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Australians to face age checks from search engines

ia.acs.org.au

61–70 of 274 posts

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#61
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the alternative? Is it really information or misinformation?

We failed to give the kids the skills to think critically (because that's not in the ruling classes best interest), so now, to keep the population under some form of governability, information has to be restricted so people don't end up destroying their own society. Nice. I agree though, most information is misinformation, even the most popular stuff, Joe Rogan et al.

Critical thinking lessons are not enough to protect kids.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mollycoddling kids is one thing, we've always done that to some extent. Mollycoddling adults is another matter altogether.

Both proposals are mollycoddling children. It just happens that one of them inconveniences adults.

"Inconvenience" is downplaying the impact of not letting adults use incognito mode to search for things.

Yes, right now search engines are only going to blur out images and turn on safe search, but the decision to show or hide information in safe search has alarming grey areas.

Examples of things that might be hidden and which someone might want to access anonymously are services relating to sexual health, news stories involving political violence, LGBTQ content, or certain resources relating to domestic violence.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was a name for this fallacy. Something slope something

Slippery slope is only a fallacy when there is no reason to believe the end state is likely or desired. It seems quite likely that governments want to continuously chip away at privacy.

Slippery slope is specifically about opening the gates to further slipping. This clearly isn't the case since there is going to be slipping regardless of this specific instance going through all the way or not.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#64

2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff 2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities 2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law 2030: you must be logged in to vis…

Australian politicians, police, and a specific chunk of the population would be exempt from this... like with privacy laws.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#65
post #48
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recollection of the time is that most citizens that paid attention and a majority of the politicians in the UK and AU were fully aware the "intel" was sketchy and the motivations impure .. the debate was less about the information quality and more about the obligation to partner with the US in the invasion. The UK PM and the AU PM backed the US position and sent troops in (in the AU case they even sent in advance…

So some government officials were probably in the pocket of Halliburton (i.e., just like the US government) while selling a weak justification to the public. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/halliburton-australia-p...

Such things play a part, of course, however at a nation level the first order consideration would have been ANZUS like defence agreements and a sense that ongoing regional support from the US rested on Australian support for the US, right or wrong.

Been ongoing for a while now: https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/aus/k5092-on-Tucker_Box-cuu...

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#67

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. Can’t say I blame them.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible.

But the people who are the primary victims of the false positives and the people who want the bad stuff fully censored aren't all the same people, and then the second group likes to pretend that there is a magic solution that doesn't throw the first group under the bus, so they can throw the first group under the bus.

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#68

The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting: > Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.

Do you suppose this is born of a desire to more easily identify people, or primarily as a regulatory fence to prevent upstart competitors? Perhaps both?

Re: Australians to face age checks from search engines

#69
post #36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> misinformation Nothing screams “not living in Soviet Russia” like having a ministry of truth.

> “not living in Soviet Russia” Nothing screams "fear mongering" like comparing with living in Soviet Russia. Look, we can argue all day. There is no right or wrong answer. I don't fully support the govts initiative but I also don't want Meta/X/Google to have unlimited powers like they do in the US.

> I don't fully support the govts initiative but I also don't want Meta/X/Google to have unlimited powers like they do in the US.

Various large US tech companies played a central role in drafting this initiative. I don't think you're reasoning about this clearly.

How exactly does this curtail their powers?

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