PieFedAustralia is the first nation to ban social media for under-16s.
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Landmark legislation sees the Australian government committed to the novel step of child protection by banning social media for under sixteens.
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.
The plan is their mygov id system and this has been years in the making.
Australian governments (both lib and labor) are on board with this and have been salivating over the idea of an internet more locked down than South Korea’s.
They've set it up so it's a legal mess. The platforms aren't given any mechanism to actually perform verifications (no double blind id system, for example) but are legally on the hook for each and every under-16 on the platforms. A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, "Nah mate, we just won't do business in Oz anymore. Bye."
Vanishingly few business make a "New York only" version of their product because it's simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.
It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.
As Muskrat has shown us with Xitter, profits arent everything when your already a billionaire. Sometimes its about burning a pile of money in exchange for influence, control and power.
Platforms love to use this threat... "if you regulate us we'll just withdraw services in your jurisdiction". They never do, and governments shouldn't respond to threats like that in any case. If one or other platform were to restrict services in Aus, it would just increase the potential revenue for some other platform.
Pornhub pulled out of 17 states. You need to buy a hustler magazine now. Australia will just have to buy National Enquirer magazines instead of doom scrolling for their fix.
Sure, but on the flip side I'm fine either way. Watching either a megacorporation *or* an out of touch nanny-state government get fucked is just about equivalent in my books. We could use a lot more of both, and I don't even live in Australia.
Meta, for instance, wants to cease operations anywhere on the planet? Insert Willy Wonka meme here: No, stop, don't... Bye...
Why?
Probably because the internet isn't an app store
... I didn't say it was.
The quote says that app stores should be responsible for verifying age, but social media is not limited to apps - they're just one of multiple user interfaces for interacting with social networks. So that alone cannot solve the problem.
Sorry for the confusion
Because how would you do that on desktop? Or on a degoogled phone? Or if the download was via an apk from elsewhere?
You are assuming that is the only way which is being considered. The suggestion (of app stores verifying) is from someone who has no power in implementation.
Because the app store isn't the only way to install an app. It is trivially easy to side load apps and it's well within the technologic skillset of the average 12 year old.
It is one way (of many) which can be used; the suggestion isn't from someone who is involved in the implementation, just someone on Instagram.
They can also just use a web browser.
The commissioner is supposed to come up with guidelines for what is a reasonable check, so we find out when they come up with it I guess 🤷
What will be interesting for sure is the difference of this approach vs. the porn approach in the southern US. In this case in Australia? Social media companies will tip toe any line they can because there is so much money to be made and they want every dollar.
PornHub? They just blocked access in 17 states instead of even trying to worry about age verification. They're still getting their users, but now they're coming over VPN.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/pornhub-florida-vpn-google-searches-skyrocket/
And, Pornhub can probably play the waiting game in those states as well. Enough people in those places will probably get pissed off enough eventually to pressure their legislators into walking those laws back. It might just take a year or two. I imagine everyone involved already knows, but the idiots who wrote the laws need to wait for the headlines to cool off a bit before they can backpedal, in order to save face.
I imagine Facebook or someone of similar size could do the same in Aus. All they have to do is refuse to serve anything to Aussie IP addresses except a message that says, "Sorry, we can't serve your country anymore because of a law passed by [legislator.] Remember, this is all *his* fault."
Politicians infamously do not give a flying fuck about the opinions of minors, but if they piss everyone *else* off too the people responsible will either be out on their ears next election or buried under an avalanche of nasty letters from their 40-and-up constituency.
Nobody's going out to protest this shit. There's too much stigma around it. Even though I'm sure this frustrates huge swaths of the population, it's politically shameful.
Why would they do that though? Large sites like Facebook are the only ones with resources to handle ID verification. They can do it and let their competitors die.
I don't really have a positive outlook on how this is going to play out. Shy of big money flooding into free speech orgs that can legitimize the fight, or a polarizing leader like Larry Flint, I don't see this going well.
I recently switched from 1 January 1900 to 1 January 2000. It feels good to be young again.
"Awww shucks everyone, looks like we don't get to have internet privacy after all. Don't worry, it's *FOR THE CHILDREN*."
Another way to think about this: Why should *you* have to give random companies your ID because *Australian teens* need to prove their age?
Yeah, someone should tell the guy at the bar checking IDs to piss off too. And what's with these fucks at the pharmacy demanding to see my medical license. They shouldn't be hassling me because someone else might be writing illegal scripts.
It boggles the mind how many times a higher up comes up with some idea (in any context, not just politicians), and never stops to answer the question: "how is this going to work?".
She'll be right mate, don't worry about it 🇦🇺
Magic. That is the only way they can enforce this drivel.
What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?
My instance is in Australia, and the new laws affect social media like Lemmy. The hard part is that there apparently isn't much guidance on *how* to follow the law. Do you have to use ID? Is a location-specific popup making you state that you're 16+ enough? Nobody knows.
I think a mastodon instance started asking aussies to send a pic of them with a bottle of vodka or a pack of smokes.
Hahaha, that's just funny.
If you are the sole user on your own ActivityPub site running on your own server, can it even be called a social media site?
We are yet to see. My guess is they charge the kid for providing social media to an underaged user (themselves). Will be very interesting to watch ngl. Also idk how they gonna implement it cos i sure as shit aint handing over my id to the social media companies.
I'm not sure that a self hosted ActivityPub site with a single user could reasonably be called a social media site. I wonder how the law defines a social media site.
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.
Good luck with that, people and politicians love cars, parking lots and highways, and the media is demonising kids as criminals.
Exactly, which is why they're doing performative shit like this
Well written!
This is a false dichotomy.
You can regulate social media platforms *and* have great infrastructure.
Your own childhood sounds tough, but advocating for social media as a way to mitigate shitty communities is a weird take.
This is false false dichotomy.
Privacy protection laws do regulate social media.
I'm not sure you understand what dichotomy means, maybe look it up.
I didn't say privacy laws don't regulate social media.
If only this applied to the parents as well... No more using your children online to make a buck as an influencer.
I assume that was already the case before, as far as I know that's also not allowed here in my EU country (but I'm just making assumptions).
After a quick Google, I agree that your making assumptions as for the EU in general.
Yeah looking into it this morning I see that it's only that some parents have forbidden their divorced spouses from posting pics of the kids online, basically you need to have parental approval (I know because the daycare asked us if we'd allow them, we don't). So yeah I guess as long as the parents are doing it, it's legal. Feels so wrong.
Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the *over*-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
Australia is the first nation to fail to ban social media for under 16s.
In further news, millions of teenagers have become experts at vpns and bypassing online restrictions
Australia fighting the good fight to produce tech savvy youth
Oh those poor kids.
I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.
This is my favorite argument against government regulation.
Anything not foolproof definitely isn't worth doing at all.
Theres a scale of influence, with a big difference between foolproof and entirely unenforceable.
In this case, it's effectively unenforceable, so what's the point in wasting time and effort drafting something that won't actually make any difference?
How is this a good argument? The law from the post being stupid notwithstanding, by this logic, why bother making any regulations or laws at all if someone, somewhere is gonna break it.
Are you aware of how much of society is held together with the duct tape of social obligation and the honestly system? Yes we have audits, and enforcement, but honestly in a health society, the vast majority is self-imposed.
This is a really poor argument against government regulation, is all I'm saying.
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?
that's exactly what they are "evaluating" now along with "biometric (age and voice) estimation".
government, politicians and media are constructing a parallel reality for themselves.
The ID verification is the purpose. Keeping minors off is a smokescreen, tracking every citizen on social media is the real reason for this law.
Put it on the parents. That's enforceable, and the root of the problem..
Banning the Three Letter Word is unenforceable too. If you ban Open*** and Wireguard - too bad, China has done that and people developed obfuscation methods. Even if you try to ban talking about them, they won't go extinct. If there's a supply, there's a demand.
The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.
Yes.
Fair dinkem mate. How are they gonna regulate this?
Dinkum
Cheese mate
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.
Social media is harming them in that case.
They will create their own places... which might not actually be desirable for the government lol
You can message your friends without all the misinformation and self-harm promoting algorithms
They didn't say anything about that
They asked what they can do
It can be the same as they do now just without the damage
I'm old enough to remember I spent my days riding my bike around town, exploring the woods, hanging out at friends' houses, going to the pizza place and hitting baseballs at the school field with my brothers.
Outside. It may take society a bit of time to adjust, just like it took a bit of time before kids not being outside became normal, but it will happen. Kids run around my town all the time unsupervised, nobody is calling the cops, and parents are looking out for each others kids. Just because some places have gone off the deep end doesn't mean everywhere has.
They should go the fuck outside, what you said isnt true at all. Also, kids arent buying their own phones and internet, the parents are.
Even excluding everything other than computers, you can still play games, talk to friends, code etc.
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
There was a German social network a few years ago that did exactly that (before Facebook was available in German)
They had SchülerVZ for kids/teens, then they had StudiVZ for university students and finally they had MeinVZ for adults. The problem was, that they weren’t interconnected at all apart from the option to move your account to the next
platform. So if you were just starting to study but you still had friends that were in school, you could’t keep in touch with them.
I'm just waiting until they remember why borders are a thing that exists.
Are they still allowed on Lemmy?
Australian legislators probably don't even know that Lemmy exists.
If the law was well made, it wouldn’t applly to websites under a certain threshold of active users.
I mean you can’t expect octopusforums.co with 40 cephalopod enthusiasts to ID check australians can you.
I don't know what it's like in Australia, but here in the USA the large websites write laws like that specifically to prevent competition from small websites.
Better make an octopus Facebook group instead.
Yes, big companies have lobbying which makes rules basically horrible for small companies.
The Megacorps don’t mind “red tape” because all they have to do is hire a lawyer and bribe the right people but small companies suffer the actual consequences.
Ie. In the country I live in, if I want to sell chicken eggs from my backyard chickens, I need to submit 3 forms that are basically impossible to without hiring a lawyer every YEAR, and pay for an inspection check every 2 years which costs a lot. That kind of environment which applies to basically any action a company wants to do makes it impossible for anyone but mid-large companies to do things.
Now kids will be forced to hide being a victim of cyber-bullying from their parents. Great work!
If their parents are social media
If they don't have an online presence and neither do their peers, how would they be cyber bullied?
I'm sure bullying will go on, old school, in the streets, but cyber bullying is one of the things that will go away with this
I think this is great. There are about one or two generations worth of people that had social media while being kids and I think they should stop acting as if it's the end of the world if it would go away. I fully understand that you grew up with it and don't know any netter but believe you me: you can do without, you can survive without, you will be better without.
Go outside, touch grass, have fun, be a kid again.
A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.
It's unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the "are you 18+" checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.
I'm an Australian, and I don't remember the 'firewall' that you're talking about. Do you have a link or something to remind me?
This is the first result from Google. It's I guess ancient history now being it was the labor rights push to (probably) unintentionally discredit kevin07, but internal politics aside Conroy (famous for his opposition to adult rating for videogames) was for aong time a candidate for 'biggest piece of shit in Australian politics'. Stephen Conroy was the face of it, so search for him and firewall to your hearts content. The Alana and Madeline foundation were involved in some of the testing that damned the project, if I remember right (as if common sense hadn't already damned it with seconds of the sales pitch).
Thanks. I do remember this now. I don't remember it costing a lot of money, but I do remember people generally disagreeing with the idea of it - and then being amused by how it was to be implemented. And yes, to get around this filter I changed my DNS server from the ISP's default to instead use Google's. (This was far enough in the past that I wasn't yet anti-google!)
Fun fact, I was called by my bullies on my parents landline and bullied when I was a kid in the 1980s.
Bullies are gonna bully - the method varies but never the motive.
If you think this is going to actually stop kids from getting on social media, I have a bridge to sell you.
All it's going to do is push kids to hide their social media apps, which they'll get either through a VPN or faking the ID check, which gives parents even less visibility into what's going on with their children online.
I grew up before the internet dude. I just don’t underestimate the cleverness and resourcefulness of young people.
Good luck with that.
It doesnt need to be 100% effective.
Escape!
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.
With great sadness I have to agree with you.
It's just one shit show after another. Voice to parliament, live export ban, and now this. Meanwhile Australians are being ground into the dust by price gouging corporations and interest rate hikes.
That said I am in support of this legislation, but it's just not enough.
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.
All of a sudden their test scores start going through the roof.
That would be a bad thing. In Australia, you want your test scores to go through the floor.
Attention span >3 minutes would be something already.
this isn't for the safety of kids; it's to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.
No offence but that’s shortsighted to be generous. I feel like half of lemmy will carry on about social media being cancer, the frequent articles citing negative effects of SM on mental health and the fact that multiple social media companies are accused of propagating misinformation (Zuckerberg face sure is in lemmy a lot lately for some reason). Like Zuck has all but greenlit harassing lgbt+ people on FB and the SM ban is to stop gay kids finding a community? Please. Corporate SM is a blight and before someone says lemmy/reddit check the mod logs or the fact that lemmy only got CSAM under control relatively recently before suggesting it’s fine for kids.
Besides, LGTB kids aren't the only ones who need the internet to find refuge
Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you're right that loss of community is a byproduct.
Like, I'm not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things they have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry
What community? This is social media we're talking about. Have people really convinced themselves that these things are communities?
Social media is not a good replacement for real life community (look through my comment history and you'll see me expressing exactly that *repeatedly*), but we can't be oblivious to the fact that for many children their only connection to fellow queer people may be online. If you live in a small town or community where there are no other openly queer people, or if your school, peers, and parents are hostile to queer people you won't have much choice in where you find community.
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.
Oh no, it's stupid....
Yeah I don't really understand the pile on.
Enforcement is not important in any way. If most kids are on social presently, then by making it illegal it just won't be a place for kids to congregate any more. What would be the point of lying about your age to create a facebook account if none of your friends are there.
Sure, some kids will still be on social, perhaps most kids will be, but there's no doubt in my mind that their usage will diminish dramatically. That's how public health works.
Should be left up to the parents.