Landmark legislation sees the Australian government committed to the novel step of child protection by banning social media for under sixteens.
It’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.
Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.
If they’re expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples’ government ID’s, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.
It’s just apparently all anyone can come up with when they’ve got government-brain.
it’s still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they’re actually going to enforce this.
“Awww shucks everyone, looks like we don’t get to have internet privacy after all. Don’t worry, it’s FOR THE CHILDREN.”
They’ve set it up so it’s a legal mess. The platforms aren’t given any mechanism to actually perform verifications (no double blind id system, for example) but are legally on the hook for each and every under-16 on the platforms. A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, “Nah mate, we just won’t do business in Oz anymore. Bye.”
Vanishingly few business make a “New York only” version of their product because it’s simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.
It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.
A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Why?
Probably because the internet isn’t an app store
… I didn’t say it was.
The quote says that app stores should be responsible for verifying age, but social media is not limited to apps - they’re just one of multiple user interfaces for interacting with social networks. So that alone cannot solve the problem.
Sorry for the confusion
Because the app store isn’t the only way to install an app. It is trivially easy to side load apps and it’s well within the technologic skillset of the average 12 year old.
They can also just use a web browser.
The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.
this isn’t for the safety of kids; it’s to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.
No offence but that’s shortsighted to be generous. I feel like half of lemmy will carry on about social media being cancer, the frequent articles citing negative effects of SM on mental health and the fact that multiple social media companies are accused of propagating misinformation (Zuckerberg face sure is in lemmy a lot lately for some reason). Like Zuck has all but greenlit harassing lgbt+ people on FB and the SM ban is to stop gay kids finding a community? Please. Corporate SM is a blight and before someone says lemmy/reddit check the mod logs or the fact that lemmy only got CSAM under control relatively recently before suggesting it’s fine for kids.
Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.
An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.
What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.
Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn’t disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn’t really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that’s a very real issue.
I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.
Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn’t going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It’s just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.
Are they still allowed on Lemmy?
Australian legislators probably don’t even know that Lemmy exists.
If the law was well made, it wouldn’t applly to websites under a certain threshold of active users.
I mean you can’t expect octopusforums.co with 40 cephalopod enthusiasts to ID check australians can you.
Based on what I’ve seen over the last few years, it’s the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
Now do 16+
It has been 3 hours as of this comment, and Spitzspot has yet to delete their account. I guess they don’t really believe what they say.
In case you forgot, Lemmy is social media
Honestly - fine with me, tear it all down.
Sounds like youre deleting your account soon.
Goodbye.
Let’s ban centralized for profit social media.
antisocial media
Huh? It is a kind of forum. Not even close to social media.
It’s exactly social media, just because it’s the one you like doesn’t make it less so.
“websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” -oxford
“forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)” - Merriam Webster
Lemmy and forums fit the bill pretty clearly.
That’s sounds like everything on the world wide web if not the entire internet.
And forums predated the term “social media.”
I wholeheartedly and respectfully disagree. Social media focuses on following individuals, not topics. There is no incentive to follow or be followed on a forum, and being pseudonymous really kills the “social network” part of that definition.
Edit: typos
Le bad
I’d prefer 17+. I think it would be fun to have only 1 year on social media.
😁
I am so, so glad to see that at least one country in the world is willing to tackle this problem.
Also a little depressed that every comment thread about this law boils down to: “It’s hard. Might as well not do it at all,” especially from people who (rightly) think we need to ban guns every time a school gets shot up here in the US, which would be monumentally difficult socially but 100% needs to happen.
What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?
My instance is in Australia, and the new laws affect social media like Lemmy. The hard part is that there apparently isn’t much guidance on how to follow the law. Do you have to use ID? Is a location-specific popup making you state that you’re 16+ enough? Nobody knows.
I think a mastodon instance started asking aussies to send a pic of them with a bottle of vodka or a pack of smokes.
If you are the sole user on your own ActivityPub site running on your own server, can it even be called a social media site?
Fair dinkem mate. How are they gonna regulate this?
Dinkum
