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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

#281
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. And its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones. How would you measure any level of success from this initiative? Doing something isnt a solution if it has tons of bad sideeffects

> its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones

It very much is not.

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

#283
post #269

I've said this before, but if countries want to mandate compliance, they should be required to provide the mechanism for compliance. The rollout of this has been pretty rough all things considered, much of it because the mechanism for compliance is flawed. Anthony Albanese's latest instgram posts are full of comments from teens saying things like, "how am i still on instagram if you banned us". The primary reason for…

So how does someone locked out wrongfully prove their age? Some people just look kinda young

The platforms all seem to have a fallback "support a ticket with your government ID, and we pinky promise to delete the ID after verifying you".

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, Roblox should not exist given the problems it caused. Goes well beyond scamming kids to work for scrip. =3

Despite how little they pay their game devs, offering like 20% I think, Roblox itself continues to make a loss so there case that they are scamming their devlopers isn't the strongest

Roblox is making a loss? How is this possible? I've always thought it was perfectly maximined.

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

#285

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…

Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime reporting on steroids.

Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline. I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both ways.

I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.

Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime reporting on steroids.

Each party is splitting into factions. I imagine the establishment of both parties think social media is a problem

People in power just want total control of the narrative and they don't want you to find out the truth about anything. Look at Walz in MN--he's like the ultimate Jedi "nothing to see here" mind trick with his wholesome grandfatherly persona, which is furthest from the actual reality of who and what he is. They all just want to force you into their reality and they hate it when you don't go there.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how does someone locked out wrongfully prove their age? Some people just look kinda young

The platforms all seem to have a fallback "support a ticket with your government ID, and we pinky promise to delete the ID after verifying you".

But thats what this law does not allow according to the head of this chain, specifically government ids are not allowed to prove age, even if you delete them unless I read it wrong

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

#288

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…

Why does the motivation matter so much? It’s not a global ban, it’s not a permanent ban, nobody is going to jail. It’s like seeing if moving the smoking age to 18 will improve health outcomes.

It’s ruining their lives as far as we can tell, and at the end of the day it’s just one country testing it out. It’ll be stastically significant, culturally close enough of a sample set for us to learn from.

I’m curious to see what the 1-2-3 year effects are. We need to let some real life experimentation happen, somewhere, instead of accepting what every conglomerate wants.

I get that “it’s easy to say” for me as someone completely unaffected by this law.

The study that was posted last week regarding at school banning of phones was enlightening. It improved scores within two years after a bit of resistance. Boom!

I want them to have a chance at being healthy and well-educated; we can’t stop teens from smoking altogether but we can sure limit their access by default.

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

#289
post #178
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just mental health: ability to concentrate + engagement with people around us.

There is no evidence that social media use shortens attention spans or reduces social engagement offline. This is a meme, and a false one.

What you’re implicitly saying here is that we should wait until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because you’re dealing with a soft science. At that point the damage will have been done and much harder to address.

If you don’t think attention spans are on the downtrend & that social media has something to do with that, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear.

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

#290

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…

> We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions

I have literally never heard this.

The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like tik tok. Your argument seems like quite a stretch.

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