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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

#871

Post by zelphirkalt »

Gigachad wrote: post #659
phantasmish wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it. It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.

Here is the thing: It seems there are many people out there, who are so much influenced, that they worry about something like: "But how will I reach my child via phone, when they are at school! My kids need their phones!" Not realizing, that not too long ago, no parent had to reach their kid at school via phone, and if they did, they would call the school itself and have a message delivered or get the kid on the phone. This happened so rarely, that it was not common over the whole amount of students.

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

#874

Post by scotty79 »

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'…

> normalising people uploading identification documents

It's also important uploading to where. To Facebook. And the bulk of advertisements Facebook runs are literal (with literal meaning of the word literal) scams. And they are powerless[1] to stop it.

[1] not incentivised

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

#875

Post by zelphirkalt »

phantasmish wrote: post #677
ncruces wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat? My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams. Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to b…

Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post. Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.

To look past the "give up" post, it did have a good point about how children will get into contact with such feed monsters.

I think it will be a good idea to try and get other parents on board. Other parents of the kid's classmates. Maybe they are struggling with this too, but don't see the way forward. And you can show them the content of feeds and shit that kids consume. You can come up with some minimum age or other idea, which you suggest for children to have, before you as a group of parents allow them to access things. Or you can come up with a once a month special lesson or something, where you show what can go wrong to the kids, and cooperate with the school.

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

#876

Post by Swenrekcah »

bigB wrote: post #862
manindahat wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an argument and worth monitoring, but IMO it's not a strong enough argument to stop this. This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept. Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make ph…

How long will it take them to ban communications ? A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying....yet a recent death in the news this week, the kid was literally bullied/sextorted via SMS....not social media. Without banning SMS and possibly calls as well, it debunks this argument

Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet. Social media however allows for easier targeting especially for bad actors that are not in the kid’s friend/acquaintance group.

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

#877

Post by WhyNotHugo »

brailsafe wrote: post #718
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #714

I've not seen any mention of how this affect families. A lot of my family growing up lived in different cities. We kept in touch via social media. PSTN was expensive and impractical. Postal mail was obviously less practical. Does this new ban move kids to using email to keep in touch with friends and family? Are they now completely isolated from the rest of the world?

> Does this new ban move kids to using email to keep in touch with friends and family? You had social media but no ability to send DMs? In an attempt to not deliberately misinterpret you, next to zero of my current ability to keep in touch with anyone in my life via the internet, distant or otherwise, depends on social media, so forgive me if this seems like a strange take. Kids need access to YouTube in order to tal…

> In an attempt to not deliberately misinterpret you, […] Kids need access to YouTube in order to talk to their family?

Your attempt has failed; obviously I’m not taking about YouTube, but about things like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Instagram, and other social media which families actually use to talk to each other on a dialy basis.

Perhaps you don’t use these, but most of the world population uses some of these (or something similar) to keep in touch with family and friends.

Heck, even when I was a teen (before smartphones) I kept in touch with friends over social media. We’d even organise meeting up through it.

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

#878

Post by zelphirkalt »

tzs wrote: post #621
indymike wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 y…

The EU is very double edged though. It has great projects, undoubtedly. For example GDPR was a gigantic step forward, even if many people here, who are US-centric mostly, don't want to hear that. But on the other hand the EU also has loads of shit that members and lobbies try to push, like for example chat control.

Let's hope that this project you mention works out, if indeed it works like you describe.

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

#879

Post by alexnewman »

My wife did a lot of conversations with kids in Australia. They all said they hate social media and regularly get harassed by Asian criminal gangs trying to blackmail them. They support the law cause they were only there cause they felt they had to be. We freed these children . The Australian internet is far more dangerous than the USA

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

#880

Post by PurpleRamen »

256_ wrote: post #803

A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself. I think this type of thinking is demonstrated, or perhaps exploited, very well by this article (I'm not…

> It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself.

This is a very simplified view. The topic has been disputed for years, and societies has tried to find alternative solutions. But turns out, there is no other well enough working solution at the moment, hence the nuclear option. And sometimes that is the only working option anyway.

Should be noted, this is not a first. Social Media has already been restricted to various degree for kids of certain ages in several countries. Australia is just raising the age from the usual 12, 13 up to 16.

> I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech".

So it's a poor article, so what? These attempts are not new. There are regularly political attempts pushing towards stricter regulations and more surveillance. Some work, some not.

> That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.

There is no shift. Those views have always been there, even before the internet. This is a normal part of societies, including democratic. There is a constant power-struggle between control and liberty in any society, and the balance is always shifting depending on how good or bad certain problems are at that moment.

But a certain thing which is missing here BTW is a complete ban of all open media, for everyone in all ages and groups. For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come. But people now, today, who are getting radicalized against the standing order, those are a problem. And nobody demanding for a ban is good sign for a healthy enough democracy. Because think about in which countries this is not the case..

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