541–550 of 1001 posts
At least as much mental and societal damage is done by elderly falling for bigoted, scammy, manipulative nonsense online than by teenagers having their self-esteem lowered.
As recent holiday gatherings have shown us, the young handle social media far better then the elderly.
/s
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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.
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Still, even the most libertarian among us generally won't oppose restricting youth access to tobacco, or restricting recreational access to hard drugs.
So, considering there is a clear health issue with fast food and television, shall we ban them from having anything other than fruit and books (but not too complicated ones, we don't want them to get potentially suicidal ideas)?
That kind of binary framing doesn’t really move the discussion forward.
A more constructive approach is case-by-case. Different things sit at different levels of harm, and "ban everything" vs. "ban nothing" isn’t a workable model for society.
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The ban is also for anyone who refuses to submit their private data (face scan or government ID) to an unrelated 3rd party company which will invariably store that data with insufficient security.
The ban does not specify how companies are supposed to do it. Eg Snapchat is not requiring ID (which the average Australian 15yo wouldn't have anyway), they're trying to determine age with the user's camera, and this is trivially spoofed using video played back on another device.
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"Everyone must prove their age online now" creates a trail of identity that kills anonymous speech dead. Anonymous speech is very important to maintaining freedoms... such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Hard disagree on anonymous speech. Individual humans should have free speech but that is divorced from anonymous speech. With anonymous speech you don’t even know if you’re talking to a person or a program. If you want to say something, then say it with your identity. You don’t get to be anonymous when saying something to my face so why should it be allowed across a screen?
My face is not my identity. Do I have to tell you my full name and address when I talk to you? I sure hope not!
Beyond that, what about the threat of violence for saying something? As another commenter points out, this is a real issue for marginalized groups, but also could easily become an issue for your average citizen sharing their political opinion.
While I agree it would be nice having some level of assurance that you're talking to a human, particularly going forward, the only way I could support such a system is if no party involved would be able to track what I visit or pin an actual identity to me as a user - but, perhaps more importantly, it also needs to not be easily broken by those actors who it's trying to stop. Otherwise it's useless and just hurts your actual citizens.
A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be technically watertight. But the key is that it doesn't have to be watertight to work. Social media is all about network effects. Once most kids are on there, everyone has to be on there. If you knock the percentage down far enough, you break the network effect to the point where those who don't want to don't feel pressured to. If that is all it does, it'…
Platforms may offer it as an option but must also offer a reasonable alternative, so no one who is 16 or older is prevented from having a social media account because they choose not to provide government ID. This includes situations where other age check methods return a result the user does not accept."
A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be technically watertight. But the key is that it doesn't have to be watertight to work. Social media is all about network effects. Once most kids are on there, everyone has to be on there. If you knock the percentage down far enough, you break the network effect to the point where those who don't want to don't feel pressured to. If that is all it does, it'…
Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age
Here you go. If you’re concerned about your personal data, only use platforms that integrate and use this.
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Well, yes but the other problem is this is putting authoritarians in charge of more stuff. I had a comment comparing this to allowing people to eat too much food and that is literally where the logical outcome of this sort of thinking goes - it happens in practice, that isn't some sort of theoretical risk. The more the government decides what people can and can't want to do the worse the potential gets when they make…
The attempt is to remove the market do exploiting the attention of children for profit. This doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth it. What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small number will go through fringe social media even less policed or normalised than the big American ones and have much higher risk on some of these issues than before.
Good for you Australia. I hope EU follows suit soon.
Father of five here, and founder of a social media marketing company (exited). Our kids are up against problems we didn't have during the great expansion of social. The three big things: 1. State level actors and well funded not for profits are fighting an information war to influence our kids. And they are very good at it. Down to having troll farms to talk one on one. Every time something new happens in the world,…
I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty. Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd l…
You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis.
It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.