Australia passes social media minimum age law, cracking down on app use by kids under 16
Australia passes social media minimum age law, cracking down on app use by kids under 16
Australia passed a new law that will ban users under the age of 16 from most social media platforms.
This will do absolutely nothing because children are way the hell more resourceful than people give them credit for. I knew how to use VPNs and taught my friend how to do so when I was like 13 to bypass school firewall restrictions. This won't do shit.
Ah, so you're the kind of guy that used to get cigarettes for the rest of the kids. Now you're called an influenceter
No to cigarettes. However, we lived at a boarding school. And so they did not like us having things like sodas and stuff like that. So I provided a lot of those.
Very impressed with this move on part of the Aussies. It's not that they know something the rest of the world doesn't, it's just that they have the guts to do something about it
This is most likely going to end up being used to push further law that's used for surveillance of the population. Our government passes junk like this all the time in the name of "protecting kids" and then just abuses everyone else with it. It's poorly thought out at best.
And worse, that data will get commingled with corporate data on individuals and likely be used for the dumbest possible "other purposes" possible.
Besides the privacy concerns, AFAIK I know there's no training/gradual-introduction for soon-to-be 16 year olds. That means, assuming some of them follow the rules, they'll go from nothing to full-force Social Media. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Any time somone does something "for the children", you have to examine it with a microscope. Age gates aren't the best solution here. And force users to truly identify themselves online with actual IDs. It's a first step toward a privacy and censorship nightmare.
The right way to protect kids here is to hold the companies accountable for their recommendation algorithms. That's largely what makes these services so toxic for people. Kids included.
Let's start with banning you from social media, eh?
There's a big difference between doing something and doing the right thing. Why didn't they put more pressure on the parents to teach their kids how to use the Internet? That seems to be the obvious starting point.
This response reminds me of that of the opponents to stricter gun laws in the US. "Just enforce the laws that are on the books!" is what they say but that obviously isn't working as we have more and more gun violence to the point that it's the number one cause of death for those under 18.
What makes you think parents know anything better about social media than their kids? It's obviously rotting people's brains all over the planet and some sort of intervention is needed. We've made it this long as a species without social media, and yet after a little more than a decade with it, we're at each other's throats ready to end the whole experiment.
Moronic.
Wait till they find out that phones have web browsers.