Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by tzs » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:31 AM UTC

indymike wrote: post #450

gertlex wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I wrong in feeling like the solution you outline is only applicable to an individual's kids? But at the societal level, it clearly seems we can't depend on enough parents to do what you talk about. Something else is needed. I don't have answers to give. Certainly not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done. (casual listening to Secur…

"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.

> "Everyone must prove their age online now" creates a trail of identity that kills anonymous speech dead.

That depends on the implementation. Do it the wrong way, like many countries or US states, and that is a problem.

Do it right, like the EU is doing in their Digital Identity Wallet project, which is currently undergoing large scale field trials, and the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.

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

#622

Post by stephen_g » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:32 AM UTC

aus_throwaway wrote: post #444

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…

The Australian government didn’t do this because of any concern about children; it’s to punish (mainly) Meta for backing out of the Australian Social Media Bargaining Agreement [1]. Other social media companies are collateral damage. News Corp wanted Meta et al to pay for the privilege of sharing links to News Corp articles (imo, ridiculous). Meta played along for a short period, but has now refused to engage, which…

Just in case anyone is sceptical, is quite literally paying for sharing links - the legslation [1] says in part 52B that

    For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:
         (a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service; or
         (b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
         (c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
     (2) Subsection (1) does not limit, for the purposes of this Part, the ways in which a service makes content available.

Part 52B (1) means that the code explicitly defines that a social media site publishing a user post containing a link to a news site as being considered exactly the same as the social media site ripping off and publishing a copy of a whole article!

The supporters of the bill then went around pretending that social media sites were ripping off whole articles and showing them on their sites with their own ads, when they are actually just linking and showing the title, thumbnail and sentence summary that the news site provides in its meta info!

In the end, the news media bargaining code is effectively just a shakedown to extract money for nothing from tech companies. Part 52B makes the whole thing indefensible.

1. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00021/latest/text

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

#623

Post by NothingAboutAny » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:35 AM UTC

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…

[dead]

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

#624

Post by dclowd9901 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:38 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #405

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'…

On your second point, that might be a little less of a concern. Granted there can be dark places anywhere, they're _so much easier_ to find online, and have to potential to be so much more reinforcing for problematic behavior.

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

#625

Post by api » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:39 AM UTC

kubb wrote: post #619

roenxi wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Authoritarians use social networks to undermine democratic principles so not exposing kids to that takes power away from them. Or did I misunderstand something?

My take for a while has been that authoritarian ideas (both hard right and hard left) dominate on social media because of the short form short attention span format. Authoritarianism tends to run on simple slogans, grievances, and identity politics. That stuff is very well suited to 140 characters, memes, and short videos.

Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when everyone has been triggered and trolled into limbic system mode by rage bait.

Liberal politics speaks to the neocortex. Authoritarianism speaks to the brain stem.

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

#626

Post by jksmith » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:39 AM UTC

devmor wrote: post #514

delbronski wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on dude, you are on HN. You probably know that social media is no longer about free speech. It’s a targeted advertising machine that is extremely effective on kids and teenagers. It preys on them so, so efficiently. It’s a technical work of art. A young mind is extremely susceptible to the algorithms on those platforms. Much more than adults are, and adults are already really susceptible. This is what this ban i…

Why do we have to ban networked communication for teens instead of regulating it? Nearly everything about it that’s bad for teens also sucks for the rest of us.

How many degrees of separation is this from adult regulation? Want to provide age information to a site so you can look at porn without any guarantee that information won't be used for additional profit? That's a real thing in the US.

Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.

Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.

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

#627

Post by Levitz » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:41 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #617

drnick1 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the EU you don’t need to upload your ID anywhere, the service can use the government’s portal for ID verification. In the case of age verification they can get a yes/no response The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen. I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, r…

I don’t really get your point. Your government is generally able to compel your ISP to give them logs of all of your traffic, if they don’t already vacuum it up, so it’s honestly a bit naive to think it shouldn’t be allowed to happen, because in practice it absolutely can. There is a distinction between getting data from an ISP and getting it via your use of their portal, but I’d argue it’s without much of a differen…

There's an enormous difference in the government having channels allowing for the disclosing of private material to them and just giving them all of it from the get go, and it is not unlike the difference of allowing the government to jail people and allowing it to arbitrarily jail people for life.

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

#628

Post by Bad_Initialism » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:49 AM UTC

To all the parents defending this: you are responsible for your children and what they do.

Passing laws that affect all of us because you are too lazy and ineffectual to raise your children properly is unacceptable.

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

#629

Post by nxor » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:51 AM UTC

api wrote: post #625

kubb wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authoritarians use social networks to undermine democratic principles so not exposing kids to that takes power away from them. Or did I misunderstand something?

My take for a while has been that authoritarian ideas (both hard right and hard left) dominate on social media because of the short form short attention span format. Authoritarianism tends to run on simple slogans, grievances, and identity politics. That stuff is very well suited to 140 characters, memes, and short videos. Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when eve…

Liberals can also be authoritarian. See reddit, where ideas that don't conform are typically downvoted out. Here too.

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

#630

Post by codebje » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 12:51 AM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #438

zmmmmm wrote: post #405

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'…

I'd even go one step further: it does not have to be enforceable at all. This has to do with teen's psychology. For whatever reason, kids just fight their parents but listen to their schools and government a lot more. Of course, there are exceptions, but I'm talking about trend. The kids in my school district were generally angry towards their parents when they couldn't get a smartphone when their peers did. However,…

Absolutely this. We have limits in place for usage of a bunch of this sort of stuff, from not at all to up to an hour, and we'd be constantly tested and pushed on these limits. Constantly. "But my friends are..." is the usual start to it.

Government says you can't chat with just anyone in Roblox, and suddenly it's accepted that this is just what it is. Not only that, but limits and rules on how much and when you can watch YouTube and the like are also suddenly more acceptable.

So far what my kids are saying is that this is broadly true across their peer groups. The exceptions are just that, exceptions. The peer pressure to be in on it all is lessened. And in turn, that means less push-back on boundaries set by us, because it's less of a big deal.

(And I face less of a dilemma of how much to allow to balance out the harm of not being part of the zeitgeist vs. the harm of short form, mega-corporation curated content).