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Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

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Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#171

Post by ptstomp »

willyt wrote: post #153
lysp wrote: post #124

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 inte…

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…

Just as a note. Peter is premier of South Australia. Same political party as national and NSW though

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#172

Post by Hawxy »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #38
ENGNR wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re a nanny state, the government is just going to use it to track us

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

> 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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#173

Post by Hawxy »

rob74 wrote: post #163
jiggawatts wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#174

Post by ruthmarx »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #119
globalnode wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#175

Post by openrisk »

arlattimore wrote: post #10

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 s…

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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#176

Post by xxs »

niek_pas wrote: post #136
chrishare wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#178

Post by throwawaythekey »

nomilk wrote: post #49

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 th…

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.

Re: Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

#179

Post by xxs »

hcfman wrote: post #60
oblio wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Good point bringing up smoking. Why don’t they just make smoking illegal in every country ? Because it’s impractical. Same as this law.

The point of smoking is about the origins of the term 'nanny state' [0]:

[0]: https://wordhistories.net/2020/10/03/nanny-state/

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