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Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

abc.net.au

221–230 of 498 posts

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#221
post #153
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Anxious Generation is poorly researched pop science book that people believe to be true because it feels intuitively right to them.

Is this just your opinion, or is there a scientific retort I can read?

Is Nature "scientific" enough?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#222
I generally think that children's access to the internet needs to be more closely monitored. You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there, why do we allow it online? I have on a few occasions had to protect a child from an adult in an online group.

What concerns me here is how this will be enforced. The only way to implement this is with IDs to check birth dates, and some method to confirm you are the person on the ID. You could imagine this being consolidated into a government ID system to 'protect your data', and to mean you only have to validate once. These accounts will be permanently attached to real people, and I think it will have a chilling effect on free speech. It's all fun and games until the government of the day considers your speech as a threat.

One can see this being expanded too, so that you would need to provide ID to use the internet more generally. ISPs could be told to selectively deliver web pages from DNS based on your ID, which would be most effective on mobile devices and less so on wired networks. My ISP already blocks websites.

I think a more fundamental question is whether the nanny state should be telling you how to raise your children, what content they can consume and who they can interact with. Suddenly you find your children consuming content only from a Z-wing bias because the government of the day hates Y-wing politics.

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#223
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t we? Cigarettes are harmful to people, they get regulated. If Facebook is harmful, why not regulate it?

So you really not see a difference between _lung cancer_ and "my teenager is moody"? The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.

Do you not see the difference between “my teenager is moody” and “depression”? Using minimizing language here helps no one.

I agree that there should be more formal research into the effects of social media but as a parent I see concern about the effects of social media in conversation with other parents and teachers all the time. It is something we all witness in our own lives to some extent or another.

“We should let this run rampant while we investigate it fully” and “we should block this while we investigate it fully” are both valid viewpoints. And if voters want the latter it only makes sense for the government to be responsive to that.

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#224
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software. Honest observers will look back on the anti-social-media movement as a moral panic. It isn't so much that social media is good, it's that the proper attitude toward new, scary things is to integrate them into your life in a healthy way rather than banning them. And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok

> And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok You realise children can legally do neither, right? Government should be in the business of improving citizens lives. As another commenter said, left to their own devices companies would still be using leaded paint everywhere if it was 1c cheaper per gallon. I’ve grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold u…

> I've grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

This is sneering, where you don't respond to a particular poster's point, but instead attack an unrelated (and even fictional) group of people based on something you don't like, or an attitude that you subjectively perceive to be common. Precisely zero people in this thread have made the claim that "any regulation is bad regulation", and in fact the person you responded to specifically called out drugs and gambling as things that they would be open to regulating.

Sneering is against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), boring, unenlightening, not intellectually gratifying, and degrades the quality of the site. Please don't do it.

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#225
post #144
post #104

If you’re tempted to think “this isn’t worth it, too hard to enforce without affecting something else”… read “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. There is very real, irreparable harm being done to young people, and it merits trying to make it right, not just surrendering to it. Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmounta…

The Anxious Generation is poorly researched pop science book that people believe to be true because it feels intuitively right to them.

On the surface it seems very similar to a book he previously worked on, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is also full of poorly researched pop science that confirms biases people already had.

Kind of an "airport book"

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#226
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t we? Cigarettes are harmful to people, they get regulated. If Facebook is harmful, why not regulate it?

So you really not see a difference between _lung cancer_ and "my teenager is moody"? The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.

>The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.

Funny because internal documents at Facebook said exactly that about teenagers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...

https://fairplayforkids.org/facebook-research-children/

https://theconversation.com/states-sue-meta-for-knowingly-hu...

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#227
post #104

If you’re tempted to think “this isn’t worth it, too hard to enforce without affecting something else”… read “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. There is very real, irreparable harm being done to young people, and it merits trying to make it right, not just surrendering to it. Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmounta…

"Ban social media for everyone because it might be bad for some kids" is as fragile as an argument as "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one."

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#228
post #175

Every single Australian 's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk). Reminds of the 'chil…

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk). This isn't a gi…

This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.

Re: Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws

#229

This is going to be an interesting experiment to watch. Because if I know kids, they will find any creative way they can to circumvent the ban. And even worse is if some actor out there starts catering to kids by publishing "proxy services". My opinion on this is that it's the same as banning drugs. People want to use them, and will find any way to use them.

Some will but at population scale any barrier will decrease usage.
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