As an Australian parent this is really pleasing to see. It's clearly inspired heavily by the work of Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge et al. The kids are not okay and the main thing stopping a worried parent from addressing it is that "all the other kids are on it". If you have an addicted/bullied child would you make them a social pariah and create interminable arguments by taking away their devices? Collective action is needed and this is what it looks like.
We don't need watertight compliance, verification or enforcement - just raise the level of difficulty for kids to get on and create a culture among kids, parents and schools that social media is not allowed. This will be enough breathing room for parents to say no and kids not to feel like they're the only ones missing out.
Parents are almost as addicted as children and often take dozens of photos of every tiny event and post it on IG without permission of other children who are there in the pictures. Many kids have their own channels which are promoted by parents and their identities are based around them. I do what I can (don't give them devices till they're 18 etc.) but it's hard when the whole society around you is pushing the other way. Some kind of societal regulation like what's happened in Australia will be a good thing. It will add friction to kids getting onto these platforms and that will significantly slow down adoption.
A solution I would be very OK with is the following:
* Enforce the age limits only on smartphones and tablets. This solves >95% of the problem and still leaves a way for people to be anonymous.
* Smartphone OS vendors come up with a common age verification framework that's based on zero knowledge proofs constructed over the electronic certificate in your passport - there are already working PoCs of this on Github
* Each identity can only be installed on one device at a time. Then parents cannot share identity with kids (unless the parents completely give up on all social media)
* For people who don't have a passport, offer a manual and thorough process for age verification, after which you get issued a small plastic card with identity certificate readable by NFC.
While I appreciate the sentiment of this legislation, removing social media access for everyone under 16 years to address the concerns of a few is a nanny state act. As a parent, you should be making these decisions for your children - not your government. Additionally, I would suggest it won't address the actual issue. The named/identified social media companies will comply as required, younger internet users will simply go elsewhere (the internet is a big place after all) and therefore the problem will ultimately go unaddressed.
It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
For children, it is very important for them to build their social skills based on interactions with other kids and adults, rather than from social media. They must learn about the world from the world, rather than through a commercial filtered lens of a big tech company, that is focussed on clicks, views and profits.
True, its a nanny state move. But, in my view, it is absolutely essential, as big tech seldom seems to worry about their products and their effects on children.
Sometimes, when the problem is big, the action must also be big.
> It is undeniable that big tech has warped the way even adults deal with each other. It warps social norms, social habits, human interactions, perspectives on the world and a lot more, all for the worse than the better.
Also true for television. Old Media had the monopoly on opinion-guidance back then. Part of the (encouragement of the) negative reaction to social media is it's threat to the status quo, much like Australia's previous legislation to force Facebook and Google to pay old media for linking to their news articles.
Different groups of people will have different lists of things they don't like about society and where it's headed; violent video games, advertising, music videos (that tend to be soft-porn these days), internet browsing tracking. Where does a government draw the line on what to act on and what to leave to the responsibility of parents? (how does this help other agendas? Will this look like we're "doing something"? Will this score votes? which way is the breeze blowing on this topic?)
Social media is a concentrator. I'm not convinced it's a 'cause'. There seems to be an epidemic of (social) anxiety, and maybe Facebook is the cause, but to me it feels societally deeper. World leadership is demonstrably not "the best of us" (I'm not just saying that because of Trump), to me, it feels as if there's a pervasive attitude of "I'll get mine and fuck the rest of you", which predictably trickles throughout the society whose leaders portray that attitude. Social media being one outlet of this, but I see plenty of 'us vs. them' polemics in traditional media.
Just my theory. I'm already poking holes in it mentally, but anyway. I don't have any useful answers. I guess we'll see if this ban makes a difference.
It's very hard for parent to resist the insistent demands of their children to get a smartphone when their classmates all have one, and not having one means being or feeling excluded. This is the kind of coordination problem better solved by regulation.
Australia has always been a nanny state though. Not even letting some games or movies in to the country because they think it's inappropriate for adults to consume for example. Ridiculous.
Curing addictions is very hard and some addictions are very strong. Some addictions are also guarded by business interests leveraging close to a trillion dollars to increase this addiction.
We didn't reduce smoking through personal responsibility, stop using "nanny state" tropes.
In democracies the government is an imperfect representation of the will of the people and sometimes it decides individuals can't fight some things.
And yet the things they have done have gone a long way to reducing the real harms caused by smoking.
A 5% spread of harm in a population is better than spread across 80% or 90%, etc. Taking action to reduce the surface area of harm, even if 0% is impractical, is beneficial to a functioning society.
I agree parents should have the choice for kids using social media, but this example of impracticality is a bit off: cigarettes are illegal for kids in nearly all developed countries.
The "behind the scenes" of this was a repeated campaign based on News Corp's (ie. Fox News / The Murdoch's) newsrooms (TV, radio + paper).
The legislation was primarily based on their campaign - likely as an attack against TikTok and other social media companies, who are taking their viewership and advertising revenue.
I believe in the premise of the change (to protect young children), just not the motivation or interests behind this law.
There’s an interview on The Rest is Politics Leading podcast with the politician Peter Malinauskas the premier of New South Wales who started the introduction of this law in his state first. I think it was maybe then taken up by the federal government.
Even if they were, aren't they are unlikely to gain much from this. I.e, when the average teenager can't consume social media platforms anymore, they surely won't go back to a more traditional outlet?
I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos and the new corpos are more than likely aware of this from their own research so I don't think fighting over viewership is a factor in this.
No, because kids don't care about news channels. It's not a darn kids on tiktoks thing, before tiktok or twitter or facebook they were outside, or playing video games, or reading books, or any number of things because underage kids don't give a hoot about talking heads newsstations.
The votes are strong majorities of both houses - great to see a functional democratic government act on such an important issue.
They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications. It really would be great to see the government act with expertise to solve the problem in a way compatible with a free and open society.
I’ve seen the Australian government accused of many things, but that’s certainly a first. This is the same country whose prime minister once said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.
That was back in 2017 when the govts were all up in arms over encryption. Apparently they don't mind it too much now, which means it all must be back door'able for them.
> They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.
Hard disagree. We do not need an internet driver's license. Australians are supposed to have a right to interact with organisations with privacy protections under the Privacy Act 1988, like APP2 which allows individuals to deal with organisations anonymously or pseudonymously.
Social media companies are doing a great deal of harm to society, but banning under-16s is tackling the symptom, not the problem. All people should have more rights and protections, like opting out (or better, opting in) to infinite scroll and algorithmic content suggestions as opposed to subscribed content. Algorithmic content today is akin to spam in the early 2000s which governments regulated and has had some impact on bad behaviour by local companies (of course I am not under any pretense that spam will ever really be solved). Social media users should be able to opt in or out of content categories which AI could potentially help with that categorisation, ideally in an uber-transparent way.
I'm young enough that "modern" social media was just starting up when I was a teenager. It's not clear that banning under 16s from modern digital communication would provide any benefits (which, by the way, social media is very loosely defined under the amendment).
> Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications.
The big issue is that we are importing the UK model which will see identity outsourcing to companies like Yoti and AU10TIX, the latter which was hacked in 2021 and led to some pretty serious implications for affected users.
Of course the reality is that Meta is already doing age and identity verification on users who use privacy-protecting technologies like Firefox Container Tabs, at least in Australia, and has been for a number of years. This usually leads to an account being blocked until the user provides their ID via a photo. This will become formalised so that accounts that are detected as possibly being U16 (via various techniques like profiling and data matching against external sources) will be requested ID, and Yoti will likely be used to actually perform that verification.
Another big concern will be that this is forced onto smaller operators like Australian Mastodon sites, internet forums, mailing lists and others.
They can opt out, by not participating with the site. No one is mandated to use social media. But I would also want to see things go the other direction anyway, default to non-algorithmic feeds. Those with the awareness to opt-out are not the people at highest risk.
I agree with basically everything else you said, and I think social media is generally a blight on society. But we can opt-out already, if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you. You need to accept that responsibility in the same way it's up to ourselves not to drink 40 beers a day at home.
Reddit is among the range of sites deemed 'social media' per the article. Reddit is practically a glorified forum where users directly influence which submissions rise above others via personal voting and self-curation of communities to follow. There's no voodoo there forcing non-subscribed things in one's feed unless one is logged out (ie: non-participating anyway).
Given the timeframe to come up with how it's meant to be practically implemented it's not hard to imagine on various services all users of all ages from the region would be required to submit standard ID rather than an idealized age verification the GP suggests that prevents either storing or leaking identity (in either direction). If it went that way it'd be a major blow to user privacy and data security concerns.
Looking at criticism of the legislation there were a range of organizations pointing out such issues, including UNICEF.
Only for now. After requiring an ID to sign up is normalized governments will inevitably try to eliminate any anonymity to “protect children”/catch criminals/censorship/etc.
> national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age
Nah, this is an antipattern we've seen before. A veritable Pandora's Box whispering to be opened. There is a much simpler and safer solution:
1. A disclosure law, which requires sites to somehow (e.g. HTTP headers) show their nature as a social media site, porn site, etc.
2. Parents can choose to purchase devices/software for their children with a parental-lock, set those filters and permissions to match their own locality or personal preferences, and whitelist any necessary exceptions.
This way the implementation costs of the shifting, complex, never-ending demands will fall onto the groups that actually want to use it, instead of all sites in the world being potential legal jeopardy for failing to implement all the censorship rules of every possible visitor.
It also means that most enforcement (and exceptions) move out into a physical realm which parents are at least able to see and control.
> without leaking identity
Leaking identity to the site is only half the problem, the other is leaking activity to the government. I'd ratehr not have a Government Internet Decency Office with an easy list of every single site I ever tried to view or register-for, without any kind of warrant or other due-process.
If your concern is that some parents will be able to afford to give their children their own devices, but not afford any parental-control software with them... Well, that's better-addressed with an explicit "Digital Tools For Needy Parents" program.
If you mean some parents will choose to give their kids more autonomy... Well, isn't it proper for that to be their decision? I have little sympathy for neighbors who use the logic of: "You are banned from giving your child $thing, because I'm tired of hearing my kids whine that they want it too."
>the government act with expertise to solve the problem
Do you have an idea which problem did they solve? Did banning certain psychoactive drugs solved the problem of drug abuse? Maybe banning alcohol removed it from the streets during great depression? Banning gambling? Kids will find a way to get into their social media accounts anyway, and then these democrats will tell you they need to ban every VPN service and set-up Deep Packet Inspection devices for every ISP, make their own govt CA, and trust me all of it will be done in the name of people and child safety.
Sad to see a dysfunctional govt. which bans and calls it a solution to the problem. When I will be in the office I would ban the whole concept of banning itself once and forever, and any politician who proposed a single ban in his life would be banned from service. I will of course step out for proposing this ban immediately.
For all the proponents of the ban here – I will just tell you what works – for your education. It is endorsing and subsidising healthy and active lifestyle, supporting and promoting strong family wellbeing as well as upholding public psychological and physiological health. Only doing these instead of issuing bans would really contribute to kids choosing virtues of real life over screen time, but unfortunately addressing root causes takes more effort and time than issuing a ban.
That's great for those that can implement that, many cant (don't have the time, education, willpower, etc...), maybe the majority.
Given the challenges of rebuilding a proper society, maybe this is a step in the right direction (maybe).
We don't allow kids to have other addictive substances, there's definitely an argument (and the co's agree, with 13 yo minimums?) for restricting an addictive medium.
Do you have data do back it up? From quickly looking at historical records online, I can't see any unfathomable amounts reduction, It's levelled on 20-30% of smokers among kids, and it remains a core challenge for child and adolescent health to the current day (according to 2020 WHO report[0]), plus they started to smoke vapes. So did the bans you sampled really work, or do they just smoke more discreetly and use tricks to buy cigarettes now, making the whole thing more inaccessible and desirable for an average child?
Social media is similar to a drug because it is dopaminergic, and banning it is very similar to War on Drugs scenario, just a knee-jerk reaction, not an expertise-driven policy
I highly doubt they have the expertise to implement anything remotely 'cryptographic.' Their level of competence seems stuck in the 1950s, stamping paper forms, while anything more complex is handed off to consultants in Australia. These consultants appear far more interested in lining their pockets than in understanding technology or math.
The far more likely scenario is they piss a couple of hundred billion away on the first company that shows up with a slick-sounding, half-baked platform, claiming it can magically solve all their problems with just a few "minor" tweaks.
I'm an interested party, I have a 13 year old daughter who would benefit from a little less time on social media. But that's my problem, and my belief that these idiots in our government could help me with that is zero percent. I am probably in the .1% of households where dads know more than kids.
(If photometric id comes in, I want to be in the fake moustache business).
There is myID (formerly myGovID) which would be the logical vehicle for a government provided age verification service. I've heard (but can't find a source) that it's build on OIDC/OAuth, so extending it to be an IdP exposing only specific claims (ie, age) shouldn't be a huge leap.
myID as it stands is a bit of a farce. It uses OIDC under the hood, but it only supports end users that download the myID app on their smartphone via the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Security is effectively outsourced to Google and Apple as the user's identity is "pinned" to their smartphone.
Take myGov in contrast which is web-capable and supports users to use a Yubikey or Passkey/Webauthn-capable device to authenticate.
Under the Australian Digital ID scheme myGov will likely be usurped by myID, which is, in my view, an inferior scheme which blatantly ignores basic standards.
ASIO has been able to track you for decades since they have real-time metadata feeds from Telstra, Optus, NBN etc.
They have access to your location estimate, URLs of sites you've visited, people you talk via email/phone etc. And we know that this dataset is shared to the Five Eyes.
So if you are concerned about being tracked I would strongly recommend leaving Australia.
And now they’ll be able to see the groups you go to within pages, read comments, see what we write, etc etc. It also goes from being a defence capability to used for all sorts of things and eventually leaked.
It’s not bad enough to leave, better to engage with the politics and try to get some rights before it spreads further outwards
For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.
Ha! We have compulsory voting but unlike many Anglo countries we don't require voter ID, vote registration etc. In fact you do not need to provide any ID to vote, because voting fraud is so statistically low (see https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/voting-fraud-negli...). We simply provide a name and address and fill out the ballot.
We have so many issues, but compulsory voting is not one of them, in my opinion. If you feel so strongly to not vote you can abstain by an informal vote like roughly 5% of the country does on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/Informal_Voting/) or simply pay the AU$20 (roughly US$13) fine like apparently around 5-10% of Australians do on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm).
In my view, and in the view of many Australians, people encouraging further "freedom" to not vote are attempting to suppress votes, a major issue in the United States and other countries with optional voting.
In Australia they ask to see your ID but you can say you don’t have it on you. I think they mostly just ask for ID so it’s easier to look up your name with the correct spelling.
Compulsory voting means that a large part of the electorate that doesn’t pay attention to politics is easily frightened by scare campaigns.
An example of this is that Australia is sorely in need of tax reform, but any party that pushes for it at state or federal level is damaged at the polls, often fatally.
You have to remember, Australia as a nation is young, and has an interesting history - forced migration of convicts, high levels of immigration (IIRC 25% of the population are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants), and of course the difficulty of dealing with colonial treatment of the Aboriginal population. "No culture" is patently absurd; everywhere with people has a culture.
And on mandatory voting: yes, in one way, that's a curtailment of freedom, but in another way, it's enshrining freedom.
This is the opposite of democracy - a group imposing rules "for their own good" on people it doesn't represent who have no recourse. If they had any integrity they'd be banning it for adults not children.
Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption? Do you feel the same way about those prohibitions too?
> Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption?
Up to a point, but AIUI there is credible medical evidence for those being disproportionately harmful (in physical, objectively verifiable ways) to the young. I think setting the same standard of harm and applying it to all ages is reasonable; maybe this law is based on some claim that social media harms children in a way it doesn't harm adults, but bluntly given how much the topic is biased and politicised I just don't trust today's social science establishment enough to justify this kind of law.
None of these sound like they are a very big problem compared to many alternative things people do. People talk about social media as though it's lead paint.
I particularly liked that one Facebook study that is usually taken out of context.
> young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
this made me lol so much. porn addition is not the cause, but the consequence.
do you have any idea how hard it is for males to find a willing mate nowadays?
most females have men fighting over them, while most men must always do the fighting to get even one low-quality female in their entire life.
just because thing A was (unjustly) demonized doesn't mean demonizing thing B is without merit, even more so when thing A and thing B are completely unrelated.
I agree with the OP that the ban is woefully undemocratic, and that banning it for children only is a grave misstep.
I think what they should ban instead is recommendation algorithms. If I subscribe to a source, and explicitly unsubscribe from another, it should be illegal to withhold some of the first’s postings and shove the second’s in my face. This should be a no-brainer and has nothing to do with the age of the user; but it's easier to just ban the people who, as OP correctly noted, have no representation and no recourse.
They are already mostly segmented off from their friends after school hours. They have killed off one of the final mediums for interaction and are preventing interaction with the rest of their generation's culture. They're also narrowing their world view to be more controlled by the state.
Hasn't that been the case for thousands of years? It's not like they can't see each other after school hours... I know i used to. And i still see my friends after my workday. I have much deeper connections with the 20 people i see in real life than the 1000 people on my linkedin profile.
Do people thrive more in their mental health when they are supposedly 24/7 accessible? Is it necessary? Is it wanted?
No, we need to turn it WAY up. We circumcise AKA male genital mutilation to hundreds of millions of male children all across the world, including much of the USA and Australian populations.
That’s just one tiny example, and no one is calling for circumcison bans simultaneously.
Letting the mutilated children have some social media is the least the state can do for them. Australia is a tyrannical hellscape.
You missed the point. Tyranny of the majority is one thing if the minority can at least vote and participate in the political process. Shutting the minority out entirely is quite different.
We do have recourse. What you'll see is more independent candidates get voted in to overturn the law. Once the government of the day starts badly implementing it the conservatives who voted with the center left party will split off and start attacking for it's repeal.
It's a nothing burger law designed to look tough and do nothing.
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Is it? Last time I checked I thought that was only when parents or legal guardians do it to a small number of children in their care, not when politicians do it to all children in an entire country.
But even if I accept your premise, your comment makes me wonder if you've never heard of people who are bad at parenting, or who are downright abusive to the children in their care.
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Children issue is just the excuse for government to get people obey. Sadly but "kids protecting" propaganda is one of two the most effective ones, works great and there are lots of alternatively gifted persons that do not get the real attitude.
Hey, didn't you get the memo that teenagers know everything, have the simple & straightforward solutions to all of life's problems, and are never wrong?? ;)
You're far more optimistic than I about our government being able to implement a secure, reasonable solution for age verification.
COVIDSafe was the last technical undertaking and it was expensive and a completely inept implementation. The MyGov website is another failed attempt at keeping personal data secure.
Further, it seems likely that social media companies are likely to come out of this with even more information about us.
Government and tech do not mix well (at least in Australia).
People are far more worried about the government knowing that you're using a social media site, than they are about the social media site knowing who you are.
I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification. I'm assuming it'll be an openid type flow where the social media sites will have to register client IDs with the govt myID, in which case the govt will directly be able to tie a person to what social media they use. It won't tell them what account it links to on the social media side, but depending on what data is returned, they can easily just ask the social media company for this info later on.
> I don't see a way this could be implemented where the govt doesn't know what site is requesting the verification
Blind signatures. Briefly, a blind signature is a way for a party to sign a document without seeing the contents of the document. The cryptographic forms of this, at a high level, work like this:
1. You do a keyed reversible transformation on document D that produces a transformed document D'. This is called "blinding" the document.
2. They sign D' with signature S'.
3. You apply the reverse transformation to S', which gives you a signature S from them for D. This is "unblinding".
Use a random key each time you need to get something blind signed and throw away the key afterwards.
Even if they later see D and S they can't match them up with any D' and S' because they don't know the key.
For age verification D would be some kind of token you obtain from the social media company during age verification. You'd then have the government blind sign that with a signature that is only used when the government has verified you are at least 16. You'd unblind the signature and give that back to the social media company.
There are also protocols to do this using zero knowledge proofs.
I suspect that it is technically possible to make an anonymous identification service because the result to the social media site just had to be yes or no.
In the Netherlands you have a government identification service that identifies people to other government sites. And a bank service that uses the banks identification service also roll to identify to other sites.
Technically it would be possible to delete any trace afterwards.
However. I have never ever in my life seen any government choose not to take advantage of an opportunity to exert more control over their citizens if the possibility exists.
Plus rather than force it on everyone it should be a choice of the parents. Clearly not doing this is better but in the absence of that parents deciding is better for the others.
It's going to be interesting to see how one can use cryptography to do this privately. I wonder if the cost and complexity of such a thing would result in big companies simply requiring some kind of "take a picture of your ID" style verification.
Estonia's ID card https://www.id.ee/en/ could certainly be a model; still not sure how to do age verification. My best guess would be some sort of cryptographic signing that refuses to sign if you are below a certain age.
The whole purpose of this is only to give parents a reason to say no. Often, a single kid in a class with an unrestricted iPhone is enough to poison the well. Now it's much, much simpler. Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
>Kids understand when you say it's against the law.
Jesus, were you born 40? I don't know a single person who didn't willingly pirate media, games and break other laws (usual suspects like trespassing, underage + public drinking...) as kids and teens. They will not care about the law if they want to do something it limits.
Or, you know, don't keep going into this path of authoritarianism.
Your comment is absolutely disingenuous pretending that this Draconian move can be implemented with open society or transparency. This is the same nation that went absolutely bonkers with their COVID policies and their inhumane treatment of anyone who desired freedom or bodily autonomy.
you must be joking, that's exactly how communist government works.
Given strict laws but "don’t prescribe any particular ... methods" so one day law enforcements can extort a large sum of fine from companies as needed.
The only difference is Commie leaders invent bullshit "laws" by themselves and no voting.
I've always wondered, when do policies become nanny state policies? If they have data showing that under-age use of social media leads to higher rates of suicide, why would that be a 'nanny state' policy? Does there have to be a gun or drug involved, rather than a phone?
I personally welcome this change. Anecdotally, I experienced unimpeded and unsupervised internet access throughout my younger teenage years, and was exposed to some truly horrendous material courtesy of the bigger social platforms. My parents knew I used social media. They believed it was fine because it was "just MySpace and Facebook".
Meanwhile, I witnessed large amounts of open bullying between my peers, recordings of physical assaults, underage revenge pornography, and a massive decline of people physically spending time together outside of online contexts, culminating in widespread loneliness and isolation.
In recent times I have seen the dramatic failure of social media companies to moderate their content, actively promoting extremist content, and even openly protecting the originators of illicit material.
Rates of youth suicide skyrocketed shortly after the rise of smartphones, social media and always-available internet access as evident by published statistics. While none of these can be individually attributed as the cause of this rise, all are undoubtedly a contributing factor, as suggested by countless studies globally.
I started using the internet unsupervised heavily in my tweens in the early 2000's and came across some horrendous stuff pretty early. Despite that, for me I think it's been a net positive and I would like my children to grow up in a similar environment.
The lasting qualities I think it's given me are:
- An open mindedness and the ability to examine issues from multiple angles
- A thick skin against shocking material/online forms of bullying
- A stronger understanding of how technology interacts with society/power structures
I think the country needs to be building digitally strong youth, not trying to put the genie back into the bottle.
When the laws come in, many Australians will get VPNs rather than provide ID to random websites.
If social media sites are compelled block VPNs, is that technically achievable/viable? Cloud providers and VPN services have predictable IP ranges, so are easily blocked (/majorly inconvenienced) by sites motivated to do so. But social media companies might not want to block VPNs since a lot of legitimate traffic comes through them (e.g. people anywhere in the world who simply wish to have that extra layer of privacy from their ISP and wifi owner).
Are there VPN strategies that will allow an Australian to reliably access social media as though their traffic is coming from another country?
I also guess Australians who try this might have to access social media sites via a browser on their phone (as opposed to native app).
This is a bad idea. We should be forcing demonetization of the platforms content creators instead of hamstringing children.
No I'm not joking. Content creators making money should be outside where I post about my cat. I'm fucking sick of engagement bait.
The money driven content creators are going to thrive on platforms that support them. If you don't want to have their content on the same feed as your cat pics, you're going to have to find some alt networks
They are not allowed to buy wine themselves. Most parents wouldn't allow them to drink when alone. Drinking small amounts of wine at the family dinner table makes the educational difference. Social media is consumed without any family interaction and can consume all free-time and more.
This is a bad idea, and it’ll be very hard to implement. Better to ban old people from watching Sky News and using Facebook, that’s the real danger to our democracy
I had to correct my auntie that no, Morocco did not manipulate the weather to cause the floods in Spain. She didn't really believe me. The Facebook propaganda is intense
Perhaps we should also make it illegal to report on the war in the Middle East in case young people find it traumatising to see that that the western democracies are supporting dropping 2000 pound bombs on children in other countries. Can you image the damage being caused to young minds seeing that death and destruction visually through their own eyes ?
And no, privacy is not already lost. It is a lie often said. Sure you share a lot of data about you, but you are often not required, especially by law to share it. Big tech also do not know everything about you, they often lie to shareholders, or advertisers about amount of users, clicks.
Protect the children, and remove the ability to freely express your opinion. I vividly remember people being arrested because of social media activity during covid.
I'm not Australian and don't know the specifics if this legislation, so I cannot speak with any authority on the matter, but I think you're mistakenly conflating banning <16yo with identifying everyone.
Porn is also banned for <18yo and you generally don't need to id yourself to get access, you only need to claim you're 18 via button, checkmark or similar
This doesn't actually remove all kids from the platform, but at least they're no longer being served legally. This will make it less ubiquitous for them.
Relevant part of the article:
Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
The point of this isn't to keep kids off social media. It's an excuse to require ID for adults so they can arrest us for criticizing them.
They also recently tried to pass a "Misinformation" bill which would have given them the power to decree what we can and can't say on social media, and they'll try to sneak that back in, too.
This country is a nanny state and it's getting scary.
Adults can still be on SM and can still criticize the govt.
Also, it must be the state of affairs that an Adult can have an ID on SM and criticize the govt. and the laws and courts should protect that individuals right to criticize.
Avoiding IDs on the internet, just so that the govt can't catch hold of the critic is a lot of step backwards.
You're literally spreading misinformation in your comment.
a) The government was trying to outlaw deepfakes and fake accounts. But also require more transparency for users to contest moderation decisions. It did not try to limit what you can say.
b) There is no law that makes it illegal to criticise the government.
Well there is actually. If the government label the criticism fake news.
In the Netherlands people have been fined hundred of thousands of euros for spreading fake news about the government. However if it’s not fake news they can do the same. You won’t be able to do anything about it because it order to show your evidence you need to be able to publish and the press on there Netherlands will not help you with that.
There are many places in the world where there is no law for "contempt of cop" but police find a way to extra-judicially punish anyway. The lack of a law allowing something doesn't stop abuse of power! And Australia is notorious for its raids of journalist's homes and has a court system very disinclined to punish the police for illegal activity.
Yep. The Netherlands is one of those places. They have made extra judicial punishment a way of working. They call it an “intervention”. And they will make use of all the government organisations to do it. those organisations just have to follow orders because the interventions are co-ordinated by an intelligence agency called the RIEC.
No evidence is required, there are no bounds as to what they can do and there are no repercussions.
We don't need watertight compliance, verification or enforcement - just raise the level of difficulty for kids to get on and create a culture among kids, parents and schools that social media is not allowed. This will be enough breathing room for parents to say no and kids not to feel like they're the only ones missing out.
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