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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

#371

Post by bgun »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #296
mickeyfrac wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway? All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening. Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids acce…

How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway? That's exactly why there's a suggestion legacy media are driving this.

It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

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

#372

Post by ruthmarx »

akudha wrote: post #109
MichaelZuo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that what the electorate desires? By electing personable but mediocore, sometimes even incompetent, MPs over the intelligent but aloof candidates. Someone or some committee, somewhere, still has to actually work out all the details, and if it’s not done in Parliament, because the average MP literally can’t grasp even half the agenda items, it has to be done elsewhere. Edit: And even that is probably being too o…

I started losing faith in democracy since Brexit. It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar. People making “protest” votes without bothering to understand the consequences, single issue voters, young people who don’t even bother to vote, dumb/racist/misogynist voters… Democracy only works if voters take it seriously, only if media is at least reasonably honest/competent etc. Across…

> It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar.

It's definitely a problem when you have a huge segment of the population that is ignorant and easily misled. Just look at the last US election.

There are definitely better systems, but people are far too attached to the status quo and find it far easier to dismiss proposed solutions rather than work to improve them.

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

#373

Post by ruthmarx »

logicchains wrote: post #309
Loughla wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bold claims need proof. Does Australia have a history of that?

During COVID times the Australian government pressured all local media to censor criticism of the government's COVID measures. Regardless of how valid or invalid you consider the dissent, it was still dissent being suppressed.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's a fantastic example.

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

#374

Post by skyyler »

jallbrit wrote: post #286
skyyler wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Oh, a fellow If Books Could Kill podcast listener? It's unfortunate that truth is so hard to come by these days.

Yes! That blend of information and humour is the only podcast format worth my time, to be honest.

There's another podcast with Michael Hobbes called Maintenance Phase that I also enjoy when I have time to listen to it. Fen-phen in particular was something I hadn't really heard of before and reading about it after their episode on it was just fascinating.

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

#375

Post by lupusreal »

akudha wrote: post #332
alt227 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dumb/racist/misogynist voters… > Democracy only works if voters take it seriously Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible? Im afraid you seem to have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to democracy. The whole point of it is that everyone, including people you disagree with, get to have a say. Calling people names like dumb and racist is just a crass result…

I was working in Mississippi during 2016 election. I met many people who point blank told me they will not vote for Clinton, just because she is a woman (there are a million reasons not to vote for Clinton, her gender is not one of them). What should we call such people? Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible? How did you deduce that from my comment? Just one day…

> there are a million reasons not to vote for Clinton, her gender is not one of them

You said yourself, many people did have this reason to not vote for her. It is as alt227 said, you just don't like it.

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

#376

Post by bccdee »

watwut wrote: post #282
blackoil wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.

At that point, what if parents just let their kids borrow their driver's licenses to use social media? There's no technical solution to bad parenting.

The only reasonable solution that doesn't infringe on privacy is to give parents the tools to limit their children's internet use, and presume, outside those bounds, that people are adults.

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

#377

Post by tootie »

averysmallbird wrote: post #117
tootie wrote: post #110

I know this is targeting social media but just pointing out that there is no evidence screen time is affecting kids development and pretty solid evidence that it doesn't have much effect at all. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

There’s a difference between screen time and social media usage.

FTA

"One also suggested we take a look at social media on its own because it’s a source of worry for many and we did not find anything special about this form of online engagement.”

It's a subset of what they studied. Surely a lot of screen time is spent on social media. They did not observe anything special about time spent on social media. A more in-depth study may yield more insight but there is no thread to pull on from this study. Only parents' misgivings.

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

#378

Post by hn_acker »

blackoil wrote: post #349
logicchains wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't; children have always been able to borrow the same books from libraries as adults, read the same newspapers. Just now much of the information doesn't live in books or newspapers.

Movies have ratings and entry to hall is restricted. Games have rating and ability to buy them is restricted. books allowed in school libraries is heavily curated and sometimes restricted by law or vested groups. It is illegal to sell R18 magazines to a minor.

Movie ratings are voluntary in the US. Restrictions on selling porn to minors are orthogonal to movie ratings. It's generally legal for a theatre to sell a ticket for a PG-13 movie intended for 15-year-olds to a 12-year-old who hasn't received parental permission. Most theatres would refuse to sell the ticket, and most parents wouldn't let their 12-year-old child go to a movie theatre alone, but the bulk of the responsibility of preventing children from watching inappropriate movies falls on parents and guardians.

Banning children from social media is like banning children from movie theatres. A ban should consider that (1) different restrictions are appropriate for different ages of children (e.g. 12 vs 15), (2) depending on the country (e.g. the US with the First Amendment to the Constitution), children may have information access rights that parents can take away but governments can't, and (3) children in unhealthy relationships with parents or guardians (e.g. transphobic/homophobic parents of LGBTQ+ kids) should be able to access some kinds of social media without letting their parents/guardians know.

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

#379

Post by hn_acker »

cherryteastain wrote: post #86
Hizonner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they ban VPNs. Moral panics acknowledge no bounds of sanity.

Even China does not have a blanket VPN ban

The extent to which China "does not have a blanket VPN ban" is of no help to people who want to bypass the Great Firewall.

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

#380

Post by jb1991 »

nomilk wrote: 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…

This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group.

This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.

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