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

abc.net.au

451–460 of 498 posts

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

#451
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're flirting with an identity fallacy here, but please, explain which part of my views are extreme.

>The real reason why politicians push through these anti-social media laws is to prevent children from networking and discussing and sharing revolutionary ideas. Thats a pretty extreme view to any normal person who didnt grow up on the internet. EDIT: please stop editing your posts after posting, it makes them most difficult to respond to properly.

What you label as extreme is quite subjective though.

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

#452

Predictably, I see a lot of concern being expressed here about how this will be implemented and enforced. There is an underlying assumption, which seems fairly reasonable, that the government is going to use this opportunity (à la Louisiana) to overreach and require people to provide their identity to access these services. One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this wa…

It is not possible aside from getting everyone an internet ID, which most will probably reject for good reason.

Governments should not get this power. This is the basic tenet that separation of powers is based on. The only measure that helps is to just take away the means.

I am uncertain it will go global at all or go very far even in Australia as there are at least some companies that try to benefit their customers. And there still is the private web anyway that isn't affected.

Australia should be made fun off for their attempts, it isn't their first rodeo.

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

#453
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…

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…

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/03/hours-after-aussie-govt-...

If 16 year olds do indeed access pornography with such an amount of naiveté, there might really be a problem. But there is no indication of a problem, is there?

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rapidly creeping authoritarianism is extraordinary.

This website has long ago lost whatever “techno libretarianism” it ever had. It’s so full of bootlickers. I have no idea why HNs userbase is mostly excited about this.

I think it grew up and had kids. The angsty-teen “I won’t do what you tell me” mentality starts to seem pretty counterproductive after a certain level of maturity is reached.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this

So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”. They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.

I would be happy to see any links to evidence of this

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

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form. I can control my child without the government.

> I can control my child Lies every parents tell themselves. Either they will watch porn at age 11 at school or at a friend, or you isolate them from society and they resent you forever. You can't control every aspect of your child's real life or online activities, that's naive and I don't believe you actually have children, let alone teenagers.

Whether GP can control their kids or not it's besides the point, which I think lies with:

> Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form.

And in fact it's not a "disgrace", it's outright dangerous, a ready half-step to totalitarian control. Regardless whether one trusts their current government or not, it is a threat to democracy and freedom that can be activated by any later regime.

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Germany has a system in their ID cards that allows anonymous age verification. No one uses it but it’s a technical marvel in my opinion. The site asks for specific read permissions and the user can decide if he wants to grant them. One of these permissions is age verification. You put the phone on the ID card and there is a cryptographic proof that the user connecting to the site is in possession of an ID of a person…

It's hardly an age verification if it just requires the bearer to have an adult's ID card.

You borrow your friend's card, or you "borrow" your parent's card, or you pay someone who sees this market opportunity.

I think it's ridiculous how the lawgivers are telling the companies to just nerd harder, but they're definitely going to have to nerd harder than that.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that BSDobelix was downvoted and flagged for implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles.

> implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles. Please don't put words in my mouth, but I'm sorry if anyone "accidentally" misunderstood. What I meant was that 99.9% of teenagers have had one or more contacts with a paedophile via "established" social networks.

I apologize for making multiple incorrect assumptions and for falsely accusing you of saying things you didn't say.

I misinterpreted your original message as and . Now I understand that your message was in reply to .

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

#459

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…

i find it unfortunate that just because the ‘masses’ are on the internet now, everyone wants to play nanny and govern exactly how you design your website

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the ads are the _least_ harmful parts of social media. It's the regular accounts that are causing FOMO and mental health issues by displaying unrealistic lifestyles that the majority of people won't ever achieve.

That's only one fragment of social media though, it's not helpful to focus on this part of social media alone; another big one is the rhetoric hidden in otherwise normal / legitimate content that seems to be a nontrivial factor in a hard shift to the right, politically.

the government should not be in the business of regulating social media to ensure that public opinion stays within [A, B] ideological bounds.

for a long time I didn’t think this needed to be said, but now I realize it needs to be said quite forcefully actually

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