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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

#191

Post by artur44 »

Honestly, this feels like another case where the headline sounds bold, but the real impact will be minimal. Any age-based restriction ends up in the same place: platforms are forced to collect more data just to “prove” someone’s age. When the target group is teenagers, that’s basically a privacy disaster waiting to happen.

From a technical perspective, this is impossible to enforce cleanly. Anyone with even basic internet literacy can bypass it with a VPN + fresh account + throwaway email. And of course, the teens most determined to get around it will be the ones the policy is supposedly protecting. The bigger issue is the false sense of security. Parents and politicians get to feel like something has been “done,” while the actual online risks don’t disappear — they just move somewhere less visible. If the goal is genuinely improving teen mental health, digital literacy and real support systems work far better than regulations that will inevitably leak.

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

#192

Post by cess11 »

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…

Whether intentional or not, one consequence of a success in this area would be to isolate older people from the views of young people and to stifle the younger generations influence on these communication media in the future.

Personally I suspect these elderly people in powerful political positions to be quite afraid of kids, it wouldn't be the first time in history, but it's likely the first time they're this old and as alienated from younger generations as they are.

Perhaps we're seeing patriarchal class societies mutate into primarily gerontocratical societies.

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

#193

Post by rockertalker »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #181
betteryet wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we break up the tech industry instead? This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of bricks.

Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g: voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g: facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?

I think if you run a website as a main source of your business profitable or not you’re in the tech industry. It’s a question of scale not industry classification or purpose classification.

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

#194

Post by whimsicalism »

estimator7292 wrote: post #116
chistev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Break up the federal government?

We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next step is dissolving congress and installing a new constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining the law of the land on the whims of a senile man

I will bet you up to $1000 at 2:1 odds that in 5 years we will still have the same constitution and congress will not have been dissolved at any point.

perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for adults or maybe just dystopian movies.

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

#195

Post by kahmeal »

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're not wrong. Even simple "page hit counters" became a target of manipulation once they were common. Human nature is tough at scale.

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

#196

Post by jsphweid »

baby wrote: post #159
killingtime74 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialising != Social media. Teens can still use messenger, WhatsApp, phonecalls, text or even....face to face!

That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.

What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons. However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic modern feed garbage content in general.

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

#198

Post by jfindper »

1121redblackgo wrote: post #182
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 actually do think people directly see the negative public health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and that that is the driving force behind all of this. I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.

I think this might be true at the parent level, but less and less true as you climb up the government ladder.

The shitty part is that when the parents really do believe something is "for the kids", it becomes that much easier to push through laws that have awful side effects (intentional ones or not). Which is why "for the kids" is so common, of course.

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