Zagorath @ Zagorath @quokk.au

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446
Joined

12 mo. ago

20h ago

front page joke/spoof 16+ our instance?

In short? They're well-intentioned but extremely poorly considered.

The government made the wrong decision at every step of the process of implementing them. From rushing the laws through without sufficient time for experts or educated laypeople to provide feedback, to then failing to give enough time to even evaluate the feedback that was received, to completely ignoring the responses that were given. Failing to consider the impact on smaller social media platforms, which could so easily have been bypassed by making it so that only platforms designated by the Minister have to comply. Ignoring the impact of algorithms as the real problem with social media (though I think I saw that they are introducing changes specifically to address this). Disregarding harmful content shared in games, and cyber bullying through chat apps. Ignoring the beneficial impacts of social media especially for vulnerable children who can find community online when they can't IRL. Disregarding superior social options of putting the age verification at the device level (where it can be done simply by telling parents to set their child's age on their device, locked with a parental control password, and doesn't require any form of third-party to authenticate anything), or superior technical solutions involving blinded signatures which could verify age in a way that makes it technically impossible to track users while still retaining the hard verification the government wants. The fact that the law has been shown to result in harm to people's privacy, with leaks having already occurred, despite the fact that the law doesn't require or even permit retention of data collected for age verification purposes...and the lack of enforcement of penalties for these breaches. I'm sure there's more I'm not remembering right now.

And with its extension to also banning porn, a complete ignorance of the fact that this just means kids are just going to (assuming they don't bypass it in the incredibly easy method of using a VPN) be driven off of relatively safe moderated sites like Pornhub and towards unregulated sketchy sites that probably host revenge porn, snuff, and other horrid content.

It is, in summary, very, very bad. But to be extremely clear, it is well-intentioned. As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. The evidence of the harm that large algorithmic social media platforms do to kids is substantial. The government's desire to limit that is real, and it's a noble goal. Ideas that it's actually about surveillance simply do not hold to the most basic scrutiny. For example, one of the few good things about it is the fact that the law explicitly forbids requiring photo ID as the verification method. And the fact that most people who were already adults at the time it came into effect didn't notice anything...because Facebook et al simply decided to use the option of analysing account histories (data they already had access to) to determine an estimate of the user's age. A 10+ year-old account probably didn't belong to a 5 year-old at the time it was created, so probably belongs to a 16+ year-old today. The problem is simply that the law is really, really badly tailored to delivering the goal. Because the government doesn't understand anything about technology, and actively refuses to listen to anyone who does (except, occasionally, big tech companies, when they try to work with the government in an effort to get regulatory capture).

20h ago

Ada Lovelace

Jump

You said

maybe Einstein, but we have proof of [Lovelace's] discoveries and they’re not at all abstract in the contemporary world!

The implication behind this is that we don't have proof of Einstein's discoveries and his are abstract in the contemporary world. But neither of those are true.