a "Misinformation" bill which would have given them the power to decree what we can and can't say on social media, and they'll try to sneak that back in, too.
This country is a nanny state and it's getting scary.
Adults can still be on SM and can still criticize the govt.
Also, it must be the state of affairs that an Adult can have an ID on SM and criticize the govt. and the laws and courts should protect that individuals right to criticize.
Avoiding IDs on the internet, just so that the govt can't catch hold of the critic is a lot of step backwards.
You're literally spreading misinformation in your comment.
a) The government was trying to outlaw deepfakes and fake accounts. But also require more transparency for users to contest moderation decisions. It did not try to limit what you can say.
b) There is no law that makes it illegal to criticise the government.
Well there is actually. If the government label the criticism fake news.
In the Netherlands people have been fined hundred of thousands of euros for spreading fake news about the government. However if it’s not fake news they can do the same. You won’t be able to do anything about it because it order to show your evidence you need to be able to publish and the press on there Netherlands will not help you with that.
The fake news that stood out to me did indeed sound pretty fake. I didn't believe it for a minute. But the point being if you fine things like that then what happens when someone has news that sounds unbelievable because it's horrific or flies against everything that democracy is supposed to stand for? If the government can fine like this then the news doesn't get exposed. Any BTW, there are a lot of people that would also not believe what happened to me. They would also think that it is fake news. Closing off reporting, means closing off avenues to highlight illegal activity from the government and hence less democracy.
Why do I care? Because I was a victim of illegal extra judicial activity as collateral damage to illegal activity (Collateral damage simply because I lived next door) and no news will organisation would print my story. But now it's quite clear that if I started to publish details on the Internet that very quickly I would be slapped with a large fine, so that avenue is now closed as well.
The details don't hurt my argument at all. Because my argument revolves around not being able to tell the difference between exposing really bad things that sound like nothing the governments would and other things that are not true.
There are many places in the world where there is no law for "contempt of cop" but police find a way to extra-judicially punish anyway. The lack of a law allowing something doesn't stop abuse of power! And Australia is notorious for its raids of journalist's homes and has a court system very disinclined to punish the police for illegal activity.
Yep. The Netherlands is one of those places. They have made extra judicial punishment a way of working. They call it an “intervention”. And they will make use of all the government organisations to do it. those organisations just have to follow orders because the interventions are co-ordinated by an intelligence agency called the RIEC.
No evidence is required, there are no bounds as to what they can do and there are no repercussions.
Around 30 years ago they got caught out with this sort of thing. It resulted in a scanal called "The IRT affaire", it's on netflix I think. They waited 4 years, learnt from their mistakes, now their new way of working is to do all of the work through proxies, orchestrated by an authority structure so it's not possible to take them to court. And all of their really dirty work they do through civilian proxies, the weakest and most easy blackmailed of society.
No one blinks an eye here.
Also, this country which has issue an arrest warrant for the leader of a particular country is at the same time buying hundreds of millions of euros of military equipment from the same country. Such hypocrisy.
As an Australian parent this is really pleasing to see. It's clearly inspired heavily by the work of Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge et al. The kids are not okay and the main thing stopping a worried parent from addressing it is that "all the other kids are on it". If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices? Collective action is needed and this is what it looks like.
We don't need watertight compliance, verification or enforcement - just raise the level of difficulty for kids to get on and create a culture among kids, parents and schools that social media is not allowed. This will be enough breathing room for parents to say no and kids not to feel like they're the only ones missing out.
> If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices?
Yes. That is literally your job as the parent. If there was some teenage trend of injecting heroin, nobody would accept "but my kid's social life might suffer" as a reason to not stop them from doing heroin. It similarly does not suffice as a reason to not stop your kids from using social media. If it really is that bad for your kids, you have a duty to stop them regardless of what other kids (and their parents) do.
Yes, but because the entire world agrees that heroin is bad (similarly to social media) governments have laws to restrict its access.
As for the job part. There is so much stuff kids don't need that other parents cave into, that unless you have the means, willpower and energy to find alternative peer groups, schools, teaching mechanisms, your kids _can_ become social pariahs if there isn't sufficient like minded parents in the community.
Of course you want your kids to internalise self-wort, a sense of confidence, and independence. Hoping they follow your mold and not a potentially damaging peer-groups. But that doesn't mean that some regulation from a body (government/school) isn't helpful. We live in communities.
Being a parent is not easy, and fights like these are really difficult. As a human you have only so much fight in you, and if a majority of parents adhere to the same rules this becomes so much easier to enforce.
Government rules set the moral bar, yes they are not enforceable but it creates a standard that most parents will adhere to.
As a dutch parent i wish we had the same rules, my kids are young enough that its easy to ban social media, but its getting harder as they are slowly becoming teenager.
As a parent I literally support bans of social media for under-16s AND I also do my job as a parent: my kids get a smart phone at 16, until then they have a feature/dummy phone (which they hide from peers because they are ashamed to show it).
Not having a smartphone would make my kids "social pariahs" for sure.
We gave them phones fairly early, but locked down. It was not really a huge problem when they were younger, but social media (no, we shouldnt even call it is, its is 110% ADS FOR CHILREN!) is getting to be a real problem now I feel.
Why dont you use any kind of adblock? Why don't you speak with them about harmful consequences of algorithms? Instead of ban that noone learn from, communicate issues.
It is definitely a parent's job to say "no" to degeneracy.
Saying "no" is easier when your child isn't offered a buffet of degeneracy by the outside world.
The point is clearly that you are causing other serious harms by doing so, unlike with the heroin example. You can’t tear kids away from a huge part of their social lives without serious consequences. Coordinated action means it’s not a choice between two terrible options.
Social media is not social anymore. The algorithmic feeds messed up almost all utility.
Facebook was a great platform for local communities and democracy but later turned into a threat to civilization more or less when they introduced the 'algo' 2010 something and wanted to get money for 'promoted posts'.
If every kid was injecting heroin we would not just expect, but demand the government step in. This is in addition to whatever parents are doing.
So true. In addition, if every kid suddenly became a vampire, we would not just expect, but demand the government step in.
Not only that, at some point the vampires will form a government for vampires which will be at odds and at war with the non-government vampire and there will be individual vampires that disagree with and feel a lack of representation from their vampire government.
Well...yeah. How would be scrounge up enough blood to keep them fed otherwise?
Wouldn't be better to educate children about deadly consequences of using heroin and what does it makes to your body? Noone is learn from ban, and enforcement of regulation also cost much more money.
According the stats in Haidt's book, between 2010 and 2020 girls in the US saw a 188% increase in emergency room visits for self harm per capita - never mind the less extreme presentations of mental health issues. Imagine you have an anxious, depressed and potentially suicidal child. This is a horrifying situation. How do you feel about being the hard-arse parent knowing that they will be furious? Is that actually your best move in that moment? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to make that kind of choice?
> > by taking away their devices
> That is literally your job as the parent.
Tell me you're not a parent without telling me you're not a parent!
This only works if there is broad support from the entire social group, meaning school and all (or most) of the other parents. If you try this all alone, all you can accomplish is to apply more suffering to your poor child.
For us, here in silicon valley, fortunately that broad support existed in elementary school. Not a single kid had a phone, so it was the norm.
In middle school the support is still broad, although less absolute. A few kids have phones, but they are outliers, so it's still normal not to have one.
I am a parent. That literally is your job.
> This only works if there is broad support from the entire social group, meaning school and all (or most) of the other parents.
Which there won't be. Most of these kids have "social media" accounts because their parents allowed it.
To be clear, "social media" for the purposes of this legislation is a VERY broad term that encompasses any almost platform that allows one user to communicate with another.
> If there was some teenage trend of injecting heroin, nobody would accept "but my kid's social life might suffer" as a reason to not stop them from doing heroin.
You know that's actually one of the reasons they made heroin illegal? So parents wouldn't be the bad guy when they stopped their kids from shooting up /s
And as a parent that duty can be outsourced into legislation and policework. Everyone has a fulltime job- and its okay to limit liberties and delegate.
Pro tip! If that is how you feel, don't have children. Wanting to outsource your childs upbringing to the government because it is "annoying" or "hard work" indicates that you are not ready to have a child.
If a parent forms that view, they should call Child and Youth Protection Services or the equivalent in their state, and offer to delegate the rest of the parenting to the state.
As a non Australian parent, I quite envy you.
Parents are almost as addicted as children and often take dozens of photos of every tiny event and post it on IG without permission of other children who are there in the pictures. Many kids have their own channels which are promoted by parents and their identities are based around them. I do what I can (don't give them devices till they're 18 etc.) but it's hard when the whole society around you is pushing the other way. Some kind of societal regulation like what's happened in Australia will be a good thing. It will add friction to kids getting onto these platforms and that will significantly slow down adoption.
> Many kids have their own channels which are promoted by parents and their identities are based around them.
What kind of sociatal cast do they belong to? I'd imagine this is mainly a thing among wannabe elite, wannabe 'influencers'? Like failed pro sports parent forcing their children to go for it to.
Are these same parents unable to tell their children "no you can't stay out late it's a school night"
My nephew is denied a smartphone due to low grades. Seems like a good enough excuse. Granted, it can work only if your country allows low grades.
What countries don’t allow low grades?
>We don't need watertight compliance, verification or enforcement
the law basically requires document verification, i.e. no anonymous access anymore for anybody. Just government protecting children, as usual.
> If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices?
They'd be addicted/bullied regardless?
This perspective highlights a key aspect often overlooked in debates about such laws: the social dynamics of parenting. You’re absolutely right that the “all the other kids are on it” pressure can make it almost impossible for individual parents to set boundaries without isolating their child
But all the other kids will simply be on the next thing. They're on social media because that's accessible, but the assumption is the demand for such things will vanish because you banned them?
I'm (apparently) one of the few millenials who seems to actually remember and empathize with my teenage self, because the early forms of social media were something I really wanted. I posted on Usenet, used ICQ etc. None of these things were easily accessible, but they fulfilled a need.
The situation being addressed is basically "I am taking no steps to limit my child from access to something I already disapprove of" and I don't see how this would address anything. You got them off Snapchat or TikTok but why wouldn't word of mouth just find a new service to act as a virtual third space? Social media works just fine in a web browser.
Basically there's a strain of assumption which could be summarized as "children aren't smart enough to use Mastodon!" as though to do so is not just "visit this URL here's the QR code".
It's a lowest energy state approach. The hope is that the hurdle will be raised high enough that enough kids will go to another outlet that is less harmful.
Personally, I think the cat is out of the bag. The information dense but fractured culture we are in makes it so kids will find otherways to communicate and share 'memes' (original sense of the world) and that this is whack-a-mole.
But, for many kids it will be enough to at least allow the parent's some appeal to authority to minimise their kids screen time and access to social media.
The internet still exists outside of social media sites designed to keep you there. I hope kids under 16 get addicted to anything else and don't turn to social media when they're old enough.
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As an Australian parent myself, let me say this legislation is useless and you need to stop hiding behind stupid government legislation pandering to the lowest common denominator in place of your parenting.
The “the government won’t let me let you use social media” is one of the most stupid and ridiculous arguments I’ve heard a mature adult make to a juvenile. Your kid is likely to see it as spineless, then go ahead and make a fake login to their favourite social media site without telling you.
I have a 14 year old and a soon to be 17 year old. Just have a conversation with them about social media. Now they are just going to hide their use of it with you and you won’t be able to guide them when their use of it goes wrong.
I’m not for this legislation, but your argument doesn’t hold up.
If people are hiding it, that in itself normalises that people are not using social media.
That’s the point; taking someone’s phone away makes them an outcast. If no one at school is “allowed” to have a phone, then it’s normalised, it’s normal to not have one.
It is pandering to the minority, but your argument hides behind insults to avoid facing the reality which is that it will normalise people not being on social media, which will make it easier for parents to ban their kids from using social media.
This isn’t some black market crap where the kids are nipping down to the servo to buy some vapes and get a slap on the wrist if their caught; if they’re banned and they’re caught, their account will get suspended.
That's instant death on SM, because of early adopter network effects.
It really will do something. You don’t understand the dynamics on SM if you think otherwise.
Whether you agree it’s good or not, is certainly open to debate. What it will do is open to debate; hidden group chats and an escape to platforms that are “technically not SM”, who knows… but the current landscape of SM & TikTok follower accumulation will change, dramatically.
Except it wasn’t up for debate. It was opened for public scrutiny on the 22nd, submissions closed on the 23rd, then it was put through Committee (who asked for only 1 or 2 page submissions because they themselves didn’t have time to review it properly) and was initially put to the House on the 26th and passed on the 29th.
The Act has no provisions for checking ID (that will be decided by the eSafety commissioner with no debate or discussion on the mechanisms they choose), and it doesn’t even define which social media companies will be affected.
To say this was up for debate is ridiculous. There was no debate!
You’ve taken literally one word from my comment, out of context.
Yes, you’re right, they rushed it through. …and that sucks.
Now what? Is that really the only meaningful complaint you can come up with about it?
I don’t support it because I think it’s overreach by a government that is already trying to make a nanny state.
…but I’m not naive enough to think it’s not going to work. It will work.
It probably has unintended consequences; that’s the problem.
I didn’t take you out of context. You literally say that whether the Act is good or not is up for debate. Before legislation is passed, it needs public consultation and debate. There literally was no public debate and now this is law!
Things like:
1. It will be trivial to bypass the restrictions.
2. The argument given in support of this Act by the OP was that it gives parents an excuse to prevent their kids from using social media. That’s going to work out great.
3. The mechanisms for verifying ID are not defined and will be decided without public debate. Adults will be forced to get a government controlled digital ID, or alternately social media companies will need to collect your official documentation to prove your age. Neither of these are palatable.
None of this has been considered. None of these concerns were allowed to be expressed by interested parties and the general public with sufficient time for comment.
That more than sucks. This is a government who wants to shove badly flawed legislation onto the Australian people because they are immensely unpopular.
I’m a Labor voter. Not next year.
Who will you vote for instead? Everyone supported it :(
An independent. Labor is more worried about the Greens and Independents than they are about the LNP.
Albanese and Co, who I voted for and quite liked, have shown that they need to be forced into a hung parliament to prevent their worst excesses. A huge pity.
They’ve been shockingly bad.
"The Act has no provisions for checking ID (that will be decided by the eSafety commissioner with no debate or discussion on the mechanisms they choose), and it doesn’t even define which social media companies will be affected."
As an Australian parent, congratulations: you are the problem.
I for one was on a public panel with politicians discussing how ridiculous this proposal was, a couple of months ago, before it passed.
The government gives all children email addresses while simultaneously banning them from social media. Only a bureaucracy could do this with a straight face.
IMHO as a technology-engaged parent the answer to complexity online (and in the entire world) for young people is education, not "ask the Nanny state to change the rules".
Timelessly compressed: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin.
> The government gives all children email addresses while simultaneously banning them from social media. Only a bureaucracy could do this with a straight face.
If you think it's email that is causing youth mental health issues then I see why you are confused about my enthusiasm.
Yeah sure, by that logic: what's next, ban networking for septuagenarians? Ban bingo as a dangerous gateway to online gambling? Ridiculous. Or perhaps the ultimate result: a brain license. You can comment online when you can construct a logical argument free of fallacy. Otherwise, stay in your hole. I'm sure society would be much better off with a Truman Show 'constabubble' for all, consuming rehashed and reverberated stereotypical pre-preference like spoonfed semi-souls locked in eternal preteen angst where the illiterati's pop-pinnacle of eloquence is dwelling on the artfully anticipative breathless pause before celebrating the only universally valid response: emotional offense and outrage at anyone or anything that can be construed as threatening the sacred illiterati-ignobubble. Stop being spoon-fed, grow the fork up, pick up the metaphoric knife and teach your kids to use it to pop their own bubble and dissect unfiltered reality: that's the one we actually live in.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
It's very hard not to see the whole marketing of the legislation as an exercise in misdirection.
The media campaign was led by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd (who see a commercial opportunity in cutting a demographic from their competitors audience for advertisers), and the government's marketing of it entirely focused on children being restricted, avoiding until the last weeks an admission it actually meant all adults would have to undertake verification processes to use social media.
The gulf between the practical effect of the legislation (all adults are impacted) and the claimed intent (only children under 16 are the focus), is so large the claims shouldn't really be accepted at face value.
Combine that with the abuse of democratic process: what would usually be weeks of public feedback was shortened to 24 hours, and after passing the lower house the government attempted to force the legislation through in the senate with no debate, finally conceding to a brief 1 hour debate before passing it in the final hours of the last sitting day of the year.
When opposition arose earlier in the week to the idea this is about a backdoor mechanism to force the government's recently rebranded myId (from myGovId), the government hastily made changes to the bill and loudly said social media companies would not be allowed to ask for government id, in physical or digital form.
But that itself was misdirection. A clause was added saying this does not apply if an alternative option is also provided.
But age assurance based on biometrics from webcams has poor accuracy, as one senator argued in the final debate. Fresh-faced youths will have no option but to go for the myID solution on their 16th birthday - which as that same senator pointed out is the age at which you can apply for a myID account.
On the topic of digital id and myID: it was also apparent that the Government seemingly feigned ignorance that this system, designed specifically for this purpose, would be the ideal and primary solution.
Yet we know just how much focus and energy has been going into designing these systems and working out how to get the public to accept them: witness this piece from 2018 [1].
It's of course fine to argue pros and cons of digital id, both philosophically, and in terms of specific implementation details, but that's not what happened here.
Everything clearly indicates the legislation was designed to sidestep any substantial debates on this topic.
What was also sidestepped was any reasonable discussion of specific implementation options. Instead we have vague details of an age assurance trial being run for many more months, with no specifics that help us understand how this legislation may work, or fail to work.
[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/preventing-another-australia-...
But didn't you know that social media is causing all of the problems we have right now? Haven't you seen the graph that shows society with no problems until social media, and now we have all the problems?
There are some ads targeting parents running on TV in the US about special accounts for under 16-yr-olds on Instagram.
It appears Big Tech has reason for concern when anyone interferes with their efforts to indoctrinate young people into their total takeover of the www.
Expecting an aggressive PR counteroffensive from Big Tech in response to experiments like Australia.
As an Australian parent, I'm concerned that there are parents out there who see it as the job of the state to do their job for them.
As another Australian parent (with school age kids) I heartily agree. Eager to see how this plays out.
While I appreciate the sentiment of this legislation, removing social media access for everyone under 16 years to address the concerns of a few is a nanny state act. As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government. Additionally, I would suggest it won't address the actual issue. The named/identified social media companies will comply as required, younger internet users will simply go elsewhere (the internet is a big place after all) and therefore the problem will ultimately go unaddressed.
It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
For children, it is very important for them to build their social skills based on interactions with other kids and adults, rather than from social media. They must learn about the world from the world, rather than through a commercial filtered lens of a big tech company, that is focussed on clicks, views and profits.
True, its a nanny state move. But, in my view, it is absolutely essential, as big tech seldom seems to worry about their products and their effects on children.
Sometimes, when the problem is big, the action must also be big.
> It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
See Penny Arcade's "John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory":
* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
> It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
Also true for television. Old Media had the monopoly on opinion-guidance back then. Part of the (encouragement of the) negative reaction to social media is it's threat to the status quo, much like Australia's previous legislation to force Facebook and Google to pay old media for linking to their news articles.
Different groups of people will have different lists of things they don't like about society and where it's headed; violent video games, advertising, music videos (that tend to be soft-porn these days), internet browsing tracking. Where does a government draw the line on what to act on and what to leave to the responsibility of parents? (how does this help other agendas? Will this look like we're "doing something"? Will this score votes? which way is the breeze blowing on this topic?)
Social media is a concentrator. I'm not convinced it's a 'cause'. There seems to be an epidemic of (social) anxiety, and maybe Facebook is the cause, but to me it feels societally deeper. World leadership is demonstrably not "the best of us" (I'm not just saying that because of Trump), to me, it feels as if there's a pervasive attitude of "I'll get mine and fuck the rest of you", which predictably trickles throughout the society whose leaders portray that attitude. Social media being one outlet of this, but I see plenty of 'us vs. them' polemics in traditional media.
Just my theory. I'm already poking holes in it mentally, but anyway. I don't have any useful answers. I guess we'll see if this ban makes a difference.
I think it has the potential to basically ruin society as we know it, the amount of hysteria, hype, division, lies, distraction and hate it breeds is enormous.
I look at some of the stuff on Reddit, especially some of the right wing stuff, it's actually alarming the stuff people say, and believe on there. I know they are extreme examples but holy shit.
The ability to amplify falsehoods and certain narratives is ridiculous.
I remember reading 1984, and being terrified, some of the stuff I read in online communities makes me at least that scared and worse.
It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.
> It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.
But they banned "social media" not smartphones. If they actually banned smartphones, this regulation would be much easier to enforce.
But by just banning a select few apos, kids are just going to move onto the next app.
And not only that, it only bans kids from having an account, they can still view content while logged out.
So Im going to bet that this not be effective, not be enforcable.
If you're not going to police that smartphone then how will this legislation do anything? What stops "US Mastodon" being the new place all the kids in your school are posting?
Like that is the goal here, because observably any phone with a web browser has social media access, it just can't be a company which tries to do business in Australia directly.
But 4chan has existed for years (that's not the end point, but certainly creating a selective pressure to push teenagers to less regulated, shadier social media services doesn't seem like it's quite the result people want).
The short version I'd say is, this move seems solely aimed at taking away a virtual third space for adolescents and doesn't plan to offer anything back. But people didn't go seeking it because it offered nothing.
Adolescents shouldn't have a non-anonymous presence on the internet.
...and no one talks about a toxic effect of comousory education in this context: your child is locked together with children whose parents you would never be friends with because of conflicting values.
maybe the peer pressure for phones issue would look completely different without compulsory education.
You can cast any regulation as a "nanny state act". Life is more complicated than that.
The ability of individuals to be aware and take conscious action against harmful behaviors is clear and should be used when possible. But that ability gets exhausted very fast in a hyperspecialized and complicated world. Most parents are digitally illiterate, can't protect even themselves online, let alone their kids.
Delegating to collective institutions that can pool the required expertise and weigh-in the pros and cons is the means to empower individuals to better handle these hard to evaluate risks.
If our institutions really dont produce good regulation the obvious thing to do is check and fix that, taking into account that the complaints about over-regulation, bad regulation etc. might be by the offenders or aspiring abusers that have something to lose.
Is there a time when you would find "nanny state" to be a useful concept? What would make that situation different to the social media ban?
I think the answer in implicit in my comment: When all the affected individuals can readily make their own judgement about the risks and benefits of their choices (1) they have all the relevant information, (2) they are able to comprehend it and (3) they can act on it using a menu of options.
99% of people are entirely clueless as to what happens behind the scenes in social media platforms because the information is not there, and it is doubtful they would be able to evaluate it anyway. Plus, there are hardly any differentiated alternatives available.
So when these conditions are not met, anybody throwing around terms like "nanny state" has ulterior motives to exploit vulnerable populations (ignorant, addicted, low information, trapped etc.) for their own gain.
Which is "fine" or at least understandable, moral values are not universal. But lets make clear the starkly different visions.
If TV were to be banned under similar reasoning would you believe that to be justified? TV programming is similarly opaque to the social media algorithms.
There are many TV channel alternatives, public TV is pretty transparent and there are regulations around when various programs would air, obligatory reporting of age suitability etc.
> There are many TV channel alternatives
There are many social medias
> public TV is pretty transparent
In what manner? As a kid I didn't know that the pokemon cartoon existed in order to make me buy trading cards.
Even in news there is an army of editors and producers making decisions all of the time. This leads to things like the state media adding sound effects to footage to make it more sensational and then after losing in court investigating themselves and finding no intentional wrongdoing [1]!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/05/abc-editorial-...
Australia has always been a nanny state though. Not even letting some games or movies in to the country because they think it's inappropriate for adults to consume for example. Ridiculous.
Curing addictions is very hard and some addictions are very strong. Some addictions are also guarded by business interests leveraging close to a trillion dollars to increase this addiction.
We didn't reduce smoking through personal responsibility, stop using "nanny state" tropes.
In democracies the government is an imperfect representation of the will of the people and sometimes it decides individuals can't fight some things.
Good point bringing up smoking. Why don’t they just make smoking illegal in every country ? Because it’s impractical. Same as this law.
I find it uncomfortable that so many of the arguments focus on practicality and that so few focus on liberty. It almost seems like a forgotten concept.
The point of smoking is about the origins of the term 'nanny state' [0]:
[0]: https://wordhistories.net/2020/10/03/nanny-state/
I agree parents should have the choice for kids using social media, but this example of impracticality is a bit off: cigarettes are illegal for kids in nearly all developed countries.
Smoking is also highly regulated now. It’s almost a surprise to see someone smoking nowadays.
And yet over half my high school year smoked, and I was absolutely peer pressured to start.
> Why don’t they just make smoking illegal in every country ? Because it’s impractical.
Is that also the reason they don't make cocaine illegal in every country?
And yet the things they have done have gone a long way to reducing the real harms caused by smoking.
A 5% spread of harm in a population is better than spread across 80% or 90%, etc. Taking action to reduce the surface area of harm, even if 0% is impractical, is beneficial to a functioning society.
The idea is to make a group decision to stop all the kids from using social media rather then get your kid alienated by just blocking him. Some people on hackernews want their kids to have zero friends and play SNES games but that's not what we should aim for.
“Nanny state” is fine when you’re talking about children.
Did you even read the parent comment?
> As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government.
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, driving and many other things are heavily regulated for children. Should a parent be able to allow his 12yo daughter to drink, smoke or marry 40yo guy? We're living in a society. Social media is just another item in the list.
I’ve seen many people make comparisons between these things and the social media ban, but I actually think they’re quite poor comparisons.
The main concern is around enforcement, which is still TBD for this ban. I assume you mean illicit drugs which are banned for everyone so I’ll skip that as it’s not relevant. For sex/marriage, these are basically not enforced until people notice or they cause a problem so again are not relevant. Driving is an interesting one but I’ll come back to it. The closest comparison here is alcohol and tobacco.
For alcohol and tobacco sales the rule of thumb staff are trained on in Australia is if the customer looks younger than 25 they ask for ID. The customer present their ID, the cashier visually checks the DoB, and the sale goes through. This does not affect the majority of Australians who either do not smoke or drink, or look old enough that no ID check is done. Enforcement for a social media ban would be onerous on all Australians who use social media (I don’t have numbers but I’m sure it’s more more than (smokers ∪ drinkers)) plus the scope for potential abuse or infringement of rights is far greater. Compare this to social media. How would such a ban be enforced? The kids are not stupid, they will find a way around whatever the enforcement mechanism is. So either the enforcement will be a) trivially circumventable to the point where the legislation is completely useless for its ostensible purpose, or b) devolve into an endless cat-and-mouse game trampling Australians’ rights every step of the way. Depending on how eager the Aus gov is to enforce this it could easily extend to VPN bans, destruction of anonymity online, and yet more means to eliminate free speech. These things are all extremely important for a functional society where people, especially vulnerable and marginalised people, can speak up without fear of retaliation. A cashier checking your ID at the shop is nowhere near the top of a slope as steep, nor slippery as this.
Driving is a really interesting comparison here actually. I’m not sure I would be opposed to a social media license. In the same way the purpose of a license is to ensure that road users can do so in a safe manner, maybe something similarly focused on education would be more helpful here than a ban. I’ve actually long blamed a kind of tragedy of the commons for the sorry state of the modern internet. Most users are simply not savvy enough to know better than to use it in all but the dumbest ways, fall for the dumbest scams, and basically allow themselves to be corralled like cattle into the sterile advertiser-friendly pens big tech companies have constructed for them. So in anger I’ve sometime said we should only allow licensed users online. Anyway that’s a bit off topic but a social media license is an interesting concept.
By that logic expecting citizens to stop at traffic light or expecting them to not violate speed limits is a nanny state act.
"to address the concerns of a few"
lol
[dead]
The votes are strong majorities of both houses - great to see a functional democratic government act on such an important issue.
They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications. It really would be great to see the government act with expertise to solve the problem in a way compatible with a free and open society.
> great to see the government act with expertise
I’ve seen the Australian government accused of many things, but that’s certainly a first. This is the same country whose prime minister once said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.
That was back in 2017 when the govts were all up in arms over encryption. Apparently they don't mind it too much now, which means it all must be back door'able for them.
Has been backdoor(ed|able) for FVEY (via Australia) since 2018.
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
5y in jail if you refuse to give a password and power to covertly access devices and conceal that fact if they desire. Yikes, they don't mess around.
By far the most bootlicking country in the Anglo world. Disgusting, and their political system should be shattered into the wind
Nature or nurture? Australia did start off as a penal colony in the early days.
And the USA started, in large part, as a destination for religious extremists. Funny how these things keep coming up again and again!
The problem is Australians are fine with it. They might be the population with the most people saying "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about" in the world, by a large margin.
> over 95 per cent of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) most dangerous counter-terrorism targets use encrypted communications
Some humorous sentences in there :).
This government also agrees on the topic.
This came from the less competent conservative government to be fair, although the current one is still very flawed.
> They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Hard disagree. We do not need an internet driver's license. Australians are supposed to have a right to interact with organisations with privacy protections under the Privacy Act 1988, like APP2 which allows individuals to deal with organisations anonymously or pseudonymously.
Social media companies are doing a great deal of harm to society, but banning under-16s is tackling the symptom, not the problem. All people should have more rights and protections, like opting out (or better, opting in) to infinite scroll and algorithmic content suggestions as opposed to subscribed content. Algorithmic content today is akin to spam in the early 2000s which governments regulated and has had some impact on bad behaviour by local companies (of course I am not under any pretense that spam will ever really be solved). Social media users should be able to opt in or out of content categories which AI could potentially help with that categorisation, ideally in an uber-transparent way.
I'm young enough that "modern" social media was just starting up when I was a teenager. It's not clear that banning under 16s from modern digital communication would provide any benefits (which, by the way, social media is very loosely defined under the amendment).
> Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications.
The big issue is that we are importing the UK model which will see identity outsourcing to companies like Yoti and AU10TIX, the latter which was hacked in 2021 and led to some pretty serious implications for affected users.
Of course the reality is that Meta is already doing age and identity verification on users who use privacy-protecting technologies like Firefox Container Tabs, at least in Australia, and has been for a number of years. This usually leads to an account being blocked until the user provides their ID via a photo. This will become formalised so that accounts that are detected as possibly being U16 (via various techniques like profiling and data matching against external sources) will be requested ID, and Yoti will likely be used to actually perform that verification.
Another big concern will be that this is forced onto smaller operators like Australian Mastodon sites, internet forums, mailing lists and others.
They can opt out, by not participating with the site. No one is mandated to use social media. But I would also want to see things go the other direction anyway, default to non-algorithmic feeds. Those with the awareness to opt-out are not the people at highest risk.
I agree with basically everything else you said, and I think social media is generally a blight on society. But we can opt-out already, if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you. You need to accept that responsibility in the same way it's up to ourselves not to drink 40 beers a day at home.
Reddit is among the range of sites deemed 'social media' per the article. Reddit is practically a glorified forum where users directly influence which submissions rise above others via personal voting and self-curation of communities to follow. There's no voodoo there forcing non-subscribed things in one's feed unless one is logged out (ie: non-participating anyway).
Given the timeframe to come up with how it's meant to be practically implemented it's not hard to imagine on various services all users of all ages from the region would be required to submit standard ID rather than an idealized age verification the GP suggests that prevents either storing or leaking identity (in either direction). If it went that way it'd be a major blow to user privacy and data security concerns.
Looking at criticism of the legislation there were a range of organizations pointing out such issues, including UNICEF.
Isn’t this kind of like saying the solution to robocalls is not having a phone?
I am not sure, phones are a device on a network, and robocalls are an abuse of the network to get to your device. It's an intrusion made by someone else. Social media seems to think it's a network, but it's more like a bar or club with a TV in it. You choose to show up each day and watch the TV.
It works though
> They can opt out, by not participating with the site
The definition of social media under the legislation is essentially any form of digital communication that allows two or more people to communicate, as decided by the minister.
> No one is mandated to use social media
OK, I'll bite. What if you want to join an interest group (crafts, technical, political etc) that organises meetings digitally on a social media site? Sure, you have the choice to not use a social media website, and if you do, in all likelihood not join your choice of interest group. The point is that Meta long used unfair and anti-competitive means to corner the market, and obviously not to interoperate so that it is difficult for people to leave. This might surprise you but the relationship between platforms and users is usually coerced and not really consensual. If you do not find yourself in this position, good for you. I'm a very firm believer that anti-competitive social media companies should be regulated in positive ways, like forcing interoperability and forcing companies to making algorithmic content opt-in.
> if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you
Yeah except people are usually on those platforms for many reasons, like access to group chats and messages, as the platforms have a wide reach. A lot of people become outcasts by quitting social media, myself included, because our friends choose to continue to use it.
I don't think we disagree, perhaps even on the point of responsibility for how we got here. I do certainly blame the social media companies for the software they built. I guess my only point is that the personal responsibility shouldn't be understated, as we all have agency over the issue, but it is too tough to rip the bandaid off for most which I understand.
I will say there are many ways to mitigate without leaving entirely, but it will be up to one's own discipline to disengage from the platform and manage your own behaviour while you visit.
Did you see the "without leaking identity" part? Your comment seems to ignore that.
Only for now. After requiring an ID to sign up is normalized governments will inevitably try to eliminate any anonymity to “protect children”/catch criminals/censorship/etc.
Case in point: COVID tracing was immediately ruined by the contact database being used by police for surveillance.
As a nation we have utterly terrible organizational firewalls for the public interest.
You must be a child, yourself. Incredibly naïve.
>the government act with expertise to solve the problem
Do you have an idea which problem did they solve? Did banning certain psychoactive drugs solved the problem of drug abuse? Maybe banning alcohol removed it from the streets during great depression? Banning gambling? Kids will find a way to get into their social media accounts anyway, and then these democrats will tell you they need to ban every VPN service and set-up Deep Packet Inspection devices for every ISP, make their own govt CA, and trust me all of it will be done in the name of people and child safety.
Sad to see a dysfunctional govt. which bans and calls it a solution to the problem. When I will be in the office I would ban the whole concept of banning itself once and forever, and any politician who proposed a single ban in his life would be banned from service. I will of course step out for proposing this ban immediately.
For all the proponents of the ban here – I will just tell you what works – for your education. It is endorsing and subsidising healthy and active lifestyle, supporting and promoting strong family wellbeing as well as upholding public psychological and physiological health. Only doing these instead of issuing bans would really contribute to kids choosing virtues of real life over screen time, but unfortunately addressing root causes takes more effort and time than issuing a ban.
That's great for those that can implement that, many cant (don't have the time, education, willpower, etc...), maybe the majority.
Given the challenges of rebuilding a proper society, maybe this is a step in the right direction (maybe).
We don't allow kids to have other addictive substances, there's definitely an argument (and the co's agree, with 13 yo minimums?) for restricting an addictive medium.
Just because the War on Drugs failed does not mean the argument extend on to every other fields.
Social media is similar to a drug because it is dopaminergic, and banning it is very similar to War on Drugs scenario, just a knee-jerk reaction, not an expertise-driven policy
And yet, the argument does extend. It applied to Prohibition, too.
And ban drunk driving works, banning gun works ? I'm not for these kind of policies either but people need more substantiate argument than that.
Of course it all works. The world now has no drunk drivers, and it is impossible to buy a gun. Thanks to the loving government and caring politicians who had employed best experts, most brilliant minds they could find, to ban the bad things. bad things no-no. We're living in ponyland already just look out of the window!
Banning smoking in many places plus banning advertising it plus banning selling it to kids reduced smoking by unfathomable amounts.
Do you have data do back it up? From quickly looking at historical records online, I can't see any unfathomable amounts reduction, It's levelled on 20-30% of smokers among kids, and it remains a core challenge for child and adolescent health to the current day (according to 2020 WHO report[0]), plus they started to smoke vapes. So did the bans you sampled really work, or do they just smoke more discreetly and use tricks to buy cigarettes now, making the whole thing more inaccessible and desirable for an average child?
[0] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/05-06-2020-smoking-stil...
Well, in Australia at least, the number of smokers in the 18-54 age cohort has almost halved in the decade upto 2022 (older smokers still tend to smoke), and more than halved in the 15-24 category.
A "national tobacco strategy" was introduced in 2011/2012 that brought plain packaging, increased taxation and a bunch of other measures.
Official data is here if you're interested: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/insights-australian-smokers-...
There's also Wikipedia and any number of other resources that go into more detail on the history of decline: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_Australia
Smoking used to be at much higher levels (50%+) and absolutely everywhere.
Also vaping is probably better than smoking, and don't worry, vaping is next on the ban list. It just takes time to build the case.
I might be wrong but I read the OP’s comment as sarcastic.
You are wrong. Banning smoking worked.
How do you know?
At least in the US, smoking rates dropped substantially by the 1980's, long before many anti-smoking laws were in effect (you could still smoke on planes in the 80's!).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184418/percentage-of-cig...
> In 1970, Congress took their anti-smoking initiative one step further and passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio starting on 2 January 1971. In April 1970, President Nixon signed it into law.
Can you guys research this stuff before posting, please?
Can you please look at links before commenting?
Do you think the US government passed a law in a vacuum?
The health issues with smoking became well known by the 60s and the number of people smoking was already dropping by the 70’s.
Please don’t make the amateur mistake of confusing correlation with causation.
Only worked for Australian politicians to pat themselves on the head. They are still getting money from tobacco companies, and they know where it is coming from. Kids in Australia still smoke a lot, exploring other ways of inhaling addictive substance, and no ban can really solve this problem
People were already moving away from smoking. The aggressive policies don't deserve all the credit.
There are many articles and documentaries about the impact of smoking adoption due to tobacco companies advertising primarily to kids.
Even if we disregard all the science, the fact that the very companies themselves were targeting kids shows that they knew where their money was coming from.
They mean the root of this comment tree, not your parent comment.
The very graphic lessons at school showing what a smokers’ lung looks like after a life spent smoking didn’t hurt either.
I highly doubt they have the expertise to implement anything remotely 'cryptographic.' Their level of competence seems stuck in the 1950s, stamping paper forms, while anything more complex is handed off to consultants in Australia. These consultants appear far more interested in lining their pockets than in understanding technology or math.
The far more likely scenario is they piss a couple of hundred billion away on the first company that shows up with a slick-sounding, half-baked platform, claiming it can magically solve all their problems with just a few "minor" tweaks.
I'm an interested party, I have a 13 year old daughter who would benefit from a little less time on social media. But that's my problem, and my belief that these idiots in our government could help me with that is zero percent. I am probably in the .1% of households where dads know more than kids.
(If photometric id comes in, I want to be in the fake moustache business).
There is myID (formerly myGovID) which would be the logical vehicle for a government provided age verification service. I've heard (but can't find a source) that it's build on OIDC/OAuth, so extending it to be an IdP exposing only specific claims (ie, age) shouldn't be a huge leap.
myID as it stands is a bit of a farce. It uses OIDC under the hood, but it only supports end users that download the myID app on their smartphone via the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Security is effectively outsourced to Google and Apple as the user's identity is "pinned" to their smartphone.
Take myGov in contrast which is web-capable and supports users to use a Yubikey or Passkey/Webauthn-capable device to authenticate.
Under the Australian Digital ID scheme myGov will likely be usurped by myID, which is, in my view, an inferior scheme which blatantly ignores basic standards.
I was too right, they already selected a slick sounding half baked platform: https://accscheme.com/
> national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age
Nah, this is an antipattern we've seen before. A veritable Pandora's Box whispering to be opened. There is a much simpler and safer solution:
1. A disclosure law, which requires sites to somehow (e.g. HTTP headers) show their nature as a social media site, porn site, etc.
2. Parents can choose to purchase devices/software for their children with a parental-lock, set those filters and permissions to match their own locality or personal preferences, and whitelist any necessary exceptions.
This way the implementation costs of the shifting, complex, never-ending demands will fall onto the groups that actually want to use it, instead of all sites in the world being potential legal jeopardy for failing to implement all the censorship rules of every possible visitor.
It also means that most enforcement (and exceptions) move out into a physical realm which parents are at least able to see and control.
> without leaking identity
Leaking identity to the site is only half the problem, the other is leaking activity to the government. I'd ratehr not have a Government Internet Decency Office with an easy list of every single site I ever tried to view or register-for, without any kind of warrant or other due-process.
The problem with this approach is that you will have two groups of children, the ones who have access and the ones who don't have access.
This is a worse problem than allowing it for all.
Its another vector of temptation, distraction, in-equality, etc.
> in-equality
If your concern is that some parents will be able to afford to give their children their own devices, but not afford any parental-control software with them... Well, that's better-addressed with an explicit "Digital Tools For Needy Parents" program.
If you mean some parents will choose to give their kids more autonomy... Well, isn't it proper for that to be their decision? I have little sympathy for neighbors who use the logic of: "You are banned from giving your child $thing, because I'm tired of hearing my kids whine that they want it too."
I don’t think the concern is economic equity, it’s social harm.
Kids whose parents choose to restrict will suffer social consequences vs parents who don’t.
The whole point of the law is to reduce the social harm caused by social media.
I'd say the next steps is that you also force institutions for kids to ban it, regardless of parent choice.
Parents must present proof of disabling said websites for their children. Or their kids can just not have those devices with them.
Do this for schools, activity clubs, restaurants, fast for food places, etc, and you've basically hit 80% of places where kids are all the time.
But not a worse problem than blocking it for everyone
We’re a nanny state, the government is just going to use it to track us
Nanny state is a term coined by tobacco industry in their lobbying against tobacco laws. Is it really a term you want to use here?
https://www.tobaccotactics.org/article/countering-industry-a...
> Nanny state is a term coined by tobacco industry in their lobbying against tobacco laws. Is it really a term you want to use here?
Sure, because most people h ave no idea where the term originates from and it now has a life of its own. It's the standard term for this sort of thing.
Who cares? Whether or not it applies in this particular case, it's a useful term. Rejecting ideas because of who they come from is the very antithesis of intellectual maturity.
Just because an "evil" group used, or even coined, a term doesn't mean it's not a useful term.
Why not? It is about treating people as adults or children.
ASIO has been able to track you for decades since they have real-time metadata feeds from Telstra, Optus, NBN etc.
They have access to your location estimate, URLs of sites you've visited, people you talk via email/phone etc. And we know that this dataset is shared to the Five Eyes.
So if you are concerned about being tracked I would strongly recommend leaving Australia.
It’s more about who has access to the data and how easily. Plus the potential of creating a massive target for hackers.
And now they’ll be able to see the groups you go to within pages, read comments, see what we write, etc etc. It also goes from being a defence capability to used for all sorts of things and eventually leaked.
It’s not bad enough to leave, better to engage with the politics and try to get some rights before it spreads further outwards
This is conspiracy theory thinking, why on earth would age verification give them access to all of this additional information?
In what way do you think they'll be able to verify your age reliably without you having to, yourself, "willingly", hand over your PII?
Aren't videogames where you consume drugs for gameplay boosts banned there? I always found that weird for a first world country.
For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.
Forced voting is proof of it. Australia is by far the least free Anglo nation. I will never step foot on that god forsaken island.
They have no culture, and that’s the opinion of Australians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Ugliness
Ha! We have compulsory voting but unlike many Anglo countries we don't require voter ID, vote registration etc. In fact you do not need to provide any ID to vote, because voting fraud is so statistically low (see https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/voting-fraud-negli...). We simply provide a name and address and fill out the ballot.
We have so many issues, but compulsory voting is not one of them, in my opinion. If you feel so strongly to not vote you can abstain by an informal vote like roughly 5% of the country does on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/Informal_Voting/) or simply pay the AU$20 (roughly US$13) fine like apparently around 5-10% of Australians do on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm).
In my view, and in the view of many Australians, people encouraging further "freedom" to not vote are attempting to suppress votes, a major issue in the United States and other countries with optional voting.
In Australia they ask to see your ID but you can say you don’t have it on you. I think they mostly just ask for ID so it’s easier to look up your name with the correct spelling.
Counter anecdote, I’ve never been asked for id when voting in South Australia or NSW in my 20 year voting history
Me neither, in Qld.
They don't. Source: Australian citizen that has voted many times.
...in the same election? Seriously, if they don't ask for any id, how do they prevent fraud?
You get your name + address marked off the roll when you go to vote. If you get your name marked off multiple times it would indicate fraud.
So, I can save my neighbors a hassle and a $20 fine by appearing at the polls for them?
Maybe but that would be voter fraud and quite a serious offence, like going to prison for ten years, which is why not many people do that.
Given that there are no identity checks and I'm doing people a favor, how would I be caught?
You wouldn't be doing anyone a favour by committing electoral fraud.
But that aside, although Australia doesn't require any ID on election day, Australians do register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) with their name, address and date of birth. AEC workers have a printed copy of these records on election day. Obvious anomalies like someone with a different age can be reported. Otherwise anomalies like multiple votes from the same address are investigated, I imagine by interviewing the person at that address.
The AEC provides transparency about how it detects fraud and the penalties that can be imposed for people who are caught doing it. The point is that this is quite rare. The AEC's aim is to lower barriers to voting in the first place so that all people can. By detecting anomalies and using tipoffs the AEC estimates the impact of voter fraud and takes a scientific approach to recommend against raising barriers to vote.
The state I live in has an average of about 4 elections a year. Sometimes as many as 8.
Being required to vote in all of them would be a large burden.
Stopping people suppressing votes should not be solved by taking away freedoms.
You won't win any arguments with Australians on forced voting. The major parties would love to kill it, but it is something the (forced) voters will refuse to give up. It may not be 'free', but it helps keep things free.
If you are going to cite sources about 1960's Australian culture, back in the oppressive dark ages of 'White Australia', make sure you compare it with other 1960's cultures. Or try some sources from this millennium that have come to terms with not being part of the British Empire.
> Forced voting is proof of it.
Forced voting is a net benefit, the biggest being that it forces parties to the center rather than having to say/promise stupid stuff to appeal to the fringes that have firm political positions (see: USA). Mandatory voting + preferential voting, alongside a well-run independent election commission has resulted in very high trust in our democratic process.
Compulsory voting means that a large part of the electorate that doesn’t pay attention to politics is easily frightened by scare campaigns.
An example of this is that Australia is sorely in need of tax reform, but any party that pushes for it at state or federal level is damaged at the polls, often fatally.
Then how did John Howard get the GST passed?
He lost a lot of seats in the 1998 election and suffered a big swing against him.
You have to remember, Australia as a nation is young, and has an interesting history - forced migration of convicts, high levels of immigration (IIRC 25% of the population are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants), and of course the difficulty of dealing with colonial treatment of the Aboriginal population. "No culture" is patently absurd; everywhere with people has a culture.
And on mandatory voting: yes, in one way, that's a curtailment of freedom, but in another way, it's enshrining freedom.
Australia is one of the freest countries in the world:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freest-co...
Higher than UK and the US.
In day to day life we are fairly free but for example we have much weaker freedom of speech/opinion than the USA. For example if you raise your arm at a particular angle you can now be sent to jail [1].
We also had some of the longest/harshet COVID lockdowns in the world in my state.
[1] - https://www.dw.com/en/australia-man-convicted-for-performing...
> if you raise your arm at a particular angle you can now be sent to jail
Also known as doing a Nazi salute.
> Higher than UK
Not according to https://rsf.org/en/index or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
I assume that other indices that show “data” that fits whatever narrative one wants are easy to find…
Which makes things like this meaningless in isolation.
Compulsory voting seems to push against the current trend of political polarization. Also, not sure Australia is, or wants to be, an "Anglo nation".
It’s not polarised, but it is quite sclerotic.
This is the opposite of democracy - a group imposing rules "for their own good" on people it doesn't represent who have no recourse. If they had any integrity they'd be banning it for adults not children.
this is what a seven-year-old would sound like if they were writing a persuasive essay about how they shouldn’t have a bedtime
Save your breath, Australians don't have the same views on government or individual rights as America (or even Canada!).
I lived in Singapore for a while and it's a "flawed democracy" where the government has stacked the deck against any opposition party to a degree that's breathtaking.
But a poll in Singapore showed that 70% felt that "social harmony is more important than democracy". Even if Singaporeans knew how undemocratic the government was, they wouldn't care.
How can you protect children from the absolute devastating effects of social media on children, by banning it for adults?
Demonizing social media is this generations version of demonizing rock and roll.
It's so tiring.
The harm of social media is closer to alcohol or tobacco. Addiction, even though with milder physical conseques. Nothing to do with demonizing.
Is it? You can see the actual harm caused by web sites.
Doomscrolling in all age groups. Going to bed very late at night.
Girls having body dysmorphia cause of instagram.
Young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
None of these sound like they are a very big problem compared to many alternative things people do. People talk about social media as though it's lead paint.
I particularly liked that one Facebook study that is usually taken out of context.
The latter is the scariest but the least binded to a social media (except of underground ones which will never have age verification anyway).
> young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
this made me lol so much. porn addition is not the cause, but the consequence.
do you have any idea how hard it is for males to find a willing mate nowadays? most females have men fighting over them, while most men must always do the fighting to get even one low-quality female in their entire life.
I wish you could see your comment as most people see it.
When you refer to "males" and "females", and especially use terms like "low-quality female" you sound absolutely unhinged.
or realistic maybe? people are too keen to forget that we share 98.8% DNA with chimps...
just because thing A was (unjustly) demonized doesn't mean demonizing thing B is without merit, even more so when thing A and thing B are completely unrelated.
I agree with the OP that the ban is woefully undemocratic, and that banning it for children only is a grave misstep.
I think what they should ban instead is recommendation algorithms. If I subscribe to a source, and explicitly unsubscribe from another, it should be illegal to withhold some of the first’s postings and shove the second’s in my face. This should be a no-brainer and has nothing to do with the age of the user; but it's easier to just ban the people who, as OP correctly noted, have no representation and no recourse.
I mean there has been at least one genocide planned on social media. Maybe adults were the real danger after all.
Does Ukrainian's Revolution of Dignity counts?
Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption? Do you feel the same way about those prohibitions too?
> Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption?
Up to a point, but AIUI there is credible medical evidence for those being disproportionately harmful (in physical, objectively verifiable ways) to the young. I think setting the same standard of harm and applying it to all ages is reasonable; maybe this law is based on some claim that social media harms children in a way it doesn't harm adults, but bluntly given how much the topic is biased and politicised I just don't trust today's social science establishment enough to justify this kind of law.
Correct. Children deserve rights, representation, and bodily autonomy. Today they have none of this
We need to turn down the volume here.
Not being exposed to social networks for a few years is no way comparable to depriving them of bodily autonomy.
They are already mostly segmented off from their friends after school hours. They have killed off one of the final mediums for interaction and are preventing interaction with the rest of their generation's culture. They're also narrowing their world view to be more controlled by the state.
Hasn't that been the case for thousands of years? It's not like they can't see each other after school hours... I know i used to. And i still see my friends after my workday. I have much deeper connections with the 20 people i see in real life than the 1000 people on my linkedin profile.
Do people thrive more in their mental health when they are supposedly 24/7 accessible? Is it necessary? Is it wanted?
> It's not like they can't see each other after school hours... I know i used to.
Things have gotten much worse since then. These days children get reported if they're out and about unsupervised.
Actually this is a separate problem. If you look at the work of Jon Haidt who promotes the kinds of measures we're talking about here, it's only half the story. The other half is that we have become ridiculously overprotective in parenting in recent decades. Kids need independence and the ability to hang out and play with their peers away from direct adult supervision. The goal isn't to take away the internet and leave kids with nothing, it's to bring back the real-world contact and relationship-building.
> The goal isn't to take away the internet and leave kids with nothing, it's to bring back the real-world contact and relationship-building.
Ok but what's the betting on which of those the actual effect of the law is going to be?
No, we need to turn it WAY up. We circumcise AKA male genital mutilation to hundreds of millions of male children all across the world, including much of the USA and Australian populations.
That’s just one tiny example, and no one is calling for circumcison bans simultaneously.
Letting the mutilated children have some social media is the least the state can do for them. Australia is a tyrannical hellscape.
Yes, but then how could they find audience for political ads, if not in social media?
Um, that's exactly what a democracy is - a tyranny of the majority.
You missed the point. Tyranny of the majority is one thing if the minority can at least vote and participate in the political process. Shutting the minority out entirely is quite different.
We do have recourse. What you'll see is more independent candidates get voted in to overturn the law. Once the government of the day starts badly implementing it the conservatives who voted with the center left party will split off and start attacking for it's repeal. It's a nothing burger law designed to look tough and do nothing.
under 16 year olds cannot vote, are not represented and have no recourse.
when one group votes to make rules for another group that cannot vote, it can be called many things, but "democracy" is not one of them.
When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Acting like we should be seriously treating children and teens as an equal political group is a joke
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Is it? Last time I checked I thought that was only when parents or legal guardians do it to a small number of children in their care, not when politicians do it to all children in an entire country.
But even if I accept your premise, your comment makes me wonder if you've never heard of people who are bad at parenting, or who are downright abusive to the children in their care.
Let me ask you something: Do you support removing liquor laws banning underage people from being sold alcohol? Or removing laws that ban the sale of cigarettes to children? How about gambling or buying lotto tickets for childrenm
I think it's clear that as a society we have already decided that government has a role in establishing legal protections to prevent children from falling afoul of systems that are designed to be predatory
This is just another layer of that
Which also establishes a social norm that letting children drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or gamble is not a good thing, so people who are bad parents know at least some baseline of what they should not be doing
Who defines what a child is? Who defines what a elderly person is? Are these questions also jokes to you? You seem pretty flippant about deciding which groups shouldn't have political power.
Many countries already tried using objective criteria to decide who gets to vote, and this always results in policy that screws nonvoters at the benefit of voters. Do you think the housing crisis all around the western world is an accident? It's not. The electorate chose this because it benefits them. Is it an accident that the last 2 US presidents are pedophiles? Probably, but that would be much less likely with a younger electorate.
A decision was made about how children's lives should function without their input. Right now do you believe that the class of parent voters votes as representatives of the interests of their children and their future? Or do you believe that all persons under 16 have no concept of time or political interests and couldn't even understand if a politician was making them a good deal through a political ad?
Children understand brand new toys better than anyone; by high school, pretty much all of them understand that they get better teachers if you pay more. Are students not interested in getting better grades for "free"?
The government is not anyone's parent, it doesn't give a lick if your kid dies tomorrow, cause kids don't vote.
Hey, didn't you get the memo that teenagers know everything, have the simple & straightforward solutions to all of life's problems, and are never wrong?? ;)
I'm not sure what's worse: giving parental responsibility to politicians or equating craven paternalism to benevolent parenting.
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Children issue is just the excuse for government to get people obey. Sadly but "kids protecting" propaganda is one of two the most effective ones, works great and there are lots of alternatively gifted persons that do not get the real attitude.
> Acting like we should be seriously treating children and teens as an equal political group is a joke
Yeah this thread is wild, maybe because those speaking “on behalf” of children here are actually all children?
Age restrictions for social media are as logical and necessary as they are for driving, drinking, etc. It isn’t just a concern about self-harm. The general public has a stake in this too in the long run, and it’s a safety and security issue for them as well. (If you don’t believe this is true, just think about how much power Facebook already has over elections, and how much more they will have if literally everyone alive grows up on Facebook and doesn’t think that power is worth questioning)
Years from now we’ll all be surprised we didn’t arrive at this conclusion sooner.
> are not represented
Young Greens/Labor/Liberal allow members as young as 14.
And these groups have significant and direct input into political policy.
So simply not true to say that have no representation.
You're far more optimistic than I about our government being able to implement a secure, reasonable solution for age verification.
COVIDSafe was the last technical undertaking and it was expensive and a completely inept implementation. The MyGov website is another failed attempt at keeping personal data secure.
Further, it seems likely that social media companies are likely to come out of this with even more information about us.
Government and tech do not mix well (at least in Australia).
People are far more worried about the government knowing that you're using a social media site, than they are about the social media site knowing who you are.
I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification. I'm assuming it'll be an openid type flow where the social media sites will have to register client IDs with the govt myID, in which case the govt will directly be able to tie a person to what social media they use. It won't tell them what account it links to on the social media side, but depending on what data is returned, they can easily just ask the social media company for this info later on.
I suspect that it is technically possible to make an anonymous identification service because the result to the social media site just had to be yes or no.
In the Netherlands you have a government identification service that identifies people to other government sites. And a bank service that uses the banks identification service also roll to identify to other sites.
Technically it would be possible to delete any trace afterwards.
However. I have never ever in my life seen any government choose not to take advantage of an opportunity to exert more control over their citizens if the possibility exists.
Plus rather than force it on everyone it should be a choice of the parents. Clearly not doing this is better but in the absence of that parents deciding is better for the others.
> I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification
Blind signatures. Briefly, a blind signature is a way for a party to sign a document without seeing the contents of the document. The cryptographic forms of this, at a high level, work like this:
1. You do a keyed reversible transformation on document D that produces a transformed document D'. This is called "blinding" the document.
2. They sign D' with signature S'.
3. You apply the reverse transformation to S', which gives you a signature S from them for D. This is "unblinding".
Use a random key each time you need to get something blind signed and throw away the key afterwards.
Even if they later see D and S they can't match them up with any D' and S' because they don't know the key.
For age verification D would be some kind of token you obtain from the social media company during age verification. You'd then have the government blind sign that with a signature that is only used when the government has verified you are at least 16. You'd unblind the signature and give that back to the social media company.
There are also protocols to do this using zero knowledge proofs.
The proposed digital ID solution is designed to protect the individual from this type of information disclosure.
lol - hardly! Submissions were announced on the 22nd, this closed on the 23rd, the Committee was so blindsided they literally requested submissions should 1-2 pages long, the bill was introduced to the House on the 26th and passed on the 29th.
That’s some really well reviewed legislation. Parliament sitting days close on the 31st.
It's going to be interesting to see how one can use cryptography to do this privately. I wonder if the cost and complexity of such a thing would result in big companies simply requiring some kind of "take a picture of your ID" style verification.
Estonia's ID card https://www.id.ee/en/ could certainly be a model; still not sure how to do age verification. My best guess would be some sort of cryptographic signing that refuses to sign if you are below a certain age.
Or, you know, don't keep going into this path of authoritarianism.
Your comment is absolutely disingenuous pretending that this Draconian move can be implemented with open society or transparency. This is the same nation that went absolutely bonkers with their COVID policies and their inhumane treatment of anyone who desired freedom or bodily autonomy.
Dear god, no. This doesn't need more technology.
The whole purpose of this is only to give parents a reason to say no. Often, a single kid in a class with an unrestricted iPhone is enough to poison the well. Now it's much, much simpler. Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
>Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
Jesus, were you born 40? I don't know a single person who didn't willingly pirate media, games and break other laws (usual suspects like trespassing, underage + public drinking...) as kids and teens. They will not care about the law if they want to do something it limits.
I’m not called Jesus and I age normally.
Do you have children?
Just stop. You're being incredibly naive.
> functional democratic government
Wait, where? Not in my Australia. Saying our govt has any competency is also gobsmacking.
Yep, it's better here than other places (for certain groups) but when the notorious hate rag daily mail condemns (literal) neo-nazis marching and saluting in support of transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull you've really got to question what kind of functional democratic government or expertise leads and legislates this country. Literally the daily mail thinks our neo-nazi problem is a bit much. I genuinely can't wrap my head around that. The daily effing mail. That's the state of this country; what a healthy democracy that literal neo-nazi groups are free to demonstrate against human rights while the police force people doing nothing more for human rights than holding the pathetic signs back from the streets so the frog marching idiots can continue unimpeded. Utterly disgraceful state of affairs. It's so embarrassing.
This legislation isn't going to stop kids accessing social media or prevent any of the related social harms, unfortunately. It's just going to give licence to erode privacy even further. All our pollies are so dangerously incompetent, especially when it comes to anything relating to computers, it's just enraging. It's a disgrace. Our governments don't give a single shit about human rights or the welfare of the people in our country. This law is no different, but it sure is a great distraction.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11879737/Neo-Nazis-...
Call me oldschool but to me a functioning democracy is where anyone can express their opinions. Neo nazis, zionists, anti zionists, jews, palestinians, socialists, globalists, communists, libertarians etc.
Yes, a functional democracy means neonazis advocating for genociding are protected from the vicious sign holders by the police. Yes, that is definitely a functional democracy. The state defending neonazis from people holding signs is absolutely the free marketplace of ideas in action. Genocide is acceptable if enough people vote for it. Wow, what a great idea!
I one day hope to be so privileged to actually think like that. Give me half a billion dollars and a lobotomy and that's as close as I'll get; I'm not sure it'll be enough.
you must be joking, that's exactly how communist government works.
Given strict laws but "don’t prescribe any particular ... methods" so one day law enforcements can extort a large sum of fine from companies as needed.
The only difference is Commie leaders invent bullshit "laws" by themselves and no voting.
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Australia was founded in 1901 as a federation of free states.
More than half of which were penal colonies.
Just so it's clear - this new law will require everyone over 16 to provide proof-of-age, and thus identity, to use the most popular portions of the internet. Saving the children is the voter-acceptable way of getting it past public scrutiny, and paves the way for a national DigitalID that will be required by all citizens.
Where does the legislation say that? My reading is that it specifically says that social networks have to provide an alternative verification mechanism that doesn’t rely on government ID.
That's the outcome of the law.
Think of it this way - how will YOU, specifically, prove you are actually over the age of 16 without having some proof of age object that is tied to your device(s) or usage patterns?
If a 15 year old will have to prove they're 16 to use a service, so will a 35 year old. It's not just the kids proving their age.
The legislation is literally
> A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.
It doesn’t specifically require them to collect IDs. However it does say the opposite and that the site can only collect government ID or a digital ID information if:
> the provider provides alternative means [not involving IDs] for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances.
I’m not going to argue that the legislation is perfect. But it doesn’t actually do what most opponents are accusing it of doing.
To keep under 16s out, everyone over 16 needs to prove they are indeed over 16. It's like a nightclub/pub/bar - to get in, EVERYONE needs to prove their age, either with a real or fake ID.
IDs don't need to be collected and stored, but "reasonable steps" could mean that Meta, for example, may use services to verify a Driver's License or Passport number, or obtain a myID token that proves age.
How else do you keep kids out for their own safety?
The legislation for social media and alcohol sales are completely different.
There is no expectation of “reasonable effort” to not selling alcohol to minors. It’s flat out illegal and heavily penalised. Nor is there a requirement for companies to find a way to sell alcohol to adults without asking for ID.
I get the concern you have, but you’re arguing against a scarecrow version of the legislation.
So a burner email account? How do you think this is going to work?
You're either going to need to have a Digital Id, such as the Australian Govt myID, or something else to prove you're over 16. A burner email doesn't prove age, and that's what AusGov says they want to do.
That's my point.
Can you elaborate what you mean? We already need identity for ISP access and mobile phones, no?
Only for activation of a service, which has nothing to do with the actual user. Purchase a phone using cash from any store selling mobile phones, and then use free WiFi (however insecure that may be) anywhere you can find it. If you want mobile data, get someone to register a prepaid SIM card, then add money to it using a prepaid debit card from AusPost, which you don't need ID to do.
I personally welcome this change. Anecdotally, I experienced unimpeded and unsupervised internet access throughout my younger teenage years, and was exposed to some truly horrendous material courtesy of the bigger social platforms. My parents knew I used social media. They believed it was fine because it was "just MySpace and Facebook".
Meanwhile, I witnessed large amounts of open bullying between my peers, recordings of physical assaults, underage revenge pornography, and a massive decline of people physically spending time together outside of online contexts, culminating in widespread loneliness and isolation.
In recent times I have seen the dramatic failure of social media companies to moderate their content, actively promoting extremist content, and even openly protecting the originators of illicit material.
Rates of youth suicide skyrocketed shortly after the rise of smartphones, social media and always-available internet access as evident by published statistics. While none of these can be individually attributed as the cause of this rise, all are undoubtedly a contributing factor, as suggested by countless studies globally.
I started using the internet unsupervised heavily in my tweens in the early 2000's and came across some horrendous stuff pretty early. Despite that, for me I think it's been a net positive and I would like my children to grow up in a similar environment.
The lasting qualities I think it's given me are:
- An open mindedness and the ability to examine issues from multiple angles
- A thick skin against shocking material/online forms of bullying
- A stronger understanding of how technology interacts with society/power structures
I think the country needs to be building digitally strong youth, not trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
Nothing I have ever seen on the internet comes anywhere close to what I was dealing with IRL.
The "behind the scenes" of this was a repeated campaign based on News Corp's (ie. Fox News / The Murdoch's) newsrooms (TV, radio + paper).
The legislation was primarily based on their campaign - likely as an attack against TikTok and other social media companies, who are taking their viewership and advertising revenue.
I believe in the premise of the change (to protect young children), just not the motivation or interests behind this law.
There’s an interview on The Rest is Politics Leading podcast with the politician Peter Malinauskas the premier of New South Wales who started the introduction of this law in his state first. I think it was maybe then taken up by the federal government.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leading/id1665265193?i...
It’s very insightful and from listening to this it seems unlikely that murdoch was a huge influence on this.
Even if they were, aren't they are unlikely to gain much from this. I.e, when the average teenager can't consume social media platforms anymore, they surely won't go back to a more traditional outlet?
Just as a note. Peter is premier of South Australia. Same political party as national and NSW though
Apologies you’re right, I looked it up but my brain had obviously already decided it was NSW as that’s what I wrote. It’s a great interview, he seems like a good guy.
I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos and the new corpos are more than likely aware of this from their own research so I don't think fighting over viewership is a factor in this.
> I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos
Well, no, because social media is a better alternative. Hence why they're getting it banned.
No, because kids don't care about news channels. It's not a darn kids on tiktoks thing, before tiktok or twitter or facebook they were outside, or playing video games, or reading books, or any number of things because underage kids don't give a hoot about talking heads newsstations.
Edit:
Quick summary of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8SkLRxFRVM (First 8 minutes)
I don't like nanny state policies like this, but hopefully we'll get some data about social media usage from this after a few years.
Prediction: the policy was both difficult to implement and difficult to determine if it made any impact, positive or negative.
I've always wondered, when do policies become nanny state policies? If they have data showing that under-age use of social media leads to higher rates of suicide, why would that be a 'nanny state' policy? Does there have to be a gun or drug involved, rather than a phone?
“Nanny state policy” just means “restriction of freedom that I don’t personally like”.
I am sure someone else would point the origins of 'nanny-state' comes from. Yet, it has been used initially in the UK to support advertising of smoking, later for support of not using seat belts, and so on.
It's a rather ironic twist in this case... and a very favorable read.
This legislation has no teeth. There is nothing that forces social media companies to verify ID. In fact in the legislation social media companies can’t force users to provide ID.
It’s stupid legislation pandering to the lowest common denominator by a Labor government who have no vision and no idea how to deal with very real cost-of-living problems for Australians. The only problem is the LNP are even worse, an the Greens are nuts, so we’re stuck either anthem because they are the best of a terrible bunch.
I don't like people who refer to government regulation as "nanny state policies".
This is a bad idea. We should be forcing demonetization of the platforms content creators instead of hamstringing children. No I'm not joking. Content creators making money should be outside where I post about my cat. I'm fucking sick of engagement bait.
The money driven content creators are going to thrive on platforms that support them. If you don't want to have their content on the same feed as your cat pics, you're going to have to find some alt networks
Supposedly Bluesky isn't monetized?
When the laws come in, many Australians will get VPNs rather than provide ID to random websites.
If social media sites are compelled block VPNs, is that technically achievable/viable? Cloud providers and VPN services have predictable IP ranges, so are easily blocked (/majorly inconvenienced) by sites motivated to do so. But social media companies might not want to block VPNs since a lot of legitimate traffic comes through them (e.g. people anywhere in the world who simply wish to have that extra layer of privacy from their ISP and wifi owner).
Are there VPN strategies that will allow an Australian to reliably access social media as though their traffic is coming from another country?
I also guess Australians who try this might have to access social media sites via a browser on their phone (as opposed to native app).
Asking for a friend, of course.
Due to the shared nature of the internet it's very hard to implement a technically foolproof block.
For example you could rent a server on AWS, forward your traffic to it (e2e encrypted) and then have that forward your traffic to a regular VPN.
Now just imagine that the VPN does the forwarding for you and offers it as a service.
In the past 24 hours:
Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-28/social-media-age-ban-...
256 points|llui85|17 hours ago|385 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264733
( and seven others still alive and several others flagged [dead] )
This is a bad idea, and it’ll be very hard to implement. Better to ban old people from watching Sky News and using Facebook, that’s the real danger to our democracy
They’re not mutually exclusive, and this isn’t about democracy.
We know that developing brains have been deeply impacted by the easy dopamine engineered hits Meta and Bytedance deliver.
To me this feels like a contemporary version of the opium wars, but instead of nation states at war, it’s companies vs people.
Perhaps we should also make it illegal to report on the war in the Middle East in case young people find it traumatising to see that that the western democracies are supporting dropping 2000 pound bombs on children in other countries. Can you image the damage being caused to young minds seeing that death and destruction visually through their own eyes ?
This is not about reporting or content. This is about the health outcomes of young people being negatively impacted by companies maximizing engagement metrics at all costs.
Reporting on war happenings occurred before social media was around.
I'm referring to the ridiculous concern about young minds being exposed to one sort of content, yes it is about content, whilst another sort there's no concern about in the slightest.
The choices are bizzare. I assume that discord channels relating to specific pieces of software will also not be allowed anyone under 16. So very clever young kids trying to build software will be disadvantaged now as well.
Facebook already does this with users under 13. Read here about how they do it: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/age-verification/
But I agree it's a bad idea. See my comment above or below.
The idea that your operating system might share with meta your personal data like your age is pretty messed up.
I had to correct my auntie that no, Morocco did not manipulate the weather to cause the floods in Spain. She didn't really believe me. The Facebook propaganda is intense
We should also ban people who disagree with me from not agreeing with me
This legislation is a bold step, but it raises a lot of questions about implementation and unintended consequences. While protecting children from online harms is undoubtedly important, enforcing an age limit like this on social media platforms could be incredibly challenging
It already works for gambling. It will reduce the access to adults, of course, but I can't say it'd see it as a negative
gambling is a little bit different, as you have to pay and receive money (easily enforceable bans). But here we are talking about a free service which is also offered by many foreign alternatives (which of course are not going to cooperate.)
The age verification is on creating the account prior to any deposits.
As for not cooperating - I'd expect to ban them altogether (ISP) unless they comply. Gambling is exactly the same.
Those who will trade privacy for safety deserve neither.
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A solution I would be very OK with is the following:
* Enforce the age limits only on smartphones and tablets. This solves >95% of the problem and still leaves a way for people to be anonymous.
* Smartphone OS vendors come up with a common age verification framework that's based on zero knowledge proofs constructed over the electronic certificate in your passport - there are already working PoCs of this on Github
* Each identity can only be installed on one device at a time. Then parents cannot share identity with kids (unless the parents completely give up on all social media)
* For people who don't have a passport, offer a manual and thorough process for age verification, after which you get issued a small plastic card with identity certificate readable by NFC.
Why would the government do that when they can just track everyone with some kind of internet ID?
I'm thinking about how in France kids are allowed to have wine, and they have fewer alcohol problems when they grow up.
They are not allowed to buy wine themselves. Most parents wouldn't allow them to drink when alone. Drinking small amounts of wine at the family dinner table makes the educational difference. Social media is consumed without any family interaction and can consume all free-time and more.
> Drinking small amounts of wine at the family dinner table makes the educational difference.
So it sounds like responsible parenting is the key there.
> Most parents wouldn't allow them to drink when alone ... Social media is consumed without any family interaction
How do parents stop their kids from drinking alone? Why can't they prevent the overuse of social media in the same way?
Ahhh yes, and thumbs down button in youtube was removed to protect small creators from harm.
It is funny to observe how many naive people there are in the world.
Australia for years hated the idea that you can anonymously share your opinion.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-07/prime-minister-defend...
And no, privacy is not already lost. It is a lie often said. Sure you share a lot of data about you, but you are often not required, especially by law to share it. Big tech also do not know everything about you, they often lie to shareholders, or advertisers about amount of users, clicks.
Protect the children, and remove the ability to freely express your opinion. I vividly remember people being arrested because of social media activity during covid.
I'm not Australian and don't know the specifics if this legislation, so I cannot speak with any authority on the matter, but I think you're mistakenly conflating banning <16yo with identifying everyone.
Porn is also banned for <18yo and you generally don't need to id yourself to get access, you only need to claim you're 18 via button, checkmark or similar
This doesn't actually remove all kids from the platform, but at least they're no longer being served legally. This will make it less ubiquitous for them.
Relevant part of the article:
Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
Thanks for providing that last part info, but I think you misunderstand how the world works. The privacy is removed in erosion, not in one action.
First create a law, then require providing a button, then require debit card number, then require ID.
I am aware of slippery slope fallacy, but I think that is where this all is going to go.
Therefore it does not matter if "it is just a button" right now. Every change in that direction is not good. I worry about the trajectory more.
Let's also look at it from a different point of view. Does the button "I am over 18" protect the children? Really? Sorry, but this is not the final step in that road.
A couple US states are in the "ID" stage for porn right now. It's why pornhub and others have started blocking those states, they don't want the liability if there's a hack/leak.
It just hurts me to see what the internet has become, simply because we allowed the general public.
The juxtaposition of this comment and username are sending me, let me tell you.
feels like i'm on reddit circa 2010
But off topic how does selecting for top news work? I posted the same thing 17 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42265447
I posted from BBC is it less reliable source?
I think it's accidental. It depends on upvotes and how quickly they happen to come in.
I like this very much. Why?
1. Life long habits are mostly formed at a young age.
2. Real social interaction is very important at this life stage.
3. There is no need to put the vulnerable self concept of a young human being at risk.
In Sweden advertising aimed at kids is illegal, and has been for a long time. But "social media" is bizarrely aimed at kids, or at least kids are extremely susceptible to what influencers are doing. My 10-year old has a wish list this year with about 70 beauty products. It makes me kinda sick.
The problem: me banning social media completely (instead of limiting which we do now) would not help completely, since all her friends use it and would influence her anyway.
Rather than banning social media, we should be forcing social media companies to make their apps less addictive and promote more positive interactions. This only stigmatises social media more and gives them a ‘free pass’ to keep being a net negative contributor to society. It’s such a lazy legislation. Besides, what counts as social media? Texting? Gaming? The internet is inherently social.
I find it absolutely wild that we've managed to ban social media for under-16s, but somehow not pornography.
And so kids can just stream hardcore, violent porn on tap, as long as they click "I am 18 or older".
I am all for limiting social media (though not necessarily in this implementation), but just utterly puzzled why what seems to be an equally damaging influence for developing minds can't be limited.
Do we expect the social media ban implementation to be any different to the 18+ restriction on pornography? Personally I doubt it. Real enforcement will come from parents and schools now having authority to stop kids instead of currently being told “but all the other kids have it”.
There does seem to be an opportunity for a big tech companies like Apple and Google to introduce an over 18 verification that’s built into the browser but remains fully anonymous after initial verification.
Most over 18 verification schemes have faltered at the point where adults are asked to verify their identity to view among other things porn. If it was cryptographically proven anonymous there’d be much less resistance.
> The law will make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent children younger than 16 from holding accounts
Unless the fines accumulate, it seems the law is rather toothless? US $33M is a parking ticket for companies at this scale.
I think you’re right about the relative scale of the fine, but theres a part of me that believes the companies will try to comply with the law, similar to how pornhub is blocked in many US states. They could easily ignore the regulation but choose not to because thats ultimately what Australians want. Companies of this scale by and large try to follow the law, especially when the affected cohort is relatively small.
Following observation of the comments:
1. Those in favor of identity based control over using electronic devices, attaching a real world identity to your computing use. (Including up to signed software only allowed to run on devices).
2. Those in favor of the restriction of access of the internet by a government entity (Including up to regulated speech).
This is similar to the break up Google arguments. Instead you just have to out-code it. (For the counterarguments, this applies to code-based companies, instead of infrastructure based)... If a social media is harmful, then parents can put those restrictions already on devices. But letting the government do this gives much more freedoms away than initially thought. Not just this, but if there happens to ever be a social media that is 10 times better than all existing ones, where even more real speech discussion and conversation happens, or whatever form it is, it will still be regulated and controlled using the same methods.
I usually don't comment often, but I would usually expect someone here to bring up these concerns... which is unusual to not find them. And I mean the specific two points are the argument. Those must be flipped to allow this law to be just, which is to say, most likely not.
And a third point, even in a perfect implementation, (imagine a perfect world), you end up with the first two points still being an issue. The technological ability to restrict devices by signed software, and speech to a central authority, allows the attack surface for anyone to have the ability to control the entirety of the devices on that system, in ways that would be hard to discern. Extend this technology to other devices, like VR, and see the domino...
If everybody in western societies agree that under-aged are forbidden to access a Casino or a brothel and also shouldn't do paid work; why should the same societies install easy doors for children to casinos, brothels and sweatshops, in every school, and children room?
What is a definition of social media? If there will be another platform, that is not listed on banned platforms, will they add it to regulation later... And later again, another...?
I think kids that wont be able to use YouTube until they are 16, might miss some good stuff too, like they might find hobbies there, learn programming.
But they won't be able to use YouTube to learn about their hobby or programming.
[dupe] Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264733
If anyone wants to know just how rushed this bill was pushed through parliament, here is the text of the public consultation announcement:
“On 21 November 2024, the Senate referred the provisions of the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 to the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee for report by 26 November 2024.
The closing date for submissions is 22 November 2024. Due to the short timeframe of this inquiry, the committee would appreciate submissions being limited to 1-2 pages.”
How’s that for well written? They announced the bill on the 21st and closed the date for submissions on the 22nd. It then went to parliament in the 26th. It has passed on the 29th. Parliament sitting days end a few days after.
Pathetic. That’s why the Committee that scrutinises the bill asked for “1 or 2 page submissions”.
Seems like legislation that will be weakly applied and is most likely a distraction. Australian politics are notorious for this.
It's well intended but it won't work. Just like every other form of censorship that's ever been tried
How's the ban on pornography for under-18s going?
How about the ban on various things, like gmail, for under-13s?
I wonder what counts as social media? What about traditional bbs, or irc?
Proper title: Australia intoduces digital ID to access the internet
wait till everyone figures out that everyone will have to provide ID to link to their account for this to even come close to being actioned....
No more anonymous Social Media accounts....
Now let's apply an age restriction to books too. This is fucking stupid.
Tell me why
They didn't just ban pedophiles off the apps
This is really good.
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The point of this isn't to keep kids off social media. It's an excuse to require ID for adults so they can arrest us for criticizing them.
They also recently tried to pass a "Misinformation" bill which would have given them the power to decree what we can and can't say on social media, and they'll try to sneak that back in, too.
This country is a nanny state and it's getting scary.
Adults can still be on SM and can still criticize the govt.
Also, it must be the state of affairs that an Adult can have an ID on SM and criticize the govt. and the laws and courts should protect that individuals right to criticize.
Avoiding IDs on the internet, just so that the govt can't catch hold of the critic is a lot of step backwards.
You're literally spreading misinformation in your comment.
a) The government was trying to outlaw deepfakes and fake accounts. But also require more transparency for users to contest moderation decisions. It did not try to limit what you can say.
b) There is no law that makes it illegal to criticise the government.
Well there is actually. If the government label the criticism fake news.
In the Netherlands people have been fined hundred of thousands of euros for spreading fake news about the government. However if it’s not fake news they can do the same. You won’t be able to do anything about it because it order to show your evidence you need to be able to publish and the press on there Netherlands will not help you with that.
Please give more details about that fine. I But I'm sure you won't because the example wouldn't help your argument.
Here you go. A whole radio program on it.
https://www.nporadio1.nl/fragmenten/gaan/028ddaac-1369-49cb-...
The fake news that stood out to me did indeed sound pretty fake. I didn't believe it for a minute. But the point being if you fine things like that then what happens when someone has news that sounds unbelievable because it's horrific or flies against everything that democracy is supposed to stand for? If the government can fine like this then the news doesn't get exposed. Any BTW, there are a lot of people that would also not believe what happened to me. They would also think that it is fake news. Closing off reporting, means closing off avenues to highlight illegal activity from the government and hence less democracy.
Why do I care? Because I was a victim of illegal extra judicial activity as collateral damage to illegal activity (Collateral damage simply because I lived next door) and no news will organisation would print my story. But now it's quite clear that if I started to publish details on the Internet that very quickly I would be slapped with a large fine, so that avenue is now closed as well.
The details don't hurt my argument at all. Because my argument revolves around not being able to tell the difference between exposing really bad things that sound like nothing the governments would and other things that are not true.
There are many places in the world where there is no law for "contempt of cop" but police find a way to extra-judicially punish anyway. The lack of a law allowing something doesn't stop abuse of power! And Australia is notorious for its raids of journalist's homes and has a court system very disinclined to punish the police for illegal activity.
Yep. The Netherlands is one of those places. They have made extra judicial punishment a way of working. They call it an “intervention”. And they will make use of all the government organisations to do it. those organisations just have to follow orders because the interventions are co-ordinated by an intelligence agency called the RIEC.
No evidence is required, there are no bounds as to what they can do and there are no repercussions.
Around 30 years ago they got caught out with this sort of thing. It resulted in a scanal called "The IRT affaire", it's on netflix I think. They waited 4 years, learnt from their mistakes, now their new way of working is to do all of the work through proxies, orchestrated by an authority structure so it's not possible to take them to court. And all of their really dirty work they do through civilian proxies, the weakest and most easy blackmailed of society.
No one blinks an eye here.
Also, this country which has issue an arrest warrant for the leader of a particular country is at the same time buying hundreds of millions of euros of military equipment from the same country. Such hypocrisy.
Sorry, I got off topic.