Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

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

You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.

> This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving

No it's not. Is every social media platform banned? How is it defined? This is the equivalent of going into a supermarket with a "kids" alcohol section and 1 for everyone else hand-picked by whoever in charge.

No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children.

There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and mandating that vendors secure proof that every user is not a child.

(Just as there is a difference between prohibiting knowingly supplying terrorists and requiring every seller to conduct a detailed background check of every customer to assure that they are not a terrorist.)

The slippery slope is long behind us, we're already at the bottom.

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?

4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed

They have millions of users. They're about to get more.

No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.

This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.

There would be nothing new here?

The argument is that kids being online isn’t the governments business one way or the other.

The slippery slope argument is always secondary, but how often has government regulation not grown in size and scope? Combine that with how norms shift and the type of large scale identity infrastructure put in place to support this, can you honestly say this isn’t going to grow?

All of that also ignores the possibility (read inevitability) that a bad actor/authoritarian would exploit this access further without popular support.

Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when everyone has been triggered and trolled into limbic system mode by rage bait.

Liberal politics speaks to the neocortex. Authoritarianism speaks to the brain stem.

I would say that much bigger problem is possibly the influence of these sites on development of young people. We know it's addictive, we know it's harmful. Cigarettes and alcohol are banned for the same reason so I'm kinda glad for this Australian experiment. We'll see.

We did, though. The chances of getting caught were slim to nil. Will kids (and adults for that matter) have the same easy opportunity to evade enforcement here?

Its a two sided bias, on the one, governmemt authority is categorically bad and on the other you cant participate and change it. You could frame social media corporations in the way, but not, when you are a libertarian, i guess.

Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"

There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.

If it's about monetizing child attention not about speech control why isn't every single toy ad, food ad, movie ad, also banned?

I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small number will go through fringe social media even less policed or normalised than the big American ones and have much higher risk on some of these issues than before.

Sure, but the Australian government's definition of an age-restricted social media platform doesn't mention advertising or algorithms at all. Technically, their definition also covers algorithm-free social media like Mastodon, which I'd argue isn't nearly as harmful.

The framing of social media as something that's inherently bad no matter how you do it is a framing that helps social media giants like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to continue to "do it" in a way that harms people. I'm sure they love the idea that the ills of social media can be solved by banning their least profitable users while doing nothing to regulate what they do with the others. They're probably thrilled that their healthier algorithm-free competitors haven't even entered the conversation. They want to be the tobacco companies of the future, because making addictive things for adults is incredibly profitable.

we didn't ban cigarettes, we disincentivized them. Why can't we do the same here? regulate the algorithms, not the platform (the platform ultimately being "the internet").

This is just a cat and mouse game where every few years the government will ban whatever the kids like. That's not how you create a high trust society.

Nearly everything about it that’s bad for teens also sucks for the rest of us.

Youtube for one is an advertising machine. On the other hand it is one of the few places where one can find some amazing educational and entertainment content. Prohibiting it I think is a crime.

Besides, lately Politicians stick their noses everywhere. It is just way too much.

I wasn't told to hate government regulations. 30 years of horrible, ineffective regulation taught me to hate these poorly thought out regulatoins. I grew up under No Child Left Behind. I saw the TSA form before my very eyes. I'm right now seeing ICE roam free, regulations be damned.

I don't hate the idea of regulation. I don't trust the people who are trying to regulate.

Australians think of themselves as carefree but good hearted larrikins who snub their nose at authority, and would always be ready to duff a steer or two from a wealthy cattleman for some hungry orphans. The reality is this type of Australian only remains as fading memories in Henry Lawson stories, the few that ever existed. The real Australian is not only a spineless sticklers for the rules completely subservient to authority, with little sense of adventure, but is also very envious of others driven by their greedy and selfish nature.

During covid "lockdowns", Australians were far more eager to tattle on other commoners for breaking the precious rules than they were concerned with questioning government's hypocritical behavior or unscientific rules and policies. It was fine in their minds that their rulers misbehaved, so long as their neighbor didn't get to take their kid to a park if they weren't allowed to as well.

EDIT: I don't mean this to sound overly harsh to Australians, it's not unique to them. What is funny is just their opinion of themselves. At least the British are admittedly subservient sticklers.

Targeting platforms is like only banning one brand of cigarette. People will just find another. We should instead attack the "seller" here, being the algorithms optimized for selling and not for the enrichment of society.

That said smoking and Instagram are probably best avoided by kids

You might want to double-check your definition of "hard drugs", "libertarian" or both.

You watch something, you like it, then you get all the time similar things.

Simple example: you click on a post about vegetarian meals. Then the next you see is cows ending up in a slaughterhouse. And then etc.. In less than a week, your posts are all about "why become a vegan".

The end effect is that they shape our children culturally, and it's very hard to explain what is true vs what is fake. Or why something is right vs wrong. They are just not there yet.

‘Fringe networks’, and ‘off the radar’ feel like a very negative framing for a kind of smaller, more intimate, and often pleasantly communal feeling internet that I quite like!

Old fashioned online forums—maybe even Hackernews itself?—would likely fit into this ‘fringe’, ‘off the radar’ internet, and yet, it still feels much less toxic here than it does on twitter.

> The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content

…and you need a massive network to enable this, right? You can’t do it without the money, and the volume of content, that the giants in this space have.

If this just pushes kids onto the small web—sure, it’s not _all_ wholesome—but at least it’s not as carefully, as deliberately manipulative.

And then there's the issue with ourselves even. We pretty much all do, say, and believe dumb things when we're younger. It's just a part of growing up. But I can't imagine what life must be like if you mix this reality with social media. Not only does this then stay attached to you forever, but pretty much anything can be artificially reinforced. With both factors probably working to impair general maturation.

These are all just consequences of 'normal' things that you'd have even if we censored 100% of vice on the internet, and it's still quite awful.

When someone wanted to do something counter-culture (i.e the *chan websites), there was actually a shared interest behind it. People would spend time making content and actually doing things on the web.

These days, internet is so ubiqutious that the majority of the users are simply consumers. There is no drive to build anything. Modern day kids aren't going to be spending time trying to figure out how to get around social media bans with technology, because most internet users simply just don't care enough to organize and build something.

Remove those apps that make you do so, and the world becomes a little bit brighter over time. I did it years ago with FB apps (which was draining battery while unused, typical fb crappy engineering when they can't even snoop on you in more subtle ways) and have 0 need to put anything there. I can check FB on desktop if I need to, and do so rarely due to lack of any actually interesting stuff there.

Same can go for any other social cancer out there.

There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.

The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.

There is a distinction between getting data from an ISP and getting it via your use of their portal, but I’d argue it’s without much of a difference in reality.

Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's why we have democratically elected governments. All these power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some extend at least.

They also have more direct means of accessing more specific data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.

I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.

Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.

The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).

The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.

> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.

Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.

- Fraudster has to bribe hotel staff, or get on staff and then work there and steal documents. Tricky.

New attack vector:

- Fraudster rents out Airbnb. Trivial.

But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".

[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.

Because the issue is:

- your street smartness is an outdated smartness

- there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about

When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized.

The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it.

Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.

Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be?

Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not?

Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.

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 for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.

> all online services

Not even close? I don’t know how you got that.

> including multiplayer games

Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those)

> community wikis

Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.

I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.

I really don't think the opposite order would work.

Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.

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 you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.

Ha! Tell that to an American and they would laugh if it wasn't for ICE threatening to shoot you for trying to get close enough to ask.

With anonymous speech you don’t even know if you’re talking to a person or a program.

If you want to say something, then say it with your identity. You don’t get to be anonymous when saying something to my face so why should it be allowed across a screen?

Currently speech is shaped by producing a glut of speech, and then having the most useful narratives platformed by trusted personalities. Simultaneously, any counter views which do not support the goals of the media-party, do not get aired. Education, science, evidence and journalistic standards are eschewed and authoritarian techniques of loyalty and trust are used to take advantage of whatever story is currently most engaging.

The churn in anonymous forums is used to identify narratives that are the best evolved to spread and gain engagement.

Don’t mistake me for saying anonymity must be given up. Do recognize that worrying about anonymity today, is very much like people talking about the way things were back in their time.

If it helps - from a utilitarian perspective, free speech enables the free exchange of ideas in the service of debates to understand reality. The marketplace of ideas.

Currently the marketplace is captured, and it is not a fair fight between state actors, media teams, troll farms, A/B tested algorithms, and regular folk on the other side.

The invisible hand of the market IS working, ensuring the optimum outcome given the current constraints, or lack thereof.

If we want to defend speech for individuals, if we want a fair fight, we need to address the asymmetry of powers, and lack of recourse.

Cable and network news did not question that narrative, aside from the exception I mentioned. Read David Barstow's Pulitzer-winning stories in NYT-- cable news shows even had retired generals pushing for war without disclosing all kinds of conflicts of interest.

Edit: I should add that in reality there were protests with record numbers of people during the buildup to the Iraq War, and there were many articulate arguments against the war by all kinds of people. However, that was not the narrative presented in Network/Cable News.

What anti-war actions have you done to prevent the end your life by drone striking? Post some dislikes, duh?

... and India. Wasn't expecting that at all.

The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.

If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.

People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.

Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.

The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.

Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.

Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.

There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.

The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.

Whenever platforms have taken even the smallest steps in that direction, the right-wing authoritarian political parties freak out and blackmail them into stopping, or in the case of Musk simply buy them out outright.

- It's not young adults, it's 15 and under. Personally I would classify 17-20something as young adult (it's a bit subjective isn't it).

- The younger children don't really care about politics honestly. Curious if you have an age that you're ok with only ensuring irl politics for children? I think age to vote is a much bigger concern for me here in terms of civil liberties.

- Parents can still make that choice for their child (unclear how this will work to me yet, to be fair).

- I've become convinced no one really practises 'politics' online. People barely even debate anymore. They argue, they perform activism, they aggitate, its what gets attention (thanks to social media). I'm worried people think this is normal, it's not- political discourse used to be much more productive. I remember when fallacies were actually brought up logically on the internet and people actually cared about the accusation.

- I did explicit rp with adults as 7 year old on MSN chatrooms back in the day :')

Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.

The whole "don't talk about politics" is so toxic IMHO.

Sure you might not want to ruin your dinner with the family members you see a single day every year. But otherwise, making it sound like a taboo could be widening the tribalization and anchor the feeling deeper into people's identity. Let the people talk about what they care about, including when that affects who the next president is.

Let's make some distinctions first.

On the one hand, you have violence and pornography, and also other crude content. There is nothing good about exposing children to these. It does not contribute to their growth or to their maturity as human beings and it is ridiculous to think it could. On the contrary, this content will cause psychological harm, causing distortions in their emotions, in their habituated appetites, in their self-understanding, and their understanding of normal relations. When deviance like that is tolerated, it shifts the Overton window. Children observe this tolerance and roll it into their sense of normality. Individuals suffer. The quality of society degrades substantially.

On the other hand, we have political agitation. This one is more difficult to define and handle, especially in a liberal democratic society. There are examples of obvious political agitation, of course, but children should generally not be exposed to political agitation at all, except as a subject matter at an age appropriate level and in an appropriate pedagogic setting. Children don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to examine such material in the wild on their own where they would be at the mercy of unscrupulous adult manipulators who couldn't care less about the well-being of children. (Ask yourself what kind of person would want to involve children in their political agitation to begin with.)

So, there's a big difference between common sense things like these and coddling children. We want to prepare children for life, not teach them adaptation to depravity. You throw them into the filth of social and psychological pathology. Neither violence nor pornography should be normalized even in the adult world - it is harmful to the adults who consume it as well - so the idea that we should prepare children for life in some violent and twisted pornland is preposterous. Nobody has to put up with that garbage, and the law should be making sure they don't.

Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.

> I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.

Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.

Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle.

Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers in UK (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_tqQYmgMQg

Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.

I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).

I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.

> 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them"

Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions.

> This may be true

Do you think it's true?

The key to his success seems, at a glance, to be raising his media profile by taking controversial positions (which I suspect he may not sincerely hold) that guarantee news coverage. Similar to how populist politicians in the UK game the BBC's "balance" policy by always taking a contrarian position to any given topic to secure an interview or place on a discussion panel.

It will normalize people thinking that uploading their state-issued ID to whatever contractor is validating accounts is safe and normal.

It looks like they're "doing something" while nothing really changes or potentially gets worse. Trying to regulate Meta/YouTube from there has IMHO become harder, as kids are on paper supposed to be out of the picture.

Honest conversations with your kids from an early age are key.

Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very much in the target age here, and they only have a passing understand of what social media even is due to us explaining how unhealthy it is to them.

It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same, but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state isn't the answer.

Printing Press <=> The Internet

but

Social Media <=> Some specific forms of (mostly centralized) publishing

It very much is not.

One does not follow from the other.

We make speeding illegal even though even the most affordable cars can trivially bypass all speed restrictions. It doesn't mean that the efforts to curb speeding are in bad faith just because it is still possible to bypass speed reduction rules.