Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s

I think it has the potential to basically ruin society as we know it, the amount of hysteria, hype, division, lies, distraction and hate it breeds is enormous.

I look at some of the stuff on Reddit, especially some of the right wing stuff, it's actually alarming the stuff people say, and believe on there. I know they are extreme examples but holy shit.

The ability to amplify falsehoods and certain narratives is ridiculous.

I remember reading 1984, and being terrified, some of the stuff I read in online communities makes me at least that scared and worse.

The legislation is literally

> A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.

It doesn’t specifically require them to collect IDs. However it does say the opposite and that the site can only collect government ID or a digital ID information if:

> the provider provides alternative means [not involving IDs] for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances.

I’m not going to argue that the legislation is perfect. But it doesn’t actually do what most opponents are accusing it of doing.

I’ve seen many people make comparisons between these things and the social media ban, but I actually think they’re quite poor comparisons.

The main concern is around enforcement, which is still TBD for this ban. I assume you mean illicit drugs which are banned for everyone so I’ll skip that as it’s not relevant. For sex/marriage, these are basically not enforced until people notice or they cause a problem so again are not relevant. Driving is an interesting one but I’ll come back to it. The closest comparison here is alcohol and tobacco.

For alcohol and tobacco sales the rule of thumb staff are trained on in Australia is if the customer looks younger than 25 they ask for ID. The customer present their ID, the cashier visually checks the DoB, and the sale goes through. This does not affect the majority of Australians who either do not smoke or drink, or look old enough that no ID check is done. Enforcement for a social media ban would be onerous on all Australians who use social media (I don’t have numbers but I’m sure it’s more more than (smokers ∪ drinkers)) plus the scope for potential abuse or infringement of rights is far greater. Compare this to social media. How would such a ban be enforced? The kids are not stupid, they will find a way around whatever the enforcement mechanism is. So either the enforcement will be a) trivially circumventable to the point where the legislation is completely useless for its ostensible purpose, or b) devolve into an endless cat-and-mouse game trampling Australians’ rights every step of the way. Depending on how eager the Aus gov is to enforce this it could easily extend to VPN bans, destruction of anonymity online, and yet more means to eliminate free speech. These things are all extremely important for a functional society where people, especially vulnerable and marginalised people, can speak up without fear of retaliation. A cashier checking your ID at the shop is nowhere near the top of a slope as steep, nor slippery as this.

Driving is a really interesting comparison here actually. I’m not sure I would be opposed to a social media license. In the same way the purpose of a license is to ensure that road users can do so in a safe manner, maybe something similarly focused on education would be more helpful here than a ban. I’ve actually long blamed a kind of tragedy of the commons for the sorry state of the modern internet. Most users are simply not savvy enough to know better than to use it in all but the dumbest ways, fall for the dumbest scams, and basically allow themselves to be corralled like cattle into the sterile advertiser-friendly pens big tech companies have constructed for them. So in anger I’ve sometime said we should only allow licensed users online. Anyway that’s a bit off topic but a social media license is an interesting concept.

Just because an "evil" group used, or even coined, a term doesn't mean it's not a useful term.

I find it uncomfortable that so many of the arguments focus on practicality and that so few focus on liberty. It almost seems like a forgotten concept.