Discussion What do you think about Australia's ban of social media for children under 16?

[Forever Sleep]

I'm old so- social media wasn't really much of a thing when I was a child. I didn't really use the internet much till my late teens/ twenties. I'm actually glad I didn't grow up with it. I imagine the bullying would have extended on to it. I also had little else to do but art so- my focus was on my dream career from very early on. I suppose video games were a distraction though.

How do you suppose it will affect youngsters these days though? I imagine it will be harder for those who have started to use it who will now find their accounts closed.

What do you think though? Will the positives outweigh the negatives? I guess they will be able to still visit things like YouTube. Just not interact.

 

[martyrdom]

Great idea, wish all countries did it

 

[Forever Sleep]

Great idea, wish all countries did it

I think it will end up being a social experiment of sorts. How will this new generation turn out, compared to the current ones? Will they be more or less advanced than their peers? I imagine it will depend on what they want to work in really. I wonder how it will impact mental health.

 

[U. A.]

Okay idea (they should just torch the companies wholesale), sounds like shit implementation.

As usual, the question to be asked is: "how will this actually play out?"; and as our beloved BBC writes, it's the tech corps who will be on the hook, and:

these companies must take "reasonable steps" to keep kids off their platforms, and use age assurance technologies - without specifying which ones.

Several possibilities have been raised, including the use of government IDs, face or voice recognition and age inference. The latter of these uses online information other than a date of birth - such as online behaviour or interactions - to estimate a person's age.

so yeah, data collection and/or surveillance. Of children. Great.
BUT DON'T WORRY, CAUSE

the government says the legislation incorporates "strong protections" for personal information. These protections stipulate that such information may not be used for anything other than age verification and must be destroyed once that has been done, with "serious penalties" for breaches.

It also says platforms must offer an alternative to the use of governments IDs for age assurance.

as if these asshole techbro institutions can be trusted to follow rules (see: Cambridge Analytica).

What's more is the "penalty" amounts to a slap on the wrist for most of them; while a company will "face fines of up to $49.5m (US$32m, £25m) for serious or repeated breaches",

former Facebook executive Stephen Scheeler told AAP: "It takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make $50 million in revenue".

And then of course is the reality from the other side:

Teens interviewed by the BBC said they were opening new accounts with fake ages ahead of the ban ... Commentators are also predicting a surge in the use of VPNs - which hide the country a person is accessing the internet from - as happened in the UK after the implementation of age control rules.

This is probably just a look-good move from government, same as the Ofcom nonsense. As stated earlier, social media corporations should be thoroughly annihilated. They spent years refining their products to be addictive as fuck, and specifically targeted teenagers no less. I don't think people understand just how massive and evil they are.