Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban • Hacker News Board

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

#911

Post by zoobab » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #221

onion2k wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the standard. This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.

> This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though. ...then the rest of the world will see what the people of China and Russia already know: bans on VPNs cause them to explode in popularity and development pace. There's a reason that the most sophisticated VPNs and tunneling tech are built to evade the GFW. I recently visited a remote part of Siber…

"in favor of a censorship-resistant internet"

At least that's a good incentive to build censorship-resistant internet.

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

#912

Post by arkey » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #517

indymike wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how…

That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.

And that's the root cause of many, many issues.

It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.

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

#913

Post by mx7zysuj4xew » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

lII1lIlI11ll wrote: post #851

rapind wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slope argument. As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.

> As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board. This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.

Yeah except the guy is a kook and an enemy to a free and open society.

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

#914

Post by random9749832 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

verisimi wrote: post #793

Is this dystopian enough yet?

Dystopian is hijacking your mind using recommendation algorithms.

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

#915

Post by random9749832 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

hollow-moe wrote: post #85

Nice! Soon enough they'll be forbidden to be outside during the day too, to avoid taking any risk crossing these "adults" thing probably.

Because so many children are going outside instead of wasting their life on TikTok Twitch etc.

The amount of human hours spent watching others play video games / gamble / creating parasocial relationships: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/watch-time

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

#916

Post by indymike » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #517

indymike wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how…

That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.

If you have kids it is your responsibility. If you have kids and are not interested or present enough, this is literally the problem.

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

#917

Post by arkey » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #550

phantasmish wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty. Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd l…

> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis. It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

> It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.

I really don't think the opposite order would work.

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

#918

Post by quitit » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

I have seen a swift uptick in "Australians" negatively posting on social media networks about the new restriction.

Notably the central theme presented by these same "Australians" was that there should be no changes, limits or restrictions to the types of information collected by social media companies, or how they handle such personal information, rather that everything should be exactly as it was... how very convenient.

Some were even so incensed about their personal privacy that they wrote how much they disagree with having to share their SSN with online platforms.

As many of you would already know, mentioning a "SSN" is a give away that the "Australians" are not genuine people. These accounts are perpetuating the lie that Australians must provide a government identity to access these services. While an ID can be used, it's not mandatory and is actually one of the less convenient options, in comparison to 3rd party verification or a face photo.

Seems a bit of a disingenuous argument to complain about taking a photo of one's face for verification, but having no qualms about using the social media network to post photos of oneself for public viewing.

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

#919

Post by denismi » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

256_ wrote: post #863

denismi wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 surv…

That's definitely an interesting argument I haven't seen before. I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here. I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probabl…

This legislation left it entirely up to the service providers to determine implementation, and so far they don't seem particularly motivated to disrupt my usage by asking me to prove my age.

My suspicion is that fairly simple heuristics of age estimation, combined with social graph inspection, are probably enough to completely disrupt the network effects of "social media" for kids, and achieve the stated objectives well enough that I never have to.

Maybe it turns out that I'm wrong, but why even risk it? If the true policy goal is extending mass-surveillance, why waste so much political capital on such a round-about approach which might yield nothing, or even set back your existing capabilities.

MyID (myid.gov.au) already exists, and could easily have been mandated, or "recommended", or even offered as a means of age verification now. But it wasn't.

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

#920

Post by random9749832 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

It feels like there is more bot activity then ever before. Reddit is now filled with fresh accounts, suspended accounts and bunch of content that suddenly gets deleted. It doesn't even feel like you are interacting with people anymore.

The "social" part is severely decaying.