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This is technically feasible, and bussiness don’t need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.
But I’m morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.
But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it’s too late.
Well that’s not going to work out.
Pssst! Hey kid, wanna buy some memes?
The fact that people even considered this with a straight face, discussed it and passed it is just indicative how tech illiterate we’ve become.
I don’t know how they are going to do over there.
Here the plan for the same goal is force any social media company to request a digital certificate when entering, or directly overtaking the ip of the social media and force a certificate check to let the user through. This certificates would be expedited by the government to people over certain age.
The haven’t implemented yet, as they were going to start using the system to ban porn for minors and got a lot of backslash.
It’s technologically doable, some kid will always find a way to enter but vast majority will not (next to a bunch of adults that will stop using them because they cannot be bothered with the same system). Moral considerations aside.
It’s technologically doable
I’d disagree here. Sure in theory you could design some system that authenticates every user on every connection but in practice it would be impossible to maintain without complete authoritarian oversight like North Korea. Even closed authoritarian countries fail to achieve this (like Iran or China).
This would cost billions of not trillions in implementation, oversight overhead and economic product loss. That money would be much more effective in carrot approach of supporting mental health institutions and promoting wholesome shared culture, anti bullying campaigns etc.
It’s not a new problem either. We know for a fact that the latter is the better solution and yet here we are…
Good. Now block Shitter.
I support this move. Some here are delusionally arguing that this impacts privacy - the sort of data social media firms collect on teenagers is egregiously extensive regardless. This is good support for their mental health and development.
This ban does nothing.
Anything that does not force ID verification is useless.
Anything that does verify ID would mean that adults also have to upload their IDs to the website.
What will happen is either this becomes another toothless joke. Or the government say “okay this isn’t working, lets implement ID checks”, and when that law passes Lemmy Instance Admins would be required to verify ID of any user from an Australia IP.
Y’all want that to happen?
So what hapoens if other countries start catching on and also pass such law?
Eventually the all internet accounts would be tied to IDs. Anonymity is dead.
Government provided open id service which guarantees age. Website gets trusted authority signed token witch contains just the age. We can do this safely. We have the technology. They could even do it only once on registration.
Digital id’s exist already in the EU, and many countries run a sign on service already. We aren’t far from this.
Depending on what the token contains.
There are two implementations I could think of:
“This user has been verified to be at least [Age]. Sincerely, [Government Authority]” Assuming this is an identical token thats the same for everyone? Sure. I’m not opposed to this.
“This user has been verified to be at least [Age]. Unique Token ID: 23456” Hell No. When the government eventually wants to deanonymize someone, they could ask the website: “What was the token ID that was used to verify the user?” then if the website provides it, now the government can just check the database to see who the token belongs to. And this could also lead to the government mandating the unique token id to be stored.
If i recall correctally, Australia tried to fine adults if they didnt have thier phone with them. Ive heard a relaible youtuber say it, but i couldnt find a news article to confirm it.
Went to look for the article. Found something even worse https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-24/can-border-force-search-your-phone-when-you-travel-to-australia/100774644
This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry to implement and enforce rules against hate speech, grooming, fake news, etc. They surely cannot verify the age of a human without any official ID made in the real world. This leads to other problems but that’s not the concern of the government! Social Media wants it’s users, not the government.
This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry
what? Why would tech industry care? If anything it’ll have the reverse effect and dimiss tech role in brain rott because “see, kids are not on it! It’s all good here”
performative nonsense which does nothing for kids or their mental health and harms queer kids who lose one of the first places they can find community.
Then it seems there is something other to fix in society than making sure facebook knows anything about that kid.
The Zuckerbergers of the world aren’t the ones to trust with that.
This is just abstinence education all over again
I always wear a condom when I log into Facebook, so I should be safe
My child’s kindergarten teacher assured me he always wears a condom while teaching, just in case.
Now ban it for over 16s
You know in the eyes of government, Lemmy is also social media.
This is going to harm kids.
Not a bad idea all things considered
Edit: Save for the “Showing your ID” part, anonymity is healthy for the net and far too rare these days
Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.
I DGAF about your kids.
Yeah I agree with you on this. It’ll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don’t have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.
Frankly, decentralized networks make it even harder to take content down.
The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.
There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.
It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.
From 63C (1) of the legislation:
For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:
- a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
- i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
- ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
- iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
- iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
- b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).
Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.
It’s a good thing we wiped out covid and will never need students to use Zoom again!
Oh, wait
- a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
Another way to look at this is a back channel method of breaking down the big tech oligopoly.
I’m all for this. Kids are smart. They start using the rest of the internet. They’ll become tech savvy.
China Video Game Ban v2.0: Electric Boogaloo
Parents should be parenting, not delegate their responsibilities to a nanny state.
This isn’t even delegating. It’s more of an equivalent of stuffing your fingers into your ear holes and going “nanananan CAN’T HEAR YOU”
Parents should be Parenting?
If they haven’t been parenting what have they been doing for the last 40 years?
And if thwy have been parenting how’s that workout for us so far?
There’s been no age ban on social media since the internet was founded but there’s record mental health crisis on young people.
That would require us paying one parent enough to cover the other parent being a child care expert. But nobody gets to profit off of that so fuck society, everybody works, and nobody gets community goods except the wealthy.
Solution is to fund a social safety net, not ban social media.
but but that requires actually effort and budget that we’d have to take away from Australian oligarchs!
if social media is fediverse, you’re right; if social media is agents of surveillance capitalism, fuck social media
what’s “social” about what most people call social media?
Governmemts doesn’t care, any platform that empowers civillians to communicate with each other is “social media”. Governments love to control and restrict communications.
Lemmy would be considered social media. Eventually they would be requiring social media to verify IDs. So Lemmy instances will be required to verify IDs or be banned from certain countries.
even YouTube got in an exception list. So it’s not an “all or nothing” approach, it seems.
- Lemmy is too small for governments to care
Youtube got an exeption because Alphabet Inc. lobbied them to do so to get kids used to Youtube. Lemmy does not have the lobbying power like a mega corporation, plus, its a good excuse to get rid of a left-leaning platform, since governments tend to be against the left.
even “crash course” alone is enough of a reason to keep YouTube accessible
A social safety net you say… like a place we could gather all the children to teach them things and let them play under supervision?
So are we gonna put teens in kindergarden?
What? No! They can have their own age appropriate place to learn and play under supervision.
Well I hope Australians are a homogenous society. Like they don’t have racial minorities or LGBT kids that have to keep their identities closeted and have no one to talk to. Every Australian is so open and accepting amirite?
Imagine kids have conservative parents that would kick them out if they came out as LGBT, classmates are just constantly using “yo thats’s gay” as an insult, while teacher and administrators dismiss any reports bullying. Have no adult they trust, and the same conservative parents would not let them see a therapist because that being “weak”. Then when they wanna go online and vent and just have someone to talk to, the government steps in and “help” them by banning online communications.
“We Saved The Kids” Amirite?
But what about those Parental Responsibilities you were talking about earlier? Are you saying we now need extra social safety nets for kids who don’t fit the mold and get bullied? Extra places for them to learn and play under supervision? Because I don’t think that’s going to be economical without boarding them there, away from their parents.
