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

abc.net.au

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

#351

Post by pimterry »

Aurornis wrote: post #312
pimterry wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comes up on every single HN thread about the topic, but I don’t understand how people aren’t seeing the obvious abuse angle: Create a market for anonymous age verification tokens. People pay $5 to someone to create an age authorization for them. 17 year old kid (who is old enough under this law) spends all day creating anonymous age auth tokens to sell to people who want them. Entire system subverted with profit…

The same applies to effectively all possible solutions for age verification, no?

Even if you have a perfect mechanism, 17 years old can create real age-verified accounts and then sell the username and password afterwards. Selling age-verification tokens directly would likely be harder than just swapping those login details, since it's very easy to make the tokens time-limited (in practice normal use would probably be some kind of oauth-style redirect flow, so they'd really only have to be valid for a few seconds).

This same argument applies to adults buying alcohol for teenagers too. The determined teenager with money can definitely find a way to get alcohol, but it doesn't mean the age restrictions on purchases are pointless.

Imo it's a bit pointless to worry about high-speed black markets trading in signed tokens when the current most common alternative is a popup with an "I promise I am over 18" button. If society agrees some things should be difficult to access if you're underage, then we can definitely do better than that as a solution.

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

#352

Post by soulofmischief »

alt227 wrote: post #348
soulofmischief wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You got to grow up with the vocal minority on the internet, in otherwords the 4% of the worlds population which is most extreme in their views and most arrogant in how they express them. This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality. > 4% of the worlds population are vocal on the internet. Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete un…

> This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality. Nope, no assumptions there. > Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete understanding of the internet. I'll give you this one, my percentage was out of date. The current percentage is estimated to be 10%. > I don't think you understand just how many people are on the internet. I dont thi…

Are you going to provide any citations?

> There were no insults or accusations. I said your reply was Narcissistic, I did not say you were.

Now you're just hiding behind pedantry.

> You can calm down now!

And now you're trying to act like I'm being emotional.

You're arguing disingenuously, more interested in trolling and escalating the negativity than finding common ground. When pressed to articulate your position, you turn to insults and deflection.

There is absolutely no reason to continue engaging with you.

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

#353

Post by rightbyte »

slibhb wrote: post #162
afavour wrote: post #141

Like the spirit, dislike the execution. Passing legislation to “protect the kids” is politically easy. Bans are simple. Much more effective, IMO, would be to legislate the way social networks behave. Stop their most addictive patterns. Adults are just as susceptible as kids in my experience. If there needs to be anything kid specific, perhaps a block on using the service during school hours, or only for X hours a day…

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

> Honest observers will look back on the anti-social-media movement as a moral panic.

It is a justified 'moral panic'. The social media companies have way too much power over peoples' conception of reality.

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

#354

Post by soulofmischief »

alt227 wrote: post #342
soulofmischief wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need to make a case for why it's extreme. Simply labeling it as extreme is not enough. Why is it extreme?

No I dont, I am done feeding the trolls. Feel free to retort whatever makes you feel most superior.

You're doing a lot of projection, engaging in such negativity after willingly replying to one of my comments, and then acting like I'm the one trolling you.

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

#356

Post by CatWChainsaw »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #337
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure you're being downvoted for implying that 99.9% of adults are "MAPs".

[flagged]

oooh fun, 99.9% of parents are pedophiles, ergo antinatalism is the only moral stance.

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

#357

Post by oloila »

Lol, guys. Even in Russia, which is said to have a low level of freedom, the government has not yet decided to introduce identification in social networks by passport.

By the way, some restrictive laws in Russia, for example, blocking websites law, began with the need to protect children from "illegal content".

Australians, don't give up

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

#358

Post by INTPenis »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #229
INTPenis wrote: post #182

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.

We'll see.

If I think back to my own time in school I foresee kids teaching each other the latest circumvention technique.

It might be as simple as using VPN vouchers. Or sharing VPN accounts, or using someone's public VPN server. This is why it'll be so fun to see what they come up with, the kids that is. They're the true innovators, the hackers. ;)

It might be as simple as use of a certain service exploding, a service that has flown under the government radar. Discord for example might not be considered social media but you can turn it into social media using bots.

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

#359

Post by thrw42A8N »

djtango wrote: post #321
nomilk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media? If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites , not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn. Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want…

Why is it 4chan and not WhatsApp groups? The internet was wild before social media but somehow the weird stuff remained fringe before recommendation algorithms and the perverse incentives that emerged from recommendation algorithms and content creation meant that feeds became an on ramp to all kinds of nasty things I'm not exactly a greybeard but I remember when happy slapping was a viral phenomenon but that seems pr…

Eh, not really. I'd consider myself a greybeard (not literally, but I am online since 90s) and everything is so much tamer now. It wasn't unusual to find open, unprotected and unencrypted sites with really, really weird stuff - that kind you only see on darknet today. Over the decades, everything became mild, normal, mainstream - which is IMHO bad and I blame the algorithms.

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

#360

Post by thrw42A8N »

blackoil wrote: post #268
pimterry wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.

I'd never accept this disgrace.
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