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What they consider as “social media”? Is it every site where you can communicate with others?
This seems fucked if its so.
While specific platforms haven’t been named in the law, the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister. Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Youtube: offers Shorts and aggressively markets them at any demo that responds well to Tik Tok, competing for a more toxic comments section with years of experience.
WhatsApp: all the group chats and online bullying that you banned facebook to get away from, 1:1, day of the ban.
Should we identify society root causes and address those? 🤔No. No, it’s the kids who are wrong /s
It’s the parents who are wrong.
Parents shouldn’t allow their kids to use social media until they can handle it. Some kids don’t have issues, whereas others end up experiencing severe depression largely as a result of too much or too little social media exposure. Parents should be the ones responsible here, both for deciding the age and for culpability if they knowingly contribute to problems by either intentionally over or under exposing their children to social media.
But at no point should the government be deciding things like ages, because enforcement would necessitate privacy violations of either the parents (if they need to allow an underage account) of the children. Screw that, let the parents decide and hold them accountable for any abuse.
You are arguing against yourself. In the first paragraph you say that the parents should keep kids from social media.
In the second, you say that it would be a violation of privacy if parents would keep kids from social media.
Kids need policing, it’s going to need to be done by the parents no matter what the laws are. Personally, I don’t think the laws matter much in this regard.
Imagine if this was done around the world. And then imagine how empty the Internet would be.
You don’t need to ban kids from the Internet. You need to ban pedophiles from it.
You need to raise kids better instead of delegating that job to the internet.
I strongly disagree.
Social media is terrible for mental health especially for the youth. Phones and tablets help in some areas like motor control development but also hurt other places like attention deficiencies and critical thinking, and very rarely does it lead to a kid learning how technology works (that’s usually from the computer nerds, aka kids who want a computer, doesn’t happen even close to the same rate as smart phones.
Smart phones make people dumb. That’s my opinion. But the above are scientifically backed.
100% agree. These things get talked up as benefits when they are mostly treated as revenue streams by the seller and distractions by the buyer. Kids and adults. We all need to be way more critical of the tech we use.
The damage to children’s lives done by social media is catastrophic.
People used to say the same thing about video games. And movies. And even books.
Not a bad choice.
So what? There will be a “Yes I’m over 16” check box which will be as meaningful as the “Yes I’m over 18” one on porn sites?
Any hope of governments or social media sites enforcing this will come with big ethical and technical compromises and I dont think anyone is actually going to really bother.
We already have limits on what children do with other potentially harmful things like fire, sharp objects, heights and roads and they all come from parents. If this law has any real and positive impact it will be the message that it sends to parents.
Some mastodon instance has it covered already. https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113519360107067092
“being angry about inaction on climate change” hahaha
Okay, that is fucking awesome. LOL.
That is both hilarious and a brilliant solution.
This is going to harm kids.
The second i have to hand over my id to a tech company is the second i leave and never come back.
Also how they gonna manage the fediverse? Can someone get fined for providing social media to themselves if an under 16 sets up their own federated instance?
In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.
The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.
Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.
So the bussiness won’t have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.
What if I’m also uncomfortable with the tech company knowing what country I’m a citizen of?
They know it already.
IP reveals general location.
Sure, and my IP is something I can control (VPN). I also travel, and I’m certainly not a citizen of each country I visit.
This kind of control tend to be ip based, like cookies in the eu. So if they don’t know they won’t know. And if they know means that they knew. Nothing changes on that regard.
This is just abstinence education all over again
I always wear a confom 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.
For a second I thought the headline said Australia banned social media for 16 seconds 🤣
Now ban it for over 16s
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.
Ah fuck. Canada is likely to copycat this, we love copying Australia’s homework. NDP and Cons BOTH already favor this idea except it’s also all 18+ websites. Gov ID to wack off. Puritans are on every wing and I wish we could shake them off.
Wait what? The NDP supports this?!??
Unfortunately. NDP have lost the plot in multiple ways under Singh.
Is anyone talking about the fact that it’s the predatory, short-term-quarterly-gains oriented behavior of the platforms themselves which is in fact rampaging though democracies, massively affecting and survielling Adult’s behaviors on a loop of ragebait-induced dopamine/seratonin manipulation?
Because Kids are going to connect with one another, on whichever the next platform is that’s not banned. What’s more, the institutions they attend will inevitably ask them to do so as…things like Youtube arent exactly 100% avoidable.
Pretty pathetic to clamp down on Youth Liberty in a society that has basically none, when centrally-hosted platforms owned by corporate behemoths are all-but-physically trampling the landscape like some kind of fucked up gentrification-glorifying-voiceline-repeating Megazord
It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.
Well we agree but it’s only as much better as it is effective…because when it’s not it’s giving the impression of doing something while in reality it’s legitimizing the stripping of the autonomy.
Not a bad idea all things considered
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.
