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

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

#931

Post by oddrationale » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

A lot of debate here is debating a social media ban. But what actually being banned is accounts, not access.

Australian teens can still scroll TikTok, Instagram, and watch Twitch streams from logged out accounts. They just can't comment, like, or upload their own content.

One might argue that this removes the algorithmic feeds. But I would wager that social media companies will just use browser fingerprinting to continue to serve algorithmic content to logged out users, if they aren't doing this already.

My take. This ruling seems to impact the content creators (from Australia specifically) more than the content viewers. Which I'm not sure is the intent of the legislation.

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

#932

Post by fugalfervor » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

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

That's the slippery slope fallacy. You assert that communications will be banned as a consequence of this, but provide no evidence that this will cause the banning of all communications.

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

#933

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

heresie-dabord wrote: post #723

Gigachad wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the social media companies have such a grip on their kids We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering. There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe f…

Them being platforms is most of the issue. Protocols (like Mastodon or PeerTube), not platforms.

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

#934

Post by josephwegner » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #871

Gigachad wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phon…

This assumes there is no added benefit to being able to reach your kids/be reached by your kids easier than it was historically. While I agree it's probably not as critical as many parents might make it seem, there are tangible benefits. Off the top of my head:

- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.

- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.

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

#935

Post by 0xedd » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

denismi wrote: post #850

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…

Australia is a Five Eyes country, with carte blanche access to data that the incumbent social media companies freely share with all the acronym deep-state authorities. Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surv…

[dead]

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

#936

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #455

Alternative to archive.md, archive.ph Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S3fVC... https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S2nVb... echo url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-social-media-ban-under-16.html \ |curl -K/dev/stdin -Agooglebot > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm links -dump 1.htm|sed -n '/Effect/,/region./p' More https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2…

[deleted]

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

#937

Post by ProllyInfamous » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

I was in college when this really cool idea came out: a social network database which only college students could join, regulating access to students@*.edu emails, only [obviously: TheFaceBook]. When distant relatives began sending `friend request`s, just a few years later, I left that platform forever.

Seems like local school districts could reintroduce such a platform (perhaps one already exists) for class discussions to continue outside of the classroom... but without the temptations of the outside world [which these u16 bans rightfully seek to limit]. Hyper-walled gardens, actual community-based social spaces, sans predation.

As always, I imagine with the unlimited timelessness of childhood multiple clever work-arounds will persist, regardless of any law. May the cat-and-mouse be merry.

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

#938

Post by lkramer » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #708

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.

The problem is that it's a government regulation regarding everyone, because now everyone must prove that they're not a subject of this new law. Do you think there should there be police on every corner you must submit your ID to to prove you're not an illegal immigrant?

Is that not literally what everyone has to do in order to consume alcohol?

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

#939

Post by rb666 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

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…

You know we kids did perfectly fine before there was social media? The point is, arguably we did a lot better.

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

#940

Post by kelnos » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 3:19 PM UTC

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…

I don't put much stock in slippery-slope style arguments. If you're going to make an argument like that, you need to support it with other instances where the same group/government has actually fallen down that slippery slope, to great detriment, in a similar enough situation for it to be likely to happen here.

Without that, it just comes off as hand-wavy anti-government fear-mongering. It's telling that you used the term "authoritarians", as if any law that's passed that can restrict what someone can do is necessarily authoritarian... which, well, as I said, it's telling.

I'm more concerned with the fact that these sorts of laws don't just affect kids: they require adults to supply government-issued identification in order to use these services, which I think is crap.