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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

#321

Post by matsemann »

didibus wrote: post #134

To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them. In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email? I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for…

Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.

Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.

So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.

But what about hn?

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

#322

Post by nazgul17 »

hephaes7us wrote: post #154
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.

Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.

Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.

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

#323

Post by dghlsakjg »

Extropy_ wrote: post #218
realityloop wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the ban does is stop kids from having accounts, if the service allows anonymous usage then they can still find somewhere to doom scroll. My teen son has been blocked from Snapchat, and was this evening doom scrolling on Tik Tok until I blocked it on our home network.

I'm curious to understand why your approach to TikTok is banning it. Why do you think this is the right solution? Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?

You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of the last step.

I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to the kid, or more intermediate steps.

> Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?

Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for most. With other things like sports, we know that there is the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated and the benefits far outweigh the risks.

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

#324

Post by Californiasober »

Look. As gen z person who basically grew up with tech and social media and had it since I was ~12, there is no way that any ban that is not direct id verification will work, this will instead make the forbidden fruit more tasty and teens more tech literate since they will look for ways around the ban. It feels like a lot of older people are more detached to the times when they first got access to Internet and social media and assume that its all dopamine hits and brain rot, while in reality its curiosity for a bigger world beyond school and limited things that you can do while being underage, cheap entertainment, knowledge.

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

#325

Post by swiftcoder »

amarant wrote: post #153
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!

I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived. Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.

At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.

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

#326

Post by Sevrene »

yfw wrote: post #267
Sevrene wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified. These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate fr…

If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation

I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.

Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.

I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).

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

#327

Post by artur44 »

gen6acd60af wrote: post #244
artur44 wrote: post #191

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 int…

Please don't do this here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208058

Got it, thanks for pointing it out.

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

#328

Post by iknowstuff »

oblio wrote: post #261
gspencley wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out? The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.

It could be designed to be anonymous. Government runs authentication service that has your personal details. User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks government service if your age is >18, service says y/n. Platform never finds out your personal details. OAuth for age verification.

The government then knows all the services you use. No bueno.

There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.

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

#330

Post by dalemhurley »

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…

Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan support and the Labor government has a significant share of the young voters who are over 18.
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