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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

reuters.com

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

#761

Post by ulbu »

dragonwriter wrote: post #710
rapind wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are government regulations regarding kids. Nothing new here, we’ve been regulating what you can market to kids for decades. I’m not buying a slippery slope argument. As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.

> These are government regulations regarding kids. No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children. There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and ma…

alcohol, cigarettes?..

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

#763

Post by ares623 »

roenxi wrote: post #459
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'…

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…

We wouldn’t have this problem if the tech companies can “self regulate” (lol). But us engineers just can’t help ourselves but find even more effective and efficient ways to harvest eyeballs and stoke hate.

And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:

- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms

Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.

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

#764

Post by pizza »

ricardobeat wrote: post #361
pizza wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.

Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that? There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.

I have no idea how to define it. I also don’t know if I’m personally convinced one way or another about the harms. Just think the platforms would probably have to be made to make more substantial changes were it the case.

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

#766

Post by eimrine »

madeofpalk wrote: post #709
jrochkind1 wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government has laws saying people under 16 can't drive cars, do you think that's part of the slippery slope that has led to all of those happening-in-practice bad things?

Yes but every time you drive on the road you don't need to prove you're over 16.

It would be true if the windows are totally black or humans under 16 are looking totally adult.

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

#767

Post by insane_dreamer »

I wonder how many of the people who are against it have young teens. It's easy to rail against the ban, or paint it as some plot to get everyone's IDs, when you're not personally affected by it. As a parent of young teens, I 100% support it.

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

#769

Post by insane_dreamer »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #72

Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior. I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!

I do agree that banning advertising would be good (though not the only problem). However, you don't need social media to socialize online (text messaging, messaging groups, etc. all still exist).

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

#770

Post by insane_dreamer »

fainpul wrote: post #173
safety1st wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted. Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse. My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the ph…

> we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago. Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.

> Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.

The escalation, the ubiquitousness, is the problem.

It's like the difference to your health between having a can of coke week and drinking a 2 L bottle of coke every day.

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