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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

reuters.com

141–150 of 1001 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can seatbelts be enforced? This is preposterous and imbecilic- if there isn't a policeman inside every car checking every minute how will we make sure that people are wearing them. Clearly there is no point in trying!

There is seatbelt cameras in Australia. They are everywhere, they can also be mobile and placed almost anywhere. These camera are mounted high so they can view down in through the windscreen. They automatically issue a $1,251 for not wearing one to the license holder.

Huh, interesting. Australia keeps surprising me.

https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-australian-state...

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

#142

To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them. In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email? I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for…

Communication over a distance between people who don't know each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it, like customer service... is a disaster in general.

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

#143

Its crazy how the AusGov has just tried to turn this into some kind of nationalistic celebration. Passing laws isolating children isnt to be celebrated by lighting up national monuments.

Do you have kids ? Do you see kids in your day to day life ? I do, every day, and even <10 years old already have permanent neck damage from scrolling as soon as they haves 5 seconds of free time. I see groups of friends walking back from schools, they're side by side, scrolling on their phone, not talking, not even looking in front of them. I walk by 3 schools multiple times every single day and that's all I see as soon as they're outside of the playground (because they're not allowed while inside). Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho

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

#144

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!

Oh, alright, I guess we just need to overthrow capitalism and install a different economic system

Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!

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

#145
post #120

These platforms are heavy censored with a direct line to governments. This will push kids to other platforms with less censorship. That's a major benefit. As we go down this road platforms will need to be banned for everyone. For example VK wasn't on the list and they won't implement age checks. They and many other sites will need to be banned until you are left with a white list of acceptance sites. Add in age verif…

They already started moving to different platforms. No VPNs needed. At some point they'll stray off the Internet (because gov.au of course barks at every platform except discord, mysteriously).

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

#146
post #2

I’m not against teens communicating with each other online, but I’m very much against the algorithm-driven dopamine addiction factories that are social media today. Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!

If you ever worked with people who fully grew up with modern social media and just entered the workforce you know we're already doomed, there is no recovery from this, that's why governments are starting to act

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

#147
I'll take on the low status role of not knowing if this is a good idea.

I've seen the data showing teen sanity nose diving concurrently with social media penetration. I'm also a borderline kook libertarian.

So I appreciate the arguments in both directions, and I think the only way to find out if it works is to try it out. Preferably on a remote isolated island without nuclear weapons, in case things go badly :)

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

#148
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hugely decisive! Feels more like a policy for idyllic hypotheticals. "Suppose we could ban social media..." well, hey, they actually did it. I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We shall see!

Given that “social media” is in fact not banned and all this does is impact a select (and frankly logically inconsistent) list of services, this seems very unlikely. Children are still free to be groomed and gamble on Roblox and join servers belonging to The Com on Discord. To be clear I don’t think those services should be regulated by this obscene law either but this isn’t going to bring back any kind of halcyon er…

Roblox blocked communication between adults and kids. I can't chat with my own children in app even though we don't live in Australia.

That's for the better, as far as I see it, I can just shout :p

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

#150
And, of course, as usual, this law, like all it's others in the rest of the world, will do absolutely nothing in protecting kids. It will instead only create a huge national security hacker paradise because everyone will use these so-called "age verification" services, which aren't exactly known for their security.
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