Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

This will end in a generation best equipped to avoid government mandated network restrictions.

And one that will have good reason to disrespect government and the law.

Restrictive tech policies just lead to populations that are tech savier.

Good, we kinda need it.

This might be what makes the fediverse finally become mainstream.

Come join the fediverse. Now illegal in Australia!
It gets my attention but I don't really see the mainstream appeal.

Gambling is an age-restricted activity because it exploits the brain’s reward mechanisms to drive profits, and can lead to addiction. Big tech social media platforms have a lot in common with slot machines, designed deliberately to drive profits, so this law makes sense. Now make free to play games with loot boxes an age-restricted activity.

"10 of the largest platforms"

So they'll move to the 11th...

Maybe if they focused on the root of the problems with Social Media instead of banning it from children, they could make the world a better place for everyone.

Endless scrolling and their recommendation algorithms keep people on their platforms for far longer than otherwise intended. They could start with forcing these companies to have chronological posts with a fixed number of posts per page to give users a natural break point for when to stop.

I always know I'm dealing with a scumbag normie website when there's infinite scrolling with no option for pagination.
It's getting pretty easy to avoid the herd.
This is nothing to do with children.
The Australian media demanded these laws so they could control the political climate in Australia. By mandating identity they can go after anyone who opposes them.
Not just that, but also holding social media owners accountable for hosting fascist content, and arresting them, no matter how rich they are.
- I cannot get behind the hosting part, it is too abusable. If that was changed for promoting, I could support that.
They can still access social media. They just can't have accounts.
- Which does mean they can't access a lot of adult content. So there's that.
So, the ban is focused on Social Media apps which refuse to comply with demands to fix cyberbullying. If an app complies it will no longer be banned.
- This added context is extremely helpful.

Will not work. None of these kinds of bans has ever worked. Is it not a common trope that teenagers can and do drink to excess despite not being legally allowed to purchase alcohol? Are we under some misguided belief that age verification procedures in this manner can or ever have worked effectively to reduce harm on minors?
Will have large unintended consequences far beyond social media access for teenagers.
Will actually make the internet less safe for teenagers, as they will now be lying about their age and circumventing the systems in place, which renders all existing protections for them ineffective.
Is pointlessly age targeted legislation as social media is also bad for adults as well. Its bad because of business practices and lack of ethical considerations in gigantic monolithic international social media corporations. If your end goal is making the internet safer for teenagers, your end result will actually end up being making the internet safer for everyone.

I fully believe it will work. The point is not to make it impossible to visit, but very annoying to. I cannot forsee the average kid jumping through hoops to maintain access, especially when most of their and their friends accounts were deleted. Eventually, they'll realise there's nothing left to go back to. Social media lives and dies by it's number of users after all.
- And now on to recreational drug and alcohol use…
- You can still view these sites.
- You could present literally the same arguments for why teenagers would never drink alcohol. Its against the law for them to purchase right, so its an inconvenience to access, so clearly they would all abandon it as all their friends become unable to access it as well. You could make the same argument for most kinds of bans. There are actually very few things for which imposing barriers to access has ever eliminated its use. Porn is an obvious example as well. Porn bans are essentially meaningless to consumers. They are so trivial to bypass as to be functionally non-existent. The only thing that imposed bans have done is make it difficult for companies to profit off of it. I am essentially ambivalent about that, but it's a literal direct parallel in this case.
  What is likely is that tools for circumventing in simpler faster ways will develop. Installing a VPN is already a single click operation. You dont have to do anything else. Teenagers are not going to abandon social media. Maybe you havent encountered many in the past 2 decades, but social media use is and has been near universal among them since social media came to exist. Like you're nuts if you think they're actually going to stop using it haha I dont know what else to say. But yeah maybe youre right. Making stuff against the law totally eliminates it because everyone is so lazy and incompetent they won't expend any effort to overcome trivial barriers to access things they have built their entire lives around lol
Will not work. None of these kinds of bans has ever worked. Did everyone just forget that they got blackout drunk as minors who could not legally purchase alcohol? Are we under some misguided belief that age verification procedures in this manner can or ever have worked effectively to reduce harm on minors?
Minors may not be 100% alcohol free but that does not mean they consume the same amount with or without age restrictions.
Will actually make the internet less safe for teenagers, as they will now be lying about their age and circumventing the systems in place, which renders all existing protections for them ineffective.
maybe, let's see how it works.
Is pointlessly age targeted legislation as social media is also bad for adults as well. Its bad because of business practices and lack of ethical considerations in gigantic monolithic international social media corporations.
that's true for other age-gated things like alcohol and tobacco. there is legislation to protect adults as well as banning use for children.
Is this law parfect? Probably not, but I think it's a reasonable starting point and at least they are trying something.
- It would absolutely be more effective to use legislation to address the root causes of excessive alcohol consumption than to make blanket bans. I'm not saying that the bans won't do anything, but they are absolutely not effective on a broad scale. There are so many circumventions that are trivially easy to access that it renders the ban more of a general barrier for entry than an actual prevention of access. Its moreso "how hard are you willing to work to get it" than "you cannot access this". So harmful alcohol consumption becomes a matter of effort. Addiction is frequently characterized by massive efforts to access substances. Its one of the hallmarks. I'm not arguing for teenage alcohol consumption, just pointing out that it's only ever been a trivial block and we are very socially aware that it is circumventable and frequently is circumvented by minors.
  And alcohol is a physical object that must be acquired. Social media access is not.
  You can circumvent this ban from any device at any time. It's like porn bans. It's now just a matter of effort. Install VPN, click click done. Youre now able to browse freely as a minor. And again, now youre lying about your age. So all age protections are gone, and you are free to engage with the same content as before but with less actual protections in place. Youve taken an undesirable situation and rendered it into a subversive one, one that requires circumvention by design, and will therefore make the relationship between the user and the platform a dishonest one. This has a lot of consequences. It makes it a lot harder to actually check the age of people using their platforms, cause everyone underage will lie. You won't be able to prevent them from engaging with grown adults in profoundly harmful ways, for example.
  Alcohol and tobacco are (mostly) harmful in all circumstances, yes. Social media is not harmful in all circumstances. Human socialization can be a good thing, but it is impossible for those substances to be good things (except possibly in extremely niche circumstances). If social media platforms were designed to be good for people, then they wouldnt cause the same harm. If they had legal requirements to be moderated, to not spread misinformation, to not promote unhealthy and damaging habits, to stop the spread of hatred and bullying, then they would be significantly less harmful for teenagers and also everyone of all ages. These things would actually make social media better for teenagers. Completely useless age verification actually makes social media WORSE for teenagers. Teenagers are never not going to use social media. Sorry thats just the truth. Entire fields of technology and software design have been developed by teenagers seeking to circumvent age bans throughout history. These bans dont even require any kind of new innovation. They just need to setup a basic VPN. Trivial.

The best way to implement that ban is to have a variable on the device (smartphone) that holds the approximate birthdate of the user (sth like 2002-01-01) and then the device gives forward the information about whether the user is 16+, 18+ forward to any app of maybe even website that requests that info.

The parent who buys the device gets a code to configure the device to set the birthdate, and without that code, it's not changeable for the user. The platforms then only have to look at that variable to figure out whether the user is old enough.

This way, you shift responsibility to the user, but in a way that is technically possible. Because today, it's almost impossible for a not ultra-tech-affine parent to actually implement age controls on their children's devices.

How about parents just parent their children? I know not everyone can do this but the state should not be thought of as your nanny
How about just use localised parental controls without this complex police state garbage. In addition, making it 16+ is extremely discriminatory and ageist. A blanket ban which treats teens like children is not acceptable and no individual should feel oppressed under their own law.

A surefire way to get kids to do something is to tell them they can’t.

Anecdotal evidence but I saw one parent say their 9 year old dgif and immediately asked them to play outside with them; which they rarely did prior.
Kids want attention, thats why social media is so dangerous for them; they're sitting ducks for predators.
I work with kids and except for legit ipad babies, kids treat cellphones like a backup when there's nothing better to do... they prefer playing games with other kids or engaging their parents/role-models.
I personally see zero downsides to this. I genuinely hope Canada follows suite.
- I personally see zero downsides to this
  I would encourage you to read my comment in another thread. There's the beginning of a good idea in this legislation, but nearly everything about how it's actually done is awful.

As an Australian, Discord wants me to verify my age to access nsfw channels. I aint giving discord my real credentials. I will work out something later when I have had a coffee.. and uppers

My server just took a vote and changed our one NSFW channel to no longer be marked NSFW. All we used that channel for was posting slightly sex-themed memes anyway.
Same boat. Managed to bypass it in 15 minutes by using random photos of IDs from google images.

Gotta start somewhere. Let them try and see how it goes.

I don't know if this is the answer but I'm glad someone is trying something. will be a good case study regardless.

That just shows how much of an idiot these people are. These teenagers are just going to learn to use platforms such as Mastodon, Lemmy, and Nostr.

Probably not and, at any rate, those platforms are far, far superior, in terms of cyberbullying, than the commercial platforms.
- especially in terms of being less addictive