Australia is the first nation to ban social media for under-16s.

So where exactly are kids supposed to go? People will go on about "they should just go outside" but kids have literally had the cops called on them for the crime of walking around their own neighborhood "unsupervised". I've seen calls to ban kids from all sorts of places - planes, theme parks, restaurants, libraries. I've seen these "mosquito" things put up to drive kids away from public places. Kids are spending all their time on social media because they have nowhere else to go.

The problem is not teens accessing social media, they’re just bored or don’t know any better

The problem is what adults post on those social media.

If anything teens should have social media of their own, where no elder boomers are allowed

Australia is the first nation to fail to ban social media for under 16s.

Unenforcible Law.

Gotta require ID verifications and ban all VPNs in order to actually be enforcible.

Surely, the website owners would never sell your information, right? Right?

Now kids will be forced to hide being a victim of cyber-bullying from their parents. Great work!

If only this applied to the parents as well... No more using your children online to make a buck as an influencer.

They need them to get indoctrinated in the public education system first.

All of a sudden their test scores start going through the roof.

Should be left up to the parents.

It's still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they're actually going to enforce this.

Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.

If they're expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples' government ID's, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.

It's just apparently all anyone can come up with when they've got government-brain.

Now do 16+

Oh those poor kids.

I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.

Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.

An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.

What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.

Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn't disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn't really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that's a very real issue.

I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.

Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn't going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It's just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.

Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.

What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?

this isn't for the safety of kids; it's to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.

Good luck with that.

Absolute stupidity and a waste of taxpayers' money spending so much time on this nonsense.

These incompetent morons are pretty much guaranteeing that they will lose the next election. In the middle of a housing and inflation crisis this is what these fuckheads decided was important.

I loathe the opposition, but it's hard to defend the sheer incompetence the Labor Party has displayed their entire term.

I am so, so glad to see that at least one country in the world is willing to tackle this problem.

Also a little depressed that every comment thread about this law boils down to: "It's hard. Might as well not do it at all," especially from people who (rightly) think we need to ban guns every time a school gets shot up here in the US, which would be monumentally difficult socially but 100% needs to happen.

The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.

Fair dinkem mate. How are they gonna regulate this?

Are they still allowed on Lemmy?

Yeah, I hear they're not allowed to watch porn until 18 either and that works flawlessly.

Beyond questions of implementation this to me sounds like maybe we're replacing Instagram with Fortnite, but it sure will be interesting to see how it plays out. I guess trying something is better than trying nothing.