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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

reuters.com

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Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#841

Post by halapro »

snarf21 wrote: post #170
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #72

Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior. I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!

The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.

You might not have opened any social media app lately. You need 10 seconds before you're sucked into the feed. Likes are a thing of the past, they just gather your interests by your reaction time on any content they show you.

Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?

I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#843

Post by callamdelaney »

feb012025 wrote: post #161

I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization. I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And suddenly they ban social media. R…

"I think drugs are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this."

Social medial is a drug, it has serious effects on the brain function and mental health of children and adolescents. On top of this social media allows predators to freely interact with children.

If people are going to do drugs, which they probably will, they should be able to balance the pro's and cons.

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#844

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ropable wrote: post #594

I fully support this legislation, and government regulation around this topic. Given the current (2025) state of the social media landscape, I believe that the positives of restricting access to them for teenagers well outweighs any potential harms. As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got smartphone…

[flagged]

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#846

Post by eigenspace »

zmmmmm wrote: post #405

A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be technically watertight. But the key is that it doesn't have to be watertight to work. Social media is all about network effects. Once most kids are on there, everyone has to be on there. If you knock the percentage down far enough, you break the network effect to the point where those who don't want to don't feel pressured to. If that is all it does, it'…

> normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams.

This law in Australia explicitly prohibits companies from using ID document verification for their age gating specifically because of concerns like this

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#847

Post by gverrilla »

egorfine wrote: post #833

Father of four here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids' connected to their social networks. I have a strongly opposing view: social media is one of the best inventions and there is no way or need to protect people from participating. With all the negative effects they bring the society has to learn how to live with it instead of pretend fighting.

Send your children to Gaza.

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#848

Post by egorfine »

gverrilla wrote: post #847
egorfine wrote: post #833

Father of four here. I will do everything in my power to keep my kids' connected to their social networks. I have a strongly opposing view: social media is one of the best inventions and there is no way or need to protect people from participating. With all the negative effects they bring the society has to learn how to live with it instead of pretend fighting.

Send your children to Gaza.

Why?

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#849

Post by _pdp_ »

Many of us grew up without social media and turned out to be fine!

Anyone arguing against this ban is delusional what social media does to undeveloped brains. There are plenty of studies to support this as well.

Social media is harmful to children. We are talking about 10 yo having access to non-stop stream of inappropriate content for their age. You can blame the parents but social media is now fact of life that cannot be so easily escaped.

Like buying alcohol, gambling, driving, voting and other similar things which are restricted under particular age, the discussion should be about at what age is safe for children to participate in the public discourse.

I really hope similar controls are implemented across EU.

Re: Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

#850

Post by denismi »

256_ wrote: post #803

A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself. I think this type of thinking is demonstrated, or perhaps exploited, very well by this article (I'm not…

Australia is a Five Eyes country, with carte blanche access to data that the incumbent social media companies freely share with all the acronym deep-state authorities.

Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surveillance?

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