Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16

Given the lack of interest in the industry “self” regulating, and&#x2F;or taking responsibility of, the content; what other option is there. It seems there’s little interest globally.<p>With my direct and indirect experiences of social media; I strongly support this.<p>That said; how does a young individual get updates to public transport outages that are only available via twitter&#x2F;x, or read the menu of the local cafe that is only posted on Facebook?<p>I do worry about the implementation, especially if government owned. The government has, in the past, said one thing and executed another. (DNS metadata collection for ISP’s, for example) Whilst I have nothing to hide, and am happy to be entirely transparent with them; I can appreciate, respect, and understand the hesitation.<p>And, if government owned; how long until it’s “privatised”.<p>Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

As usual, the problem with this is that it assumes a way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet, which in turns mean a way to perfectly identify, in real time, somebody carrying permanently a tracking device with GPS, microphone and camera.<p>It&#x27;s crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80&#x27;s, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now.<p>Things like &quot;Find my&quot; and &quot;air tags&quot; are already beloved my millions, people use it to track loved ones and they swear by it. Even very intelligent, educated people.<p>There is such a cognitive dissonance between people swearing the last election meant a likely dictatorship and the same people setting up a tech rope around their necks in case a dictatorship does happen.<p>My now-dead Jewish grandfather met my grandmother during the French occupation because she was making fake papers. He would be horrified if he knew what we are doing right now with our data.<p>My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.<p>What the hell is going on?

Funny how so many middle-aged tech workers, who were almost certainly using some primitive social media themselves as teenagers, are now in support of a full ban.<p>I don&#x27;t like the outcomes we see with modern social media, but this feels like we&#x27;re punishing the victim instead of the perpetrator.

I wonder how can you implement such a law without forcing people to identify online ? Will they enforce a digital ID that you need to use to access the web or social media ?

I fully support this. In fact, make it 18. I see it like a new type of drug. Future generations will be horrified that we permitted children to connect their brains to attention-optimization algorithms running on supercomputers.<p>Children can not consent. They can&#x27;t sign contracts. They don&#x27;t understand the ramifications of what algorithmically delivered content does to you.

This is awesome. I have been telling that social media is like smoking. When cigarettes came, even doctors were advertising the benefits of cigarettes. Now we know the harmful effects. Same is the case with social media. We just dont know they harmful effects completely yet.<p>Ban this. I am addicted and can&#x27;t stop. Or put a warning on social media apps like they do on cigarette packets. Using this app maybe harmful for your mental health.

Apart from the logistical issues with tracking and verifying everyone&#x27;s identity, I think cutting teenagers off from an (admittedly very manipulated and dysfunctional) source of community is not a straightforwardly good idea. To give some examples, isolated LGBT teenagers probably benefit from being able to find and talk to people like them, and people into all kinds of niche hobbies and interests can be inspired to learn and create by other people into the same thing (cosplayers, digital artists, electronic musicians, etc). Also social media is used for organizing a ton of IRL events as well. (It would be nice if online community was not all centered on Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;etc, but unfortunately that&#x27;s the current situation.)

Good, but not enough if you ask me. Mainstream social media make money out of angering people and the addiction it creates, and it affects everyone, not just kids: had a few grown ups among friends and other people, even over 60 and older, completely ruined by that crap. I don&#x27;t see any reason why corporations that don&#x27;t obey any moral obligation should be motivated to change their business model anytime soon, unless forced from above.

In the &#x27;90s, a lot of dial-up BBS were owned by &lt;16yo teens. Later the same happened with internet forum. Today, you&#x27;d think 16yo is old enough to have your own social media. Maybe a Mastodon or Lemmy instance, or something unfederated like an old phpBB forum or something. Yet the australian gov think these same people aren&#x27;t old enough to access a social media! They should incite their teens to have one in their bedroom, fcs.

How about over 60? That&#x27;s more likely to have a positive effect on society

While I dislike social media, this ban is as stupid as Australia&#x27;s laws enforcing bicycle helmets. Will this mean I will have to register as my real name on Hacker News? Not a chance

And this is why we try our best to have minority governments.<p>The bills being put forward lately are really concerning and I have no idea how to get a party in that would kill the eSafety Commissioner and put in strong freedom of speech laws.<p>I&#x27;m pretty content seeing the web destroy their website blocking measures. Thank you DoH and ECH!

I would remind everyone that the ban of porn below 18 is not enforced, but it is enough to ensure it is not consumed openly or at school. That is how this will play out too.

A lot of you who are supporting this are unaware that to enforce this, EVERYONE will have to have an online government ID and the government will be tracking EVERYONE&#x27;s internet activity.

prohibition never worked and won&#x27;t ever - the only way to make it work is by implementing a total surveillance state with draconian punishment for noncompliant citizens. but given that i&#x27;m more or less the only one realizing that i just make peace with what is coming.

Start with 16. Increment it every year.

I support the ban.<p>In terms of enforcement, social media platforms already use algorithms and gather huge amounts of data on their users, enough to make a good estimate of age even if a user has signed up with a fake age.<p>So, when the algorithm detects that a user is likely to be underage, that&#x27;s when they&#x27;d be required to show ID.

I put in a submission to the committee for this issue[1]. The big issues from my point of view are widespread ID validation and the security and privacy consequences of that, definition of social media, lack of controls provided by social media websites, and further risks to centralisation (like ID providers requiring an app that can only run on an iOS or Google Play device).<p>Many of the ID verification services that have spun up over recent years like AU10TIX are private companies that don&#x27;t have their users&#x27; interests at heart. It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if they become more involved with the so-called data economy (data broker ecosystem)—if they aren&#x27;t already.<p>Meta itself causes harm to users of all ages with their algorithms (like suggested content on the feed) which can&#x27;t really be turned off, and fueled the misinformation crisis which really took off a few years ago. The social media companies have done a good job of convincing the Australian government to overlook these harms.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roffey.au&#x2F;static&#x2F;submission-social-media-2024.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roffey.au&#x2F;static&#x2F;submission-social-media-2024.pdf</a>

So when China regulates the internet, it&#x27;s a dictatorship; when a western-affiliated democracy does it, it&#x27;s... good?

It sounds righteous for sure, but the implementation sounds terrible.<p>Let&#x27;s suppose kids do get forced off the mainstream social networks with Australia legal entities (Meta, Goog, Bytedance, X?). What stops them from joining fringe social networks operated outside of Australia with even less oversight? Surely nothing bad could happen between kids on those networks.<p>Yes, the Australian government could DNS block them like they do torrent sites. But it really wouldn&#x27;t be beyond teenagers to inform their friends about how to change DNS servers...

this is fake legislative action, there is no way to legaly enforce this, short of a complete and total policing of the internet and peoples phones,and the quiet part is that by seperating the &quot;law&quot; into all of its beurocratic bits,such as needing to &quot;ratify&quot; it later....., and then actualy create and fund some sort of enforcement body at some further and impossible to predict time which all then points to a desperate and floundering government, resorting to the lamest kinds of tacticts to buy a bit more time at the trough oink oink

Imo would be nicer if algorithmic feed &amp; targeted ads would be banned for them. So basically a social network with chronological feed and no targeted ads should be ok-ish. This would allow them to use the tech without the addiction mechanisms and influencing

There are parental controls on most phones. Educating parents on how to use them is a better option than a blanket ban that&#x27;ll either: a) not work or b) require you to use some digital &#x2F; national ID to register.

It&#x27;s crazy that human beings with the new fandangled ability to communicate in ever easier ways have created this problem. This is your enemy. Social media, government rules are not the enemy. Nor the saviour you think it might be.

I&#x27;m not sure to see the value of going all the way to 16. 14yo would be a massive win already.<p>The cost&#x2F;benefit of social media between 14 and 16 is much more favorable to social media than &lt;14.

The way to give this teeth is for any proposed law to charge the parent or guardian of social networking children, as well as the social networking site. Once it hits the parents&#x27; pockets they&#x27;ll start to get involved in their kids lives and see what they&#x27;re looking at on the web.

I wish they would make some effort to restrict what inputs the social media algorithms can use to target people, instead of this ham-fisted idiocy.

Regulating this is always going to be impossible, and when it’s not, you’re in a surveillance state and you have bigger problems than the age you’re allowed to be on social media

&quot;Australia Proposes Ban&quot; is way too common a headline.

I agree with others whom see the identification problem. But I also think that it is a right step on the way to help improve the current situation

What even counts as social media? Is Hackernews social media? Is my future platform where people can talk to each other social media? It&#x27;s all pure desperation, they could instead force social media companies to only promote useful educational, pro-science, pro-fitness, documentaries, family style content and then social media would be helpful. Forming communities around learning, robotics, science? What could possibly be better for children who look for purpose in life? It would be fantastic. But of course half the grifters on social media are also already hiding in those tags and serving the most shallow, useless, fake content about e.g ancient pyramid aliens or discussions about how veganism will help your body. As you can tell by my last little insertion here, half the problem is that even all the adults can&#x27;t come to a shared understanding of what is &quot;good&quot; or true.

I&#x27;m late to this thread, but I propose that for greater social good, people OVER 16 should be banned.

Why about Sky News?

Can&#x27;t we just ban exploitative &amp; manipulative social media instead? This is another case of the baby and the bathwater.

This is the wrong approach, to achieve the desired effect they should make social media compulsory for anyone over ~40.

Ok, they will join places like 4chan instead.

Social media companies would have a strong motivation to ensure the plan fails. They would want it to fail to stop spreading to other countries. They could help it fail by several methods, in my opinion. Social media companies would have NO motivation to ensure its success. Maybe there needs to be a significant penalty to social media companies if the proposal fails?

This might force children to be social in the real world. And disabled children will remain unsocial.

Doesn&#x27;t everyone lie about their age anyway, to get around the stupid restrictions?

I proposed ban on all social media politicians and government officials.

I wouldn&#x27;t have said this a few years ago, but I think this is a good idea.

Also note that the government is attacking social media on a second front.<p>Last night they took advantage of the population being distracted by the US election by having an extended parliamentary session to push forward with a second reading of the controversial misinformation bill.<p>The government and state media apparatus are of course both immune from any penalty under the bill.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2024-09-11&#x2F;acma-crackdown-social-media-disinformation-bill&#x2F;104339144" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2024-09-11&#x2F;acma-crackdown-social...</a>

I would raise the limit to 20 at least

An insane idea, encroaching on the liberty we enjoy on the web. These types of decisions should be up to parents, and, will eventually play out as they seem fit.

australia proposes big button that says &quot;are you really old enough to read posts? please do not lie&quot;

All of these &lt;16s will be voting in a few years, and Australia has compulsory voting. I hope they remember this on their first visit to the ballot box.

They’re protecting the children.

I, for one, am all in favour of our new &quot;summary execution of children if they access social media&quot; law.<p>Bring on the brown shirts! We must protect family values at all cost!

Yeah I’m not against it. Please EU follow suit.<p>What really needs to happen is tough regulators digging through the algorithms. Why are boys on YouTube getting served so much manosphere crap? Etc.<p>We have enough studies about what these algorithms are trying to do to people to keep them engaged. It’s not healthy for society.

Time for some &quot;right wing extremists&quot; to win a landslide victory and send that administration packing.<p>Hopefully, this is an issue that will make Australians finally wake up fron their hypnosis...

I fully support this.<p>Fuck google, meta, tiktok, all of them, they are ruining the world.<p>And fuck amazon too.

Another development that makes me happy for the US 1st Amendment.

Ahh yes, government knows what is best for you.

lol, probably because they have a propaganda leak.

Such a shame of a news, sad to see the level of Australian govt when they are trying to ban for &quot;safety&quot; in the year 2024. Good thing one smart Digital Industry Group representative already told them they are not thinking straight. Of course giving young people something better and more exciting thing to do is not in their plans.<p>In their dreams is to BAN, take ID VERIFICATIONS and FINE private companies for the rest of their days, any Australian should be ashamed of such dull and unsophisticated policies, and BRAVO to Sunita Bose.

Completely unenforceable

It&#x27;s so sad seeing how many people think its on the government to raise kids.

The main reason for this ban, like the attempted TikTok ban in the US, is the overwhelmingly anti-zionist views of the younger generation due to repeated social media exposure to the genocide in Gaza. Fundamentally social media facilitates the faster and broader spread of information than ever before in human history, which is a threat to the gatekeepers who for decades have tightly controlled what information the people of Australia have access to.