I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.
I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And suddenly they ban social media. Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.
I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids" unfortunately
I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.
Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.
If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.
The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.
In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.
Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.
You mean like the outside world?
What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose?
I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood. It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas.
... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation
Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on.
I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.
There's hardly any parallel between the type of political content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and what's found in today's social media. It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.
Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people. It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at least have brains that are fully-developed.
Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.
The original comment suggests that the policy is politically motivated. The commenter replied with other reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I think its a valid response.
I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.
No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the point.
Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter, went viral recently about how social media needs to be banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist movement.
The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens without social media, given their actions over the past few years.
> 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with preventing harms"
> 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them"
Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions.
>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.
If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.
> I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.
Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle.
>"Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you?"
Whatever your conclusion is, it’s sort of beside the point I was making, which is that the many of the arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol) are meaningfully different than the arguments being made today about age verification for websites.
>“So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.”
This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.
I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities. Which is why I thought your comment of “eerily similar” was off-base.
If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation
The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party, which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won’t have been deliberate.
I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.
Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.
I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).
The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content
I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine
That is just a thought-stopping reference. Why does this literal nobody who nobody has to listen to have the total backing of both major political parties? That is the real question and it obviously goes back to narrative control and the move from democracy to an authoritarian managerial state.
Of course they aren't. If they were actually helping kids, they would be going after algorithmic feeds in general and the most predatory platforms like Roblox (especially given its recent scandals), doing something about kids being exposed to gambling advertising, etc.
The bill was put up for public comment for less than one business day before being rammed through Parliament. Australia is just sending out one of the horsemen of the infocalypse so that other countries have an excuse to follow suit. Like how our "Assistance And Access" Act was a test run of the UK's "snooper's charter".
This law will just lead to:
1. kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these filters
2. platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"
3. everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)
I actually do think people directly see the negative public health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and that that is the driving force behind all of this.
I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.
It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.
My son is 15. My talk to him went something like this: There's a lot of porn and nasty things that you can't unsee, so be careful what you look at. Also, those extortion gangs target teenage boys, so if some girl is suddenly hot for you online, come see me immediately so we can troll the ever loving fuck out of them. I think it went pretty well. We like doing things as a family, but more like the Addams family...
I'd view that as more of a works for me argument than necessarily actionable. Social dynamics are complex and personality, status, etc, plays into which relationships end up mattering, being convincing, etc. I.e. some children bond closer to a grandparent not because parents have failed in any way at honest conversations.
3 kids, same honest conversations, 2 where it worked and works very well, 1 where it is a constant battle.
So sorry but no, the platforms are addictive and not all the kids can resist against an armada of statisticians ensuring the systems stay addictive only through honest conversations.
By the way, this would mean you could solve all the addiction issues if it would be working...
> It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.
Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very much in the target age here, and they only have a passing understand of what social media even is due to us explaining how unhealthy it is to them.
It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same, but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state isn't the answer.
I remember there being an experiment where parents were placed in a room with some toys their children were allowed to play with and some toys their children weren't allowed to.
They measured the parents perceived level of control against their actual level of control by seeing if they stopped their children from playing with the researchers laptop that had been left in the corner of the room.
Part of me wonders if it was apocryphal, I'm not sure if a test like that would get past an ethics committee (at least since laptops existed)
Likewise, the state abdicating its responsibility and placing the burden solely on parents isn't fair either, and that is exactly the environment we currently find ourselves in.
I think this might be true at the parent level, but less and less true as you climb up the government ladder.
The shitty part is that when the parents really do believe something is "for the kids", it becomes that much easier to push through laws that have awful side effects (intentional ones or not). Which is why "for the kids" is so common, of course.
It's not that the people don't genuinely believe what they're saying. It's that they've deluded themselves into thinking their ideological right is "for the kids".
There's always been Reefer Madness sorts of people. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Video Games, DnD, Rap Music, Homosexuality, and on and on. Today it's half woke mind virus and half DEI (for lack of a better term). Most of the people that spout this stuff genuinely believe they're fighting for the kids.
Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. And its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones. How would you measure any level of success from this initiative? Doing something isnt a solution if it has tons of bad sideeffects
> Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn.
One does not follow from the other.
We make speeding illegal even though even the most affordable cars can trivially bypass all speed restrictions. It doesn't mean that the efforts to curb speeding are in bad faith just because it is still possible to bypass speed reduction rules.
Thank you. I thought it was a pretty good analogy, too.
>Wonder why banning homelessness works so well[?] Oh we don[']t ban it? Must be because we don[']t care enough[.]
I do not understand what point you are trying to make about homelessness, and how that would be at all relevant to keeping teenagers from having accounts on social media.
That's not a great comparison.
I was just pointing out that the existence of ways to violate a law, does not in any way, mean that passing the law or enforcing it is a bad faith effort.
It very much is. Free VPNs almost always have some sort of catch. E.g. HolaVPN users agree in the ToS to become an exit node for other VPN users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)
If social media is so compelling, then teens almost certainly will take whatever steps are necessary to access it.
“Kids” are no longer old enough to use social media as they are “kids”. At the same time Australia states are updating laws believing “kids” are old enough to be treated as and tried as adults in a court of law.
Meta == Phillip Morris - This is a public health issue and will likely need to be treated like tobacco. Kids can't vote so I don't see the political motivation.
The solution, however, isn't prohibition or age restrictions; it's either regulating the algorithms or holding these companies responsible for the adverse outcomes their platforms contribute to. Safe harbor laws made sense when tech wasn't filtering/promoting content, now that they are influencing the material we see, these laws must no longer apply.
This may mean adopting a modern equivalent to libel laws. Something akin to: if an algorithm pushes false information, the company behind the algorithm can be sued for harm. Disallow terms of service that force arbitration or cap liability limits.
> Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.
I get the sense this is supposed to signify something; don't know the name, but looking at their profile, great career, Obama's chief of staff. What's the implication?
Agreed. I'm no fan of social media, and especially not a fan of TikTok and Instagram. But I really doubt this is about the kids more than it is about getting another foothold along the path of controlling internet access wholesale.
It's also a massive propaganda channel. We can argue about whether any one particular state is involved in that or not but gut reaction is that if this were the real concern, their solution would be to regulate and censor what is posted online rather than kicking them off the platform and thus detaching them from the teat of (alleged) indoctrination. (that push for censorship also exists).
Maybe Australia and the US are not involved in any social media propaganda campaigns but, at least in the case of the US, there is most certainly an abundance of precedence.
I don't know the sincere feelings of these types wrt the safety and well-being of children but I don't think the goal is "getting them back" wrt policy or whatever.
The problem is that school curriculum is as well. I remember going to school in Texas and hearing the phrase "Northern War of Aggression" to describe the Civil War.
Censorship is never about cutting off information, it's only ever about cutting off information that the censors don't like. Given how openly hostile both AU and the US's governments are to progressive politics and worldviews, I am dubious that this isn't about controlling kids' access to a more open view of the world than their schools will give them.
The Australian government isn’t banning books. It’s banning access to harmful content.
One morning I logged into Reddit and saw a video of Charlie Kirk get his head blown off. I didn’t want to see that, but for some reason it wasn’t taken down yet. I’m really glad my 12 year old daughter didn’t have to see that…
Maybe. I think it's overall a rightward shift, only in urban cores is it accelerating a leftward shift. To the extent that it is motivating marginal voters to vote (which I think it is), it is also benefitting the right. It's also breaking down ethnic voting patterns in a way that benefits the right, I think.
It is not motivating marginal voters to vote. The choice is between two nearly identical establishment candidates from two private clubs. The electorate is going the same way it's going in Europe, except in Europe other parties are legal (although marginalized through parliamentary methods.)
In the UK, for example, Reform has been consistently polling the same as the Conservatives and Labour added together., and all three of those added together only represent 2/3 of the electorate. In the US, that translates to 2/3 of people becoming non-voters.
Why that might look like a rightward shift in the US is because the Republicans don't fix their primaries (since the 90s), and their voters actually have an effect on who gets picked to run. Why it won't actually be a rightward shift is because Republicans ignore their platforms after being elected, and don't mind getting thrown out at the end of a term or two to work at the businesses they helped while in office.
Democrats simply don't believe in any sort of democracy anymore. They invest all their effort into yelling at black people and Hispanics, and raising as much money as they can from the worst people in the world. The rest of the time they spend attacking anybody running to the left of them as racist or Russian, while their media outlets simply ignore those people other than when they're helping promote the slander. That's whats pushing away "ethnic voting."
As a black person, I know when the voting season is here because I see a bunch of paid Democrats running around calling black people who criticize their party ethnic slurs and using the word "massa" a lot. Republicans don't do that. They don't rely on black people so just ignore us. Democrats rely on us, but will never do anything for us, so they use terror.
The two party system exists because even in a multi party system (eg. those that exist in proportional representation governments) still end up as "In government" vs "In opposition"
Secondly, we employ "adversarial" systems for two branches of government (legislative and judicial) because it's a hell of a lot easier to spot flaws in ideas of people you are opposed to (as opposed to some European Judiciaries that have "inquisitorial" systems, where a judge investigates activity)
Very often in the proportional systems people opine that "grand coalitions" should form, with the two largest parties, although that loses a lot of the advantages of the adversarial system, and has a tendency to steam roll smaller interests in the country.
People in power just want total control of the narrative and they don't want you to find out the truth about anything. Look at Walz in MN--he's like the ultimate Jedi "nothing to see here" mind trick with his wholesome grandfatherly persona, which is furthest from the actual reality of who and what he is. They all just want to force you into their reality and they hate it when you don't go there.
Every political party ON THE PLANET has always had to manage internal factions, it doesn't matter if you're talking the Soviet Communist Party, the Democrats, the Republicans, The Tea party faction.
There's absolutely nothing new about parties having internal divisions. Even the fact that at the moment everything is so partisan is nothing new, history has shown that several times over the past century that politics has followed a penudulum that swings from partisan extremes, back to centrist moderates, and then back to the extremes.
Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline. I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both ways.
I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
> I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium.
Generally agree, but
> Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse
Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me.
> Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts - Trump buddying aside - were much better.
> Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these complaints do not apply.
Is it still publicly viewable without age verification in Australia? It's a little unclear from TFA whether the ban is purely on account creation, or also applies to viewing.
All the ban does is stop kids from having accounts, if the service allows anonymous usage then they can still find somewhere to doom scroll. My teen son has been blocked from Snapchat, and was this evening doom scrolling on Tik Tok until I blocked it on our home network.
I'm curious to understand why your approach to TikTok is banning it. Why do you think this is the right solution? Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
No, it’s that he will spend hours doom scrolling whatever they feed to him.. I’ve tried to lead him down a path of watching more educational stuff on YouTube but he will just end up doom scrolling shorts.. I’m trying to figure out ways to enable him access but not have him waste hours with shorts.. I know there must be short form content that’s good but I’ve not seen any evidence watching over his shoulder.. I block shorts on YouTube for myself even.. at this point the best I can think of is allowing access in short windows of time with longer chunks of blocked access.. if anyone has ideas I’d love to hear them.
Short-form content (if you can call it that) is a weapon of mass attention span destruction. IMHO the doom-scrolling loop it creates should be illegal, regardless of the audience.
You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of the last step.
I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to the kid, or more intermediate steps.
> Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for most. With other things like sports, we know that there is the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated and the benefits far outweigh the risks.
This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
There's no motive other than "easy politicial win". The kids aren't gonna vote against you (they don't vote), parents will vote for you, you get to show people you protected children and passed legislation. Politicians support anything that keeps them in votes and campaign contributions.
Why does the motivation matter so much? It’s not a global ban, it’s not a permanent ban, nobody is going to jail. It’s like seeing if moving the smoking age to 18 will improve health outcomes.
It’s ruining their lives as far as we can tell, and at the end of the day it’s just one country testing it out. It’ll be stastically significant, culturally close enough of a sample set for us to learn from.
I’m curious to see what the 1-2-3 year effects are. We need to let some real life experimentation happen, somewhere, instead of accepting what every conglomerate wants.
I get that “it’s easy to say” for me as someone completely unaffected by this law.
The study that was posted last week regarding at school banning of phones was enlightening. It improved scores within two years after a bit of resistance. Boom!
I want them to have a chance at being healthy and well-educated; we can’t stop teens from smoking altogether but we can sure limit their access by default.
> I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.
I mean... you can say that about most of things in life. Behind every social movement or policy, it's always a mix of good faith, cynical fearmongering, and opportunism by people or organizations who stand to gain something from it. Does it matter?
If you think that social media and smartphones are harmful to the youth, you (a) should probably be glad that someone is doing something decisive about it; and (b) you get a large-scale experiment that will hopefully prove or disprove that.
I think adults are barely able to take reasoned political positions in today’s online environment, but at least an adult has the experience to make the attempt. Exposing kids to the type of online political persuasion we have today means that we are exposing them to something they have not got the tools to navigate. They just get swept up into whatever the popular idea of the day happens to be. To me, the argument that separating kids from social media separates them from today’s political onslaught is one of the best arguments in favor of it.
In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out?
The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.
The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not.
Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out.
In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a minor.
> Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...
Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?
The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple times
So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution as though they've sufficiently thought about the people affected and the harms involved.
Government runs authentication service that has your personal details.
User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks government service if your age is >18, service says y/n. Platform never finds out your personal details.
The government then knows all the services you use. No bueno.
There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.
The government still knows your identity in this scenario, so it's a pretty limited form of anonymity (i.e. only suitable for activities the government isn't hostile to)
I know Americans don't want to hear this, but once the government turns hostile, internet anonymity won't save you, just like how guns won't save you (hello propaganda and a large and very active brainwashed minority that also has guns).
The only thing saving you from a hostile government is a well educated populace that really wants democracy and is willing to fight for it (through constant activism, peaceful & other types of protests). This is where many democracies are failing now. No amount of technology or rules can replace large amounts of constantly vigilant eyes that understand how democracy is subverted.
I would rather optimize for not giving companies too much power and end up with a Kafkaesque patchwork of corporate abuses and regulatory captures.
Some concerns:
- government gets a list of every website that requests your age
- every website has to register with the government to initiate age verification checks
Which pretty much puts an end to any notion of an open internet. But maybe a system I prefer to one where a bunch of random startups have my age verification biometrics .
I don't see the danger of pornography, tbh. Oh, much of it is sick, sure, but violent video games are far more harmful. Would it be better to depict loving, caring relationships? Hell, yes! But there are so few of those these days.
My teenage son struggles to have any meaningful dialog with any of the girls his age. It's like he doesn't exist. The few kids who are "dating" is basically the exact scenario that MGTOW depicts--girls only go for the elite jocks and ignore everyone else like they don't even exist. Everyone is miserable. Many will eventually grow out of it, but I don't think the females will ever view themselves as doing anything but "settling" because of the nonsense programmed into their heads. And yes, social media is largely responsible for how extreme the situation has become. In the 90s, girls were picky, but nothing like now. So all that young men have left is like AI chatbots and porn and it's better to not take that away from them, too.
It's four horsemen of the infocalypse 101. Look at the platforms they allowed to continue - discord and roblox, the specific worst of all socials with the most predators, least effective countermeasures.
The purpose of a thing is what it does. Australia's policies do not protect children. They quite brazenly and blatantly leave children vulnerable and exploited. The question of what those actions accomplish has a simple answer - narrative control, censorship, and weaponization of public discourse against dissent.
The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education and more information.
None of the policy Australia crafted does anything good. It's just another power grab using "won't you think of the children?!" as the excuse. Next year it will be terrorism or drugs or money laundering, and they'll keep constricting around civil liberties until they have absolute control.
They'll also put various racial and ethnic officials in prominent positions, so that you may not criticize anything lest you be deemed a racist or bigot (super effective social engineering.)
> The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education and more information.
This is just complete bullshit. Ah yes, my solution to this problem is just to require every single family to be infinitely better in every way imaginable. What is the proposal if that can't happen? We just execute people who don't meet the "stable loving family environment"
No doubt in my mind you are from the generation of a stiff upper lip
Maybe. Do you forget that people use to not have phones or social media and they still had independent thought? Just because kids aren’t introduced to videos and comments about politics at a young age, doesn’t mean they’re going to be brainwashed by the ruling government. Societies operated just the same before social media.
Edit: Dont get me wrong, there could be ulterior motives, but kids will have other ways to educate themselves on the happenings of the world beside social media
Current social media is terrible for children - this is known. They've been told many times they need to change or they'll get banned. They have not. This is known. It reminds me a little of when Australia banned Amazon because Amazon refused to charge GST (their version of VAT or sales tax).
The surveillance part is about adults having to upload their identity. This concern is entirely separate from the part where children are banned.
Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a political or commercial context, but it should not be the only one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.
Just my anecdote addled opinion but i seems like most of the people being mentally "cooked" by social media are in their 30's ,my generation, and up to maybe late 60's.
I don’t think the US will ever enact a similar ban. The power to shape young minds is too great, even if these service also increase suicides in children to some degree.
The same algorithms that showed IDF war crimes compilations and turned a generation against Israel can be reshaped to push a different, right-wing narrative. The David Ellison’s of the world have too much power to allow regulation getting in the way of this.
>We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions,
When Twitter added its location feature and it turned out that political accounts with millions of followers are run out of Pakistan or India you have to be crazy to still deny the scope of foreign influence that is exerted over social media.
You see it with the rise in anti-semitism or Russia's explicit promotion of influencers targeting Western youth. Why on earth would we let our kids be brainwashed by foreign intelligence agencies? There is no reason to assume this is some "hidden agenda", this is as big of a public issue as the mental health of teenagers. The United States used to have media rules that limited foreign ownership in companies with a broadcasting license, and now 14 year olds get their political lessons straight from Moscow, it's ridiculous.
To be fair, "anti-semitism" claims have been 90% bad faith. Gaza was the internet's Vietnam.
We got just as mad at the internet letting our citizens at home see the brutality as we did with Jane Fonda and calling her "Hanoi Jane" after she traveled to Vietnam to bring light to the conflict(not a war).
I don't think there's any merit in being upset at dead children being reported because it messes with our national security goals. If the goals don't have public support with truthful reporting, they're basically illegitimate.
I would reject the notion that shifting public sentiment is a result of foreign influence campaigns, which is not to say it doesn't exist to an extent.
I've seen plenty of real information, from non-anonymous American journalists that I'm certain are the largest factor in any sea-change amongst Americans.
And despite the claim, I've yet to see solid evidence of large, pakistan-based accounts wielding massive influence on twitter. Most anonymous accounts that focus on current events tend to be located in America, Europe, or Canada from what I've seen.
"What are they really doing?" is a stupid conspiracy brained question: trying to win the next election obviously and whatever you may think, representing the electorate.
Whether intentional or not, one consequence of a success in this area would be to isolate older people from the views of young people and to stifle the younger generations influence on these communication media in the future.
Personally I suspect these elderly people in powerful political positions to be quite afraid of kids, it wouldn't be the first time in history, but it's likely the first time they're this old and as alienated from younger generations as they are.
Perhaps we're seeing patriarchal class societies mutate into primarily gerontocratical societies.
I chuckled when I read that, when over-16 is considered elderly.
What will we do when we no longer have the views of 14 year olds at our fingertips? Well, hopefully they will write their views down on notepaper, and in two years we'll hear all about it.
unfortunately there is nothing we can do in any society without seeing comments like this… whatever “move” is done comments like this will be there with endless “analysis” about “motivation” for the move… it is what it is…
The nature of democracy and open dialogue I suppose.
But really, when banning a large portion of the population from social media, political motives should absolutely be entertained. Politics is inextricably related to social media in 2025
Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan support and the Labor government has a significant share of the young voters who are over 18.
Kids being banned from social media is just one side of the coin. _Everyone_ else being forced to KYC with random websites is the other. I can’t help but wonder, which of the two outcomes is the actual goal here.
Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are attempting to but are blocked by federal courts. Will be interesting to see if the tech industry allows it, or decides to break up the federal government before it becomes too powerful.
Not going to help the tech industry given their largest audience bases are in blue states, who will happily just regulate them to death if the federal government doesn't.
We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next step is dissolving congress and installing a new constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining the law of the land on the whims of a senile man
There's no need to dissolve congress. You instead make sure that (1) a single party stays in power (through gerrymandering, voter suppression and more), (2) the courts are stacked with loyalists and (3) the legislature and courts rubber stamp all decisions of the executive regardless of legality or anything else.
Yeah this is usually how it happens. Whether its ancient Rome, modern Russia, Venezuela, etc all the dressings of the old Republic stay but become subverted by an autocrat.
There's no need to do any of things you mention considering that both parties are owned by the same people and are essentially two faces of the same party in practice. Also - almost all the powers that be - including courts and Congress are already for sale/at the service of big tech.
Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument:
Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.
I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it.
From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.
I will bet you up to $1000 at 2:1 odds that in 5 years we will still have the same constitution and congress will not have been dissolved at any point.
perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for adults or maybe just dystopian movies.
Russia still has a constitution, a parliament, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary. It even has opposition political parties and elections.
Right, because there's no need to change the Constitution when you have a captured Supreme Court to help you ignore it, and no need to dissolve Congress when they've steadily made themselves less and less relevant over the past few decades.
I do wonder about the normalization of dystopian ideas. Take even a show like Scandal. The fact that one of the big reveals is that billionaires stole the election by targeted hacking of election machines is kinda messed up.
Everybody seems to have missed the memo that all power was concentrated in the Executive branch since the Bush Doctrine, and that since 2016 people have started insisting that the Executive doesn't even have any obligation to the President, the only important vote left (although limited to choosing between two private clubs funded by the same donors.).
If Congress steps away from doing anything but serving donors (helped by the filibuster), and the captured regulators don't have to obey the President, there's actually no democracy left. We're in the impossible situation where Trump not being in control is scarier than Trump being in control.
Even scarier is that the people saying that we're on the way to becoming an authoritarian state are saying that because they think that the voters get too much say. Authoritarianism is when we don't beatify Dr. Fauci, or agree that it's fine for pregnant women to take Tylenol. The upper middle class, in its complete narcissism and fall into self-indulgent fantasy, is entirely focused on aesthetics.
edit: when replies that say that there's already a problem, but seem to be heretical about the covid response get flagkilled, there's a blessed opinion. I have no idea how elite echochambers are supposed to avoid an authoritarian state. Your bosses are kissing Trump's ass, and you're working hard doing things that advance their agenda. They couldn't do it without you.
Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g: voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g: facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?
The thing with those alternative communities is that they sort of orbit around the larger tech platforms. Their agenda is set by the news-of-the-day within certain X/FB/YouTube subcommunities. Its sort of analogous to wire services in traditional media.
Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them.
I think if you run a website as a main source of your business profitable or not you’re in the tech industry. It’s a question of scale not industry classification or purpose classification.
Not my point. The original comment said the tech industry can decide to break up the federal government because they don't want to be forced to clean up their act. Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. If the tech industry is against that, then they should be the ones broken up.
> Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity.
I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing.
States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for.
Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms.
But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps.
Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too and really need to act early. States can become one person or party and it's game over for a long time. Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of faith in it.
> They are closer to states than they are to algorithms
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.
I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media.
* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic
* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon
Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?
I agree. It’s just there has not been a pro-EU vote in any form or capacity by any EU population. So the stopped doing referendums but the EU grew only even more unpopular- and lately with VDL and KK, its as if its a cruel joke we all expect for it to end soon.
EU is holding, but the fact that every authoritarian (US, China, Russia) is trying to break it apart should tell you something. It's like the only one remaining, and they don't like it.
You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history.
Can you name a referendum of a country within the EU that has to do with the EU in some form or capacity and received a positive vote? Netherlands, France, Italy and Greece all voted at a certain point in time. The result was always a “no”.
The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not.
Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.
Facebook then wasn't what facebook is today. The social media of the early internet was largely a digital expansion of otherwise healthy social norms. Then the internet blew up. Now it's more akin to the drug dealers DARE warned us about. Still waiting on _those_ free drugs, tbh.
Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.
If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.
It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons. However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic modern feed garbage content in general.
I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
> we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted
That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.
Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
The previous static ads of the past are completely different beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven design(leading to doomscrolling etc).
It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and scale.
Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.
Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.
And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.
My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so of course they're more anxious/depressed.
The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
>How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.
It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).
Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.
It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.
Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally... you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there are some guardrails). Social media can with much less restriction.
I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.
Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.
I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.
A paragraph from an email Reddit sent me presumably because I created my account in Australia:
> Users confirmed to be under 16 will have their accounts suspended under the new Australian minimum age law. While we disagree with the Government's assessment of Reddit as being within the scope of the law, we need to take steps to comply. This means anyone in Australia with a Reddit account confirmed to be under 16 will be blocked from accessing their account or creating a new one. Note that as an open platform, Reddit is still available to browse without an account.
“Confirmed to be under 16” sounds like they’re not trying very hard to identify them. But maybe I’m just spared any attempt at checking since my account is 12 years old.
I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant with the letter or the spirit of the law—an account is not required for at least some forms of damage. But I’ve paid no attention to this law since I live in India now.
> I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant with the letter or the spirit of the law
Haven't read the law, but I don't think they considered this, since the most popular social media sites make it very hard or impossible to browse without an account. I guess with adult content bans they do consider this, since people don't tend to make an account there.
And a very similar fun fact: You can't browse facebook marketplace if you're logged into an under 18 account, but can without an account (at least here in Hungary).
Somehow, things are going to work better when you're not logged in...
To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them.
In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email?
I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
> YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments
Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist (what???), notifications (why???)
Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.
Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.
So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.
Communication over a distance between people who don't know each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it, like customer service... is a disaster in general.
Excessive social media is detrimental (to everyone). Age restrictions are not a good solution, it effectively categorises it as an adult activity, and glorifies it further.
Kids are very good at identifying hypocritical behaviour and scare tactics. It'll end up counterproductive like the D.A.R.E. program.
If the kids are forced out, the adults should be too.
When I was a kid, online games with chat were a no-no. Most of the ones designed for kids specifically avoided having a chat feature aside from preset phrases, like Toon Town.
Then of course by teens, most boys were in the notorious MW2 lobbies.
Despite how little they pay their game devs, offering like 20% I think, Roblox itself continues to make a loss so there case that they are scamming their devlopers isn't the strongest
Most their users are don’t pay, their services are all hosted by themselves, development of tooling for games and the platform itself is costly, legal issues, etc.
Here is an overview of related restrictions in other countries [1]. Actually, in many European countries, Google does not grant access to Gemini for people under 16yo [2,3].
Quite a decisive move by the Australian government. I don't know if it's a move in the right direction or not but the research clearly shows that around the time social media became mainstream, teens' and preteens' mental health took a nosedive (Especially girls).
* The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
* Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
maybe it's a step in the right direction but you can't regulate away ALL parenting. I know kids in the 5th grade getting brand new Iphone 17s! i've even seen one kid at the age of 7, getting their own Ipad. some parents even force their kids to use play on their iphone, just so they don't have to keep an eye on their kid anymore. My jaw really dropped to the floor on that one.
at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that bad.
How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is just band-aid.
the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens" until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed device that just lets them get their homework done.
The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.
If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.
The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.
If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.
i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?
in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.
is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
it does help. i think this is a good step in the right direction.
but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).
Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the problem. They still see the exact same content shared by friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do damage.
This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then blame everything on parents.
Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad thing, even though they paid for all the public infrastructure we use every day.
As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the better.
What you’re implicitly saying here is that we should wait until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because you’re dealing with a soft science. At that point the damage will have been done and much harder to address.
If you don’t think attention spans are on the downtrend & that social media has something to do with that, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear.
Hugely decisive! Feels more like a policy for idyllic hypotheticals. "Suppose we could ban social media..." well, hey, they actually did it.
I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We shall see!
I think one must also re-evaluate how in modern times a parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the crime of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove unrestricted outside (within reason). I've heard of this happening in both the US and Australia, the HOA mindset really needs to die.
I live in Philadelphia in Mt Airy. I see kids of all races around all the time. Sometimes my kids. The only place I read about parents being jailed for their kids being outside is HN.
Where are you from? Sweden? Denmark? Fun fact for Europe: America is quite a dangerous country. At the very least, this is why parents fear the outdoors. And much of our nature is polluted. There are cases of this. I agree it's wrong, but it's good to understand the background.
And as far as the internet: I am part of the younger generation and I welcome this change. I see how it affects my generation every day.
America isn't universally dangerous, but it is very diverse. Where I am (Western Pennsylvania) there are kids outside running around all the time (maybe less now that it's very cold out). It just depends where in the country you are.
I am also from a younger generation and from a state that has experienced quite a bit of pollution, but before the popularity of the smartphone ~2012 or so, there was still much more play outside. As for crime, it has been on a downtrend for decades, and many areas are the most peaceful they've been in years¹. I admit this may still be higher than in Europe, but this is exactly the fearmongering message platforms like X try to spread to garner support for authoritarian policy
You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then. Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on them for riding their bikes around the block, and the cops followed the kids back to their front door and then talked with the parents.
I think a huge part of that is context. Age, location, time of day, etc. I’d be curious to see numbers on this, usually it’s just asserted as “back in my day we played outside and got dirty all day!” but then I hear those same (usually now grand-) parents talk about all the tv shows/movies they watched as they espouse their views on modern media!
My assumption is a lot of those people who proudly proclaim that lifestyle were raised in (segregated) suburbs and have rose tinted glasses. But I’m also making assumptions like them, so again I’m curious to find info on this.
The success so far is really just political, which has largely been shutting down debate and dismissing calls for some kind of cost analysis of what we risk losing in enforcing this.
Whenever someone brings up this stuff, the politicians take the tone that "we won't let anyone get in the way of protecting children", and this is in response to people who in good faith think this can be done better. Media oligopolist love it because it regulates big tech, so they've been happy to platform supporters of the policy as well.
Third spaces won't reappear because the planning system in most cities shuts anything down the moment someone files a compliant. They get regulated out of existence the moment police express concern young people might gather there. The planning system (which in NSW/Sydney is the worse) has only gotten worse since the 80s after the green bans. It was largely put in place to allow for community say in how cities are shape, which sounds nice but it's mostly old people with free time participating who don't value 3rd spaces, even if they might end up liking them. They just want to keep things the same and avoid parking from getting overly complicated (and this is a stone throw away from train stations and the CBD).
Third places can be fixed by reforming planning which is slowly gaining momentum via YIMBY movements, but this social media ban is just not a serious contribution to changing that. If anything Social media phenomenon like Pokemon GO contributed more to these third places lighting up.
Governance in Australia is very paternalistic, it's a more high functioning version of the UK in that sense. I think it might be in part due to the voting system being a winner takes all single seat electorate preferential voting system which has a median voter bias for least controversial candidates.
As a kid I always felt being in Australia you missed out on a lot of things people got to do in America, that has slowly changed as media and technology has become less bound by borders but looks like that being undone.
Given that “social media” is in fact not banned and all this does is impact a select (and frankly logically inconsistent) list of services, this seems very unlikely. Children are still free to be groomed and gamble on Roblox and join servers belonging to The Com on Discord. To be clear I don’t think those services should be regulated by this obscene law either but this isn’t going to bring back any kind of halcyon era for kids. It will expand the surveillance of and shame around young people’s internet use, however.
It will also massively expand the surveillance of adults: if a platform introduces face scanning or checking government IDs for "age verification", then they don't just scan the underage users.
How so? It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation. The age verification service doesnt get browsing details, and the site providing content doesnt get any additional user details beyond what they would likely already have, including those subject to PII legislation.
This is false. Like all the age restricting laws being passed around the world, the implementation is not being specified and is being left to the individual platforms, which are using some combination of photo ID and video selfie in order to validate people's ages. Each platform is implementing it differently, and on different timelines. For example, X has failed to even respond for a while, but it's finally said they'll comply.
> Companies have told Canberra they will deploy a mix of age inference - estimating a user's age from their behaviour - and age estimation based on a selfie, alongside checks that could include uploaded identification documents.
> It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation.
This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify a single particular implementation for age-based verification and there's absolutely no single "age verification service" that platforms are legislated to use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based on several recommended methods, including age inference. https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-need-t...
Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding whether she's concerned about people bypassing authentication-based age verification checks: "If you’re an adult - you probably won’t need to do anything extra to prove your age, because like I said before, these platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.
Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.
Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
Thinking about this this will of course fail. Because teens will do what they did before online: make their own social networks. But by necessity these will be small.
I hope that's what will happen. That this is only really a problem for FANG, for the tech industry and doesn't actually prevent social media.
Funny, but I (and I believe many who support this law) would say that's a good thing. The problem is not (and never was) social interaction online, it is large corporations designing their algorithms to be as addictive as possible to tie kids as early as possible to their services.
I have had to recently get back to using Facebook (after creating the account ~15 years ago and leaving it dormant for >10 years), due to several sports clubs using it as their only means of communication. It's scary how good these algorithms have become, I often only want to look up something related to the club and end up being roped into 1h of doomscrolling. And I'm an adult with significant better impulse control than most teenagers.
While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or predation.
As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.
Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.
I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.
All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.
I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.
As an Australian the only platforms I have that asked for an age check were Discord and Bluesky. Which is funny as neither came under this legislation, they're implementing this because they chose to.
Nothing from Reddit or any of the Meta platforms which have to comply with this legislation.
Can you give examples of what your friends had to do for each platform? No one I know has been affected, so it does seem “invisible” to me. However I’ve also been an adult for quite some time now. If you don’t mind me asking, are your friends young adults?
Apropos social media and age, I have some relatives with the last name of Aam. (Åm or Aam is an old farm in the Volda area of Sunnmøre, Norway).
If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it does.
This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed it. Go and try if you want.
So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media friends to notice.
You have to see if it's in a corporation's interest for false positives or false negatives. For you and AAM, it costs Facebook almost nothing for a false positive on "age abuse material" so I would expect them to continue to flag your family name as a false positive.
With snap and others, I would expect them to focus on reducing false negatives and give the benefit of the doubt to the kid who is under 16. Worst case, you say "Mea Culpa" and update your algorithm accordingly to any cases that you missed but the state has found.
Nothing has changed for my 15 year old either. It’s business as usual today for her.
She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection check on her behalf.
Are you kidding me? So the answer is let's let some random vendors used by said corporation scan her face? This feels like using DNA sequencing to confirm you're tall enough to ride the rollercoaster.
It’s just as reliable as you’d expect from a system that relies on shitty cellphone camera pics.
They’re trying to guess the age of someone who could pass for 11 or for 22, and who with careful use of makeup could push that figure in either direction.
For some reason (and this is one reason people think there's a conspiracy), that is the "preferred" form of age verification. It certainly saves the government from having to do IT.
> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this
I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.
It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over. Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for older people was the only metric.
The execution didn't finish; it started. Big policy changes typically take time to solidify, and it'll probably take a bit to get a reliable read on its trajectory. But there is international momentum on this, so making predictions based on whatever percentage of people that were supposed to have their accounts deactivated actually did the day of (if we even have that data, and I doubt that we do), is probably not going to be useful.
The government have previously stated they won’t pursue breaches unless they’re particularly egregious anyway so this is basically shameless political theatre.
ABC polled a cohort that's going through the most rebellious period in their lives and asked them whether they think authority figures can effectively prevent them from doing something they want to do. Had I been asked the same question as a teenager, I would've answered no every single time, regardless of the actual circumstances.
I actually feel that teens shouldn't be on social media at all. But I also don't think I should be able to lord that opinion over other people via fiat.
Sugar is pretty bad for teens as well but I don't think banning that will solve health issues anymore than this will help teens.
Personal decisions > a government trying to be mom
Governments always end up doing the most damage when their control is "for the good of their constituents."
This might seem like a good thing while they're parenting for you on things you agree with, however, there will likely come a time when they do something you don't and by then it will be too late.
I agree with you when I believe a choice can be freely made. But peer pressure as a child is extremely intense, and if you're the one weirdo you know whose parents don't allow them on Snapchat, it can cause lots of strife and probably be ineffective anyway.
This bit a community discord server of mine where I am a mod last night since we have a large oceanic contingent, somehow NZ got swept up in it too and we scrambled a bit to change our onboarding and other general policies.
These platforms are heavy censored with a direct line to governments. This will push kids to other platforms with less censorship. That's a major benefit.
As we go down this road platforms will need to be banned for everyone. For example VK wasn't on the list and they won't implement age checks. They and many other sites will need to be banned until you are left with a white list of acceptance sites. Add in age verification on those sites for everyone.
Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the standard.
> This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
...then the rest of the world will see what the people of China and Russia already know: bans on VPNs cause them to explode in popularity and development pace.
There's a reason that the most sophisticated VPNs and tunneling tech are built to evade the GFW.
I recently visited a remote part of Siberia, and I was amazed at the ubiquity of VPNs. Grandmothers who grew up in shamanic traditions knew how to get around apparent traffic shaping (even on youtube!) to listen to their traditional music. It was quite inspiring.
I'm not saying bans are a good idea - I'd much rather the adults in the room read the writing on the wall and bring about peaceful dismantling of legacy states in favor of a censorship-resistant internet.
They already started moving to different platforms. No VPNs needed. At some point they'll stray off the Internet (because gov.au of course barks at every platform except discord, mysteriously).
And, of course, as usual, this law, like all it's others in the rest of the world, will do absolutely nothing in protecting kids. It will instead only create a huge national security hacker paradise because everyone will use these so-called "age verification" services, which aren't exactly known for their security.
My belief is that late stage capitalism pushes democracies to fascism and the overton window requires politicians to break-up unpopular changes into a smaller changes. I am prognosticating why politicians would pretend to care about the mental health of children.
Controlling access to any substance is a long process, and the motives aren’t always clear at the beginning.
I’m not sure why Australian policymakers chose to take this step now, but regardless of the motive, it feels like a meaningful starting point. Social media’s engagement-driven echo chamber model has contributed to a deeply divided world, and governments stepping in can at least make parents’ jobs a little easier.
It's a relatively uncontroversial ban, with public support in Aus because of mental health concerns, and key social media sites complying.
VPN's come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's. As do the credit and debit that are usually required somewhere along the line to pay for the services.
Historically, if it's awkward to circumvent most people tend to comply; which means in turn that minority that can figure out a way around it are unlikely to find many of their friends present. While for majority there's unlikely to be much of a draw or peer group pressure to circumvent.
I'm sure Aus gov will monitor, media will highlight problems etc, but would be surprised if it was not actually quit effective.
While I'm not sure about this ban, _something_ is causing normally nice, peaceful Australia to be somewhere I don't feel safe anymore. My relatives in Melbourne have left, after being physically attacked and had their property vandalized by mostly young "activist" types who, no doubt, get all their news from social media.
Look. As gen z person who basically grew up with tech and social media and had it since I was ~12, there is no way that any ban that is not direct id verification will work, this will instead make the forbidden fruit more tasty and teens more tech literate since they will look for ways around the ban. It feels like a lot of older people are more detached to the times when they first got access to Internet and social media and assume that its all dopamine hits and brain rot, while in reality its curiosity for a bigger world beyond school and limited things that you can do while being underage, cheap entertainment, knowledge.
I kind of get it, except youtube... which has much more educational, news, and long form content. Also also forcing face/age verification sounds ripe with issues.
It has some educational content, most of it is brain rot like everywhere else though. Open a brand new youtube account and check out what's being pushed by default, you either get room temperature IQ political analysts or "shorts" with softcore porn thumbnails to bait people for a click
Open a new YT account then feed it with [1] for few hours at least then you will unleash the full power of Youtube... unless you missclick even once into some popular blog typically they very clearly aimed at low-IQ people which accidentably might be your kid or somebody else like you know who I mean. But to prevent that slippery slope at least partly, just increase the feeding time of your YT account with the best requests possible which are carefully stacked at [1].
Although I think that social media causes issues with underdeveloped brains, If this is about confirming age at the point of login, then this is really about identifying everyone and not protecting children. If this is the case, you know they are going to use this data to target people for speech related things.
I've said this before, but if countries want to mandate compliance, they should be required to provide the mechanism for compliance.
The rollout of this has been pretty rough all things considered, much of it because the mechanism for compliance is flawed. Anthony Albanese's latest instgram posts are full of comments from teens saying things like, "how am i still on instagram if you banned us". The primary reason for this is most providers are leveraging age-estimation techniques, because the law specifically states:
> 63DB Use of certain identification material and services
> (1) A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not:
> (a) collect government-issued identification material
In an effort to prevent identity theft, the bill as originally written(1) was updated(2) to forbid platforms from collecting government IDs as a proof of age. Even if you support the intent of the bill, the design-by-committee approach made the requirements so easy to circumvent that it's effectively security theater.
But thats what this law does not allow according to the head of this chain, specifically government ids are not allowed to prove age, even if you delete them unless I read it wrong
There is a pattern of government using moral panics to exert greater control. Australia and New Zealand seem to be used as a testbed for projects which are introduced elsewhere.
The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
The offline-socializing point is good, but it's also a cultural shift that won't magically happen because a law is passed. If anything, the hard part is rebuilding the offline spaces and social norms that used to make that easy.
Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for them to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids outside. Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens supposed to be where they won't be harassed. When I was a kid we used to just wander around and chat. There used to be a whole event on Friday evenings where high schoolers would decent on this mall across the street from two movie theaters. We went to the skating ring. There were teen clubs. More. Right now, I can't think of a single place a teen could just hang out besides at each other houses which is mostly what I watch them do. It makes sense why they end up in virtual spaces. They can socialize privately that way.
I agree. I had to coax people out after lockdown and it took years.
We do need offline spaces. I've been out for a Christmas lunch today. Much more meaningful than meeting on Zoom or whatever. I don't hate technology but I think we have to use it widely.
TIL English teenager isn't necessarily the translation of Dutch tiener. Wikipedia at least says 10–19 for us and 13–19 for English. In German the word teenager is also used and the page gives both definitions on the same page without realising it's self-contradictory
Idk that anyone takes this so literally (as that you're only a teenager if your cardinal age ends in the literal word teen and so twelve is definitely not a teenager), I've always understood it as "in their tens" but that may be my origin
>You may be "in michigan" but are you "from michigan".
I have literally 0 reason to answer this, it has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation, but to placate whatever weird obsession you have, yes. I was born in Michigan.
>Why would you say north america unless you have ties to canada.
Why do you care? Is North America offensive now or something?
I said "North America" because, for the purposes of this specific conversation, it doesn't matter at all. Except to you, apparently. For some unknown reason.
I try not to be super US-centric on international forums. First time someone's ever started questioning me about it, though.
North america encompasses the US, Canada AND MEXICO. Not sure what the age range for "teen" is in canada. If you are not canadian, why are you speaking for canadians. Don't think they even use "teen" in mexico as they speak spanish in mexico.
> I try not to be super US-centric on international forums.
HN is an american forum. You can be US-centric if you want. I give you permission.
The ban is also for anyone who refuses to submit their private data (face scan or government ID) to an unrelated 3rd party company which will invariably store that data with insufficient security.
The ban does not specify how companies are supposed to do it.
Eg Snapchat is not requiring ID (which the average Australian 15yo wouldn't have anyway), they're trying to determine age with the user's camera, and this is trivially spoofed using video played back on another device.
Honestly, this feels like another case where the headline sounds bold, but the real impact will be minimal. Any age-based restriction ends up in the same place: platforms are forced to collect more data just to “prove” someone’s age. When the target group is teenagers, that’s basically a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
From a technical perspective, this is impossible to enforce cleanly. Anyone with even basic internet literacy can bypass it with a VPN + fresh account + throwaway email. And of course, the teens most determined to get around it will be the ones the policy is supposedly protecting. The bigger issue is the false sense of security. Parents and politicians get to feel like something has been “done,” while the actual online risks don’t disappear — they just move somewhere less visible. If the goal is genuinely improving teen mental health, digital literacy and real support systems work far better than regulations that will inevitably leak.
Frankly, I would have been pissed if this were the case when I was a teen and I got a lot of healthy & useful value out of social media.
That said, some of the subcommunities I've seen created, particularly among young women, seem obviously unhealthy/toxic and regulation is probably needed there. I'm thinking of things like '#edtwt'.
But I also think we need to avoid ruining things for smart, responsible kids by focusing on the worst.
Its crazy how the AusGov has just tried to turn this into some kind of nationalistic celebration. Passing laws isolating children isnt to be celebrated by lighting up national monuments.
Do you have kids ? Do you see kids in your day to day life ? I do, every day, and even <10 years old already have permanent neck damage from scrolling as soon as they haves 5 seconds of free time. I see groups of friends walking back from schools, they're side by side, scrolling on their phone, not talking, not even looking in front of them. I walk by 3 schools multiple times every single day and that's all I see as soon as they're outside of the playground (because they're not allowed while inside). Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
Absolutely second this, and I am part of the younger generation. Technology is isolating. Social media feeds superficial relationships. The anxiety it creates is so worrying.
Yes. What I'm saying is that people can choose to leave online spaces that are abusive, as opposed to abuse at school or home, which are much harder (usually impossible) for children to escape.
Ah yes brilliant. Instead of trying to address these issues at their source let’s just let kids form immaterial connections online and guarantee they never learn how to form any sort of in person communication skills!
I'm sorry what does a gay kid do about parents that think they are fundamentally immoral? What does any kind of abused kid do? Because my parents were abusive, but not in the way that left marks and the internet was the only thing keeping me sane. I lived in a neighborhood with no kids my age and across town from my school, so even the friends I made there lived nowhere near me. The internet was not a place I made immaterial connections. It's where I maintained what I had until the rare occasions I could see them outside of school. It was where I got to interact with people who gave me the motivation to keep going until I could escape. What does a kid like me do without the internet? No one was going to step in because my parents isolated me and where a bit mean (from their POV, not mine). Not when I was clean, had food and clothing, and was a straight A student, be real.
You are framing this as if you had no in person social connections due to your circumstances. By your OWN admission elsewhere in this thread, this is untrue:
> Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for them to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids outside. Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens supposed to be where they won't be harassed. When I was a kid we used to just wander around and chat. There used to be a whole event on Friday evenings where high schoolers would decent on this mall across the street from two movie theaters. We went to the skating ring. There were teen clubs. More. Right now, I can't think of a single place a teen could just hang out besides at each other houses which is mostly what I watch them do. It makes sense why they end up in virtual spaces. They can socialize privately that way.
What I am saying is that we should work toward bringing those ^ spaces BACK, rather than allowing kids to wallow in digital space. The more we are online, the more difficult that becomes. The more time we spend in digital space, the more we lose control over our physical spaces.
Ah yes brilliant. Let's keep trying to solve these issues that we've been trying to solve for centuries. That's clearly going well. Instead, let's put a bandaid on it so we don't have to look at the issue for a little bit.
Alternatively, letting some kids who struggle to form connections IRL learn to form them online might give some the confidence and self-assuredness to form connections IRL when they want to.
Anyway I'm not sure why you think that I'm suggesting we don't try to address bullying and family abuse. Did I say we should only do one or the other?
We very clearly are making progress on these century long issues, unless you somehow think kids now are growing up in more hostile physical environments than they were 100 years ago.
This ban does not prevent kids from using IM platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord so your argument that this somehow restricts the ability for online communication is false.
What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
> What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
Actually, what I'm arguing against is the restriction of whatever apps a government chooses to apply their very loose definition to. What happens when the kids congregate on another platform? Presumably they'll just add that to the list too, right? Does a cat and mouse game seem productive? To say nothing of the precedent set being used for political ends.
What I'm arguing for is stuff that may actually solve the underlying issues - like, for example, addressing those predatory algorithms you refer to.
The real danger isn't the ban itself... it's the precedent that could be built on top of it if governments decide they like controlling digital participation
Texas SB2420 requires age verification to download apps. Now, both the government and corporations have a new lever to identify exactly who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and can selectively cut you off from everything. Government-endorsed technofeudalism with inverted totalitarian features normalizing deviancy to become shameless, traditional totalitarianism.
-> Scenario
Want to use cash for lunch or parking? Sorry, no, you must be banked, and have an app.
Want to use a bank? You must use an app.
How do you get an app? You must have a phone and an ID.
Want to buy a phone? Whoops, conundrum encountered.
(And don't even think of wanting to get an ID.)
-> In summary
This further disenfranchises the extremely poor, and takes power and freedom away from everyone who isn't a billionaire.
Just online, which has been a bad idea from day one due to the evertrending centralization of the Internet, the primary catalyst thereof being people's laziness. Offline, it still exists.
Not really, it gives them justification to more thoroughly remove privacy and anonymity in order to make sure the age and identity of the user are more confidently known.
"It's just kind of pointless, we're just going to create new ways to get on these platforms, so what's the point," said 14-year-old Claire Ni.
Claire Ni concluded it best. They are just going to find new ways. Imagine a kid stopping using something because of the law or government ban. Those lawmakers are just delusional if they think they can pass a law and the kids will stop using social media.
That’s like saying we should let children smoke because as a fifteen year old I was able to acquire cigarettes.
I might have taken up smoking (to be fair I took it up when homeless from being around older homeless people who smoked) but a large cohort of my generation didn’t.
I’m not against teens communicating with each other online, but I’m very much against the algorithm-driven dopamine addiction factories that are social media today.
Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
If you ever worked with people who fully grew up with modern social media and just entered the workforce you know we're already doomed, there is no recovery from this, that's why governments are starting to act
I'll take on the low status role of not knowing if this is a good idea.
I've seen the data showing teen sanity nose diving concurrently with social media penetration. I'm also a borderline kook libertarian.
So I appreciate the arguments in both directions, and I think the only way to find out if it works is to try it out. Preferably on a remote isolated island without nuclear weapons, in case things go badly :)
I really hope other nations, including the United States, copy this. Australia proved that it is possible. I think the results will be so overwhelmingly positive that others will take notice. Good job Australia!
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Isn't it a little early to declare success? I think the bigger worry with the US though is not whether it is technically possible, but whether anyone in power cares to actually help kids versus using this it as an excuse to implement Orwellian surveillance upon citizens.
Alcohol, tobacco and many other products have age restrictions, so do cars and many other products of the modern society. Social media can and should have age restrictions.
This is a nonsense take that gets perpetuated over and over. For some reason.
Purchasing alcohol or buying a car is not the same as verifying your age on an internet property. They aren't even comparable. This is just as dumb as saying "well you have to verify your age to go into a bar". Sure, but does the bartender or salesman who sells you the alcohol completely remember every pixel of your photo or video selfy, permanently? Or do they just remember your face more generally?
The problem with these age verification laws is that they harm everybody, adults and kids. They don't do anything to protect kids and their sole purpose is a way for governments to suppress things they don't like. Any age verification technology (be it age estimation or similar) has a permanent record of the photo ID or video selfies (or whatever you use to prove your age) that you give it. Forever. If these systems didn't have those records, the result would be you having to verify your age every time you visit the website. There is a massive, massive difference between getting alcohol at a bar, or going to a strip club or similar, and providing your photo ID to a bouncer or bartender, who probably won't remember your ID after 5 minutes, versus a computer which permanently remembers it. That is the differentiator.
Surveillance could be part of it, if you let it be. Improved mental health, education, and social outcomes for each generation is also pretty darned important.
For people in an industry that is _built_ on A/B testing, HN sure expects governments to get everything perfect first go with no edge cases or externalities doesn’t it!
Of course it is possible, why would it not? I'm glad this is happening and I'm sure it'll follow in other countries, probably not the in the US though. Frankly I really hope most people just get off social media's grip and start interacting the way we used to.
I hope it won’t, because the whole thing is just a medium to enable digital ID using fears as a justification, in this time it’s kids.
The whole ‘anxious generation’ isn’t because of social media, it’s because the new generations are hopeless and helpless (incl genz and millennials too), wherever you look in any domain, it’s bleak times waiting ahead for them, boomers fucked them up severely and now want to suppress them with laws and bills and control them because they know for a fact something will snap at this current rate.
I don't necessarily think this as it is will "work" but I'm all for someone at least trying to do something. Yes, there are a bunch of externalities and potential second order effects that don't sit well with me but, at this stage, I'd rather some attempt at trying to regulate than throwing up hands and saying its all too hard.
Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they did this or not frankly
Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10% but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
"I don't necessarily think this as it is will work" != "harmful" or "dumb"
Like do warnings on cigarettes work? I definitely saw a guy move cigs to older pack he had from china because he didn't like ugly warning picture on the new pack. Do mandatory id checks work? If I saw some kids get their hands on smokes does it mean "it doesn't work" and therefore there should be no limits on big tobacco?
I like to win another poster said about addiction to cigarettes other things. The world drugs was an absolute failure. I think that is how this is going to go, lots of regulation and expenditure for something that's going to ultimately fail. Can't really work unless it's a little authoritarian, such as permitting Websites to only allow youth who have a permit. But I am in agreement, we need to do more, and we can't really depend on the parents anymore. So I think in a way, we have to make it costly for children to do things they're not supposed to be doing, but without disadvantaging certain groups.
How does a country effectively enforce this? Below is how they propose doing this. If you don't have any form of verification of your actual age, it's seems like they are just going on what the user says ( self reports). How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their age?
>the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature, but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued identification as the only way to prove their age because of privacy concerns.
> How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their age?
You make them bleed money when you find they are in violation. They either figure it out or they go under as a company. There isn't a natural law saying companies have a right to exist.
Go and read the actual report of what the eSafety commissioner is requiring.
The company can't be found liable if they have put in reasonable age verification technology, particularly if the user lied about their age or found a way to circumvent the restrictions.
They clearly aren't going by just what the user says as the companies have implemented age verification tools that try to do that detection.
How can seatbelts be enforced? This is preposterous and imbecilic- if there isn't a policeman inside every car checking every minute how will we make sure that people are wearing them. Clearly there is no point in trying!
They are everywhere, they can also be mobile and placed almost anywhere.
These camera are mounted high so they can view down in through the windscreen.
They automatically issue a $1,251 for not wearing one to the license holder.
any kid who cant figure out how to slide right by a government hack is a looser, and while we should feel a little bad for both of them, presumambly someone will take pity and fix there phones up , and let them know that there is sex and everything on the net
Starting Jan 1, 2026, Texas SB2420 is also requiring ID verification for all app stores. It's not about "think of the children", it's lazy parents who chose unAmerican totalitarianism and billionaires weaponizing government to eliminate privacy and make data brokers rich.
> Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
Saw a screenshot last night of someone who can't get into JIRA (or some other Atlassian product) until they either submit two forms of government ID or record a face scan. Seems like a great and effective initiative /s
Text of the screen:
"Your Atlassian account is not age verified.
Laws in your country require us to verify your age before accessing some products, including Jira and Confluence. This process takes 5-10 minutes. This can be done using two pieces of government ID or by performing a face scan."
Now, all we have to do is mandate that you pass a psychiatric test in order to use social media or LLMs. In this way, we can protect the mentally disabled. People are killing themselves after going on sites like Reddit. It's too dangerous to the mentally disabled.
Interesting to frame this as a bad thing. As a parent, I would take that as a feature, not a bug. To me this is very suspicious why there seem to be so many people here, who I am assuming are mostly adults, advocating so strongly strongly for <16 olds told be on social media, as if it was something they need.
I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss political issues in the public forum. That's basically the definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse) social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights are limited, but they do have rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
The only appropriate comment here would be invoking Goodwin Law. Everything else is too mild to describe the journey of former democracies to totalitarian regimes.
Let's not go overboard. While I don't agree with this law, it's not much different from other underage laws that are commonplace: alcohol, tobacco, driving... I don't think it's an indicator of totalitarianism, it's just the same-old lawmaking philosophy updating to new developments.
My personal favourite analogy is gambling. The constant microdosing of dopamine to get you to hang around and spend just a little more ~money~ attention.
I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.
I think phones and social media are harmful, but I get the sense there's a political motive behind this. We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc... And suddenly they ban social media. Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.
I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids" unfortunately
I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.
Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.
If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.
The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.
In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.
Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that?
There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
So, do absolutely nothing is your plan?
Yes. The internet is awesome and the government will destroy it.
> These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.
From their users in Australia? Clearly not.
yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.
You mean like the outside world?
What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose?
I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood. It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas.
... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation
Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on.
I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.
There's hardly any parallel between the type of political content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and what's found in today's social media. It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.
Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people. It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at least have brains that are fully-developed.
Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.
You can guess exactly how authorities would define "political agitation", though. dangerous things to allow them to ban.
> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.
This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.
The original comment suggests that the policy is politically motivated. The commenter replied with other reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I think its a valid response.
I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.
No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the point.
Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter, went viral recently about how social media needs to be banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist movement.
https://x.com/jennineak/status/1992395176283922767
The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens without social media, given their actions over the past few years.
I think this is a bit of a conspiracy colordrops, honestly. It's the same sort of stuff as on Infowars.
Is that all you got? Ad hominem?
> 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with preventing harms"
> 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them"
Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions.
> This may be true
Do you think it's true?
>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.
If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.
Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.
> I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.
Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.
Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle.
Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers in UK (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_tqQYmgMQg
>"Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you?"
Whatever your conclusion is, it’s sort of beside the point I was making, which is that the many of the arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol) are meaningfully different than the arguments being made today about age verification for websites.
>“So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.”
This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.
I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities. Which is why I thought your comment of “eerily similar” was off-base.
If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation
The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party, which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won’t have been deliberate.
Murdoch media killed a story critical of Labor government member so there is not _no_ evidence of support here.
https://archive.is/Hlr4l
You mean this guy? https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/08/29/albanese-murdoch-meetin...
The traditional outlets you are referring to are now worse because of social media.
nothing is worse than social media - absolutely nothing
I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.
Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.
I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).
The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content
I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist
That is just a thought-stopping reference. Why does this literal nobody who nobody has to listen to have the total backing of both major political parties? That is the real question and it obviously goes back to narrative control and the move from democracy to an authoritarian managerial state.
Of course they aren't. If they were actually helping kids, they would be going after algorithmic feeds in general and the most predatory platforms like Roblox (especially given its recent scandals), doing something about kids being exposed to gambling advertising, etc.
The bill was put up for public comment for less than one business day before being rammed through Parliament. Australia is just sending out one of the horsemen of the infocalypse so that other countries have an excuse to follow suit. Like how our "Assistance And Access" Act was a test run of the UK's "snooper's charter".
This law will just lead to:
1. kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these filters
2. platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"
3. everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)
I actually do think people directly see the negative public health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and that that is the driving force behind all of this.
I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.
It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.
My son is 15. My talk to him went something like this: There's a lot of porn and nasty things that you can't unsee, so be careful what you look at. Also, those extortion gangs target teenage boys, so if some girl is suddenly hot for you online, come see me immediately so we can troll the ever loving fuck out of them. I think it went pretty well. We like doing things as a family, but more like the Addams family...
That's the only way that can work in the long term.
Interesting, my experience is completely opposite; I'm not losing to them at all.
Honest conversations with your kids from an early age are key.
How do you know you’re not losing?
How many years of evidence do you have?
I think I won my battle against being addicted to games… but I don’t go back to find out.
You don't know you lost until after it happens. Then it's too late.
I'd view that as more of a works for me argument than necessarily actionable. Social dynamics are complex and personality, status, etc, plays into which relationships end up mattering, being convincing, etc. I.e. some children bond closer to a grandparent not because parents have failed in any way at honest conversations.
3 kids, same honest conversations, 2 where it worked and works very well, 1 where it is a constant battle.
So sorry but no, the platforms are addictive and not all the kids can resist against an armada of statisticians ensuring the systems stay addictive only through honest conversations.
By the way, this would mean you could solve all the addiction issues if it would be working...
> It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.
Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very much in the target age here, and they only have a passing understand of what social media even is due to us explaining how unhealthy it is to them.
It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same, but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state isn't the answer.
I remember there being an experiment where parents were placed in a room with some toys their children were allowed to play with and some toys their children weren't allowed to.
They measured the parents perceived level of control against their actual level of control by seeing if they stopped their children from playing with the researchers laptop that had been left in the corner of the room.
Part of me wonders if it was apocryphal, I'm not sure if a test like that would get past an ethics committee (at least since laptops existed)
Likewise, the state abdicating its responsibility and placing the burden solely on parents isn't fair either, and that is exactly the environment we currently find ourselves in.
you could if you just whitelisted the apps you wanted your kids to use
and delete the web browser?
there are similar mechanisms for controlling website usage. school computers do it all the time
Computers (they each had their own) in public space and no phone until 14. Worked great w/o no filtering or whitelisting of any sort.
I think this might be true at the parent level, but less and less true as you climb up the government ladder.
The shitty part is that when the parents really do believe something is "for the kids", it becomes that much easier to push through laws that have awful side effects (intentional ones or not). Which is why "for the kids" is so common, of course.
Banning the printing press in Europe would have stopped the 30 years war.
Somehow I don't think anyone here would approve of the long term consequences.
The end result of this will be that everyone needs to give their real name and address to view social media.
Anything you say or watch that the current government doesn't like will result in police coming for a chat.
It's not that the people don't genuinely believe what they're saying. It's that they've deluded themselves into thinking their ideological right is "for the kids".
There's always been Reefer Madness sorts of people. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Video Games, DnD, Rap Music, Homosexuality, and on and on. Today it's half woke mind virus and half DEI (for lack of a better term). Most of the people that spout this stuff genuinely believe they're fighting for the kids.
Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn. And its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones. How would you measure any level of success from this initiative? Doing something isnt a solution if it has tons of bad sideeffects
> Its not good faith because its already broken by vpn.
One does not follow from the other.
We make speeding illegal even though even the most affordable cars can trivially bypass all speed restrictions. It doesn't mean that the efforts to curb speeding are in bad faith just because it is still possible to bypass speed reduction rules.
Thats a great comparison. Wonder why banning homelessness works so well. Oh we dont ban it? Must be because we dont care enough
> That[']s a great comparison.
Thank you. I thought it was a pretty good analogy, too.
>Wonder why banning homelessness works so well[?] Oh we don[']t ban it? Must be because we don[']t care enough[.]
I do not understand what point you are trying to make about homelessness, and how that would be at all relevant to keeping teenagers from having accounts on social media.
That's not a great comparison.
I was just pointing out that the existence of ways to violate a law, does not in any way, mean that passing the law or enforcing it is a bad faith effort.
> its forcing kids with no credit cards to download free and malware ridden ones
It very much is not.
It very much is. Free VPNs almost always have some sort of catch. E.g. HolaVPN users agree in the ToS to become an exit node for other VPN users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)
If social media is so compelling, then teens almost certainly will take whatever steps are necessary to access it.
TikTok is not going to make kids better informed about foreign policy.
Australia is a huge contradiction.
“Kids” are no longer old enough to use social media as they are “kids”. At the same time Australia states are updating laws believing “kids” are old enough to be treated as and tried as adults in a court of law.
Indeed. We will stick them in prison, but they can’t use social media. It’s a farce.
Meta == Phillip Morris - This is a public health issue and will likely need to be treated like tobacco. Kids can't vote so I don't see the political motivation.
Good analogy.
The solution, however, isn't prohibition or age restrictions; it's either regulating the algorithms or holding these companies responsible for the adverse outcomes their platforms contribute to. Safe harbor laws made sense when tech wasn't filtering/promoting content, now that they are influencing the material we see, these laws must no longer apply.
This may mean adopting a modern equivalent to libel laws. Something akin to: if an algorithm pushes false information, the company behind the algorithm can be sued for harm. Disallow terms of service that force arbitration or cap liability limits.
I think the solution is banning accepting compensation for third party advertising.
I know all the reasons it "wouldn't work", but I'd love to see somewhere try this.
They'll vote eventually, and preferably won't be damaged in irreparable ways by then
I just can't get behind any of it, sorry. The puritanical moralizing feels so good until you cause a revolution or the species goes extinct.
> Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.
I get the sense this is supposed to signify something; don't know the name, but looking at their profile, great career, Obama's chief of staff. What's the implication?
Agreed. I'm no fan of social media, and especially not a fan of TikTok and Instagram. But I really doubt this is about the kids more than it is about getting another foothold along the path of controlling internet access wholesale.
It's also a massive propaganda channel. We can argue about whether any one particular state is involved in that or not but gut reaction is that if this were the real concern, their solution would be to regulate and censor what is posted online rather than kicking them off the platform and thus detaching them from the teat of (alleged) indoctrination. (that push for censorship also exists).
Maybe Australia and the US are not involved in any social media propaganda campaigns but, at least in the case of the US, there is most certainly an abundance of precedence.
I don't know the sincere feelings of these types wrt the safety and well-being of children but I don't think the goal is "getting them back" wrt policy or whatever.
> It's also a massive propaganda channel.
The problem is that school curriculum is as well. I remember going to school in Texas and hearing the phrase "Northern War of Aggression" to describe the Civil War.
Censorship is never about cutting off information, it's only ever about cutting off information that the censors don't like. Given how openly hostile both AU and the US's governments are to progressive politics and worldviews, I am dubious that this isn't about controlling kids' access to a more open view of the world than their schools will give them.
The Australian government isn’t banning books. It’s banning access to harmful content.
One morning I logged into Reddit and saw a video of Charlie Kirk get his head blown off. I didn’t want to see that, but for some reason it wasn’t taken down yet. I’m really glad my 12 year old daughter didn’t have to see that…
Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime reporting on steroids.
Each party is splitting into factions. I imagine the establishment of both parties think social media is a problem
Maybe. I think it's overall a rightward shift, only in urban cores is it accelerating a leftward shift. To the extent that it is motivating marginal voters to vote (which I think it is), it is also benefitting the right. It's also breaking down ethnic voting patterns in a way that benefits the right, I think.
It is not motivating marginal voters to vote. The choice is between two nearly identical establishment candidates from two private clubs. The electorate is going the same way it's going in Europe, except in Europe other parties are legal (although marginalized through parliamentary methods.)
In the UK, for example, Reform has been consistently polling the same as the Conservatives and Labour added together., and all three of those added together only represent 2/3 of the electorate. In the US, that translates to 2/3 of people becoming non-voters.
Why that might look like a rightward shift in the US is because the Republicans don't fix their primaries (since the 90s), and their voters actually have an effect on who gets picked to run. Why it won't actually be a rightward shift is because Republicans ignore their platforms after being elected, and don't mind getting thrown out at the end of a term or two to work at the businesses they helped while in office.
Democrats simply don't believe in any sort of democracy anymore. They invest all their effort into yelling at black people and Hispanics, and raising as much money as they can from the worst people in the world. The rest of the time they spend attacking anybody running to the left of them as racist or Russian, while their media outlets simply ignore those people other than when they're helping promote the slander. That's whats pushing away "ethnic voting."
As a black person, I know when the voting season is here because I see a bunch of paid Democrats running around calling black people who criticize their party ethnic slurs and using the word "massa" a lot. Republicans don't do that. They don't rely on black people so just ignore us. Democrats rely on us, but will never do anything for us, so they use terror.
I definitely think your views are a good example of what I mean, it’s giving internet poisoning.
It's almost as if a country's population need more than 2 parties to express themselves.
The two party system exists because even in a multi party system (eg. those that exist in proportional representation governments) still end up as "In government" vs "In opposition"
Secondly, we employ "adversarial" systems for two branches of government (legislative and judicial) because it's a hell of a lot easier to spot flaws in ideas of people you are opposed to (as opposed to some European Judiciaries that have "inquisitorial" systems, where a judge investigates activity)
Very often in the proportional systems people opine that "grand coalitions" should form, with the two largest parties, although that loses a lot of the advantages of the adversarial system, and has a tendency to steam roll smaller interests in the country.
Finally, the Greeks pointed out that governance within societies cycles through a series of styles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
The USA itself has gone through SIX iterations of how parties should look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_system#United_States
I think the Greeks called our form of government an oligarchy. Elections as popularity contests are so easily swung by money.
Instead, democracy was determined to be selecting public officials by random lots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I guess it's a bit like the jury system.
I read an article not long ago on here about how promotions in companies should also be done by lottery in order to break up cabals.
People in power just want total control of the narrative and they don't want you to find out the truth about anything. Look at Walz in MN--he's like the ultimate Jedi "nothing to see here" mind trick with his wholesome grandfatherly persona, which is furthest from the actual reality of who and what he is. They all just want to force you into their reality and they hate it when you don't go there.
This is a ban on “children” having access to social media? What are you on about ?
Every political party ON THE PLANET has always had to manage internal factions, it doesn't matter if you're talking the Soviet Communist Party, the Democrats, the Republicans, The Tea party faction.
There's absolutely nothing new about parties having internal divisions. Even the fact that at the moment everything is so partisan is nothing new, history has shown that several times over the past century that politics has followed a penudulum that swings from partisan extremes, back to centrist moderates, and then back to the extremes.
Youtube really wants to send me down the alt-right pipeline. I watch a few WW2 history videos and suddenly I must identify with "Mr Mustache" as the kids say. TikTok wants to radicalize me the other way, and shows me every video of a cop abusing their power that they can find. It cuts both ways.
I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium. Mamdani did really well by making good social media posts. Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse because they have a competent grasp on social media in common. Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
> I think what's killing Dems is that they don't understand the medium.
Generally agree, but
> Him and Trump had a grand old time at the whitehouse
Yeah, but that wasn't entirely positively received, despite his earlier social media success. Him buddying up with Trump was a huuuuge turn off for me.
> Newsom has been trolling lately and his approval ratings are only going up.
Newsom's content is also a huge turn off for me, and I am not convinced that his supposed approval ratings are not simply more CTR type machinations from the DNC. Maybe there's some segment of the population that genuinely wants whatever the hell Newsom is pushing content-wise, I certainly don't have #s on my side. Mamdani's efforts - Trump buddying aside - were much better.
> Dems being a million years old is killing the dems.
Yes, but I think age is simply a proxy for a number of other highly correlated behaviors and positions. Most progressives can name a couple of >70yo dems for whom these complaints do not apply.
Non-American countries are also importing a lot of American politics. I'd rather that didn't happen and is alone worthy of curbing in my opinion.
> We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions
I have literally never heard this.
The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like tik tok. Your argument seems like quite a stretch.
> The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like tik tok.
That is exactly what the ban aims to do? TikTok is literally listed in the article as one of the platforms ordered to ban access by under-16s
The ban is on having an account. Tiktok video is publicly viewable.
> Tiktok video is publicly viewable
Is it still publicly viewable without age verification in Australia? It's a little unclear from TFA whether the ban is purely on account creation, or also applies to viewing.
All the ban does is stop kids from having accounts, if the service allows anonymous usage then they can still find somewhere to doom scroll. My teen son has been blocked from Snapchat, and was this evening doom scrolling on Tik Tok until I blocked it on our home network.
I'm curious to understand why your approach to TikTok is banning it. Why do you think this is the right solution? Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
No, it’s that he will spend hours doom scrolling whatever they feed to him.. I’ve tried to lead him down a path of watching more educational stuff on YouTube but he will just end up doom scrolling shorts.. I’m trying to figure out ways to enable him access but not have him waste hours with shorts.. I know there must be short form content that’s good but I’ve not seen any evidence watching over his shoulder.. I block shorts on YouTube for myself even.. at this point the best I can think of is allowing access in short windows of time with longer chunks of blocked access.. if anyone has ideas I’d love to hear them.
Short-form content (if you can call it that) is a weapon of mass attention span destruction. IMHO the doom-scrolling loop it creates should be illegal, regardless of the audience.
You assume that banning usage was the first step instead of the last step.
I'm not OP, but I'm guessing they started with talking to the kid, or more intermediate steps.
> Are you concerned at all about your son's ability to cope independently from oversight and control?
Kids aren't fully independent for good reason, and a very hard part of parenting is deciding how much independence to give them vs. sheltering them from the parts of the world that will hurt them. If a kid comes home with drugs or hardcore porn it is completely reasonable to confiscate them with no regard for independence and control. Is TikTok the same as heroin? No. But it is provably harmful in any number of ways that young brains do not have the tools to handle, and the benefits are arguably non-existent for most. With other things like sports, we know that there is the possibility of getting hurt, but that can be mitigated and the benefits far outweigh the risks.
I'm actually glad to read about a parent taking responsibility. There's nothing important about Tiktok that won't wait until the child is 16/18.
Serious question: Do you now have, or have you ever had, children to raise?
This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
But think of the children! Or the terrorist! Or communists! Whichever makes you accept the surveillance state.
The nanny-state control freaks used "think of the children" so often over the years that it became a meme, and yet here we are. What a workhorse!
There's no motive other than "easy politicial win". The kids aren't gonna vote against you (they don't vote), parents will vote for you, you get to show people you protected children and passed legislation. Politicians support anything that keeps them in votes and campaign contributions.
Why does the motivation matter so much? It’s not a global ban, it’s not a permanent ban, nobody is going to jail. It’s like seeing if moving the smoking age to 18 will improve health outcomes.
It’s ruining their lives as far as we can tell, and at the end of the day it’s just one country testing it out. It’ll be stastically significant, culturally close enough of a sample set for us to learn from.
I’m curious to see what the 1-2-3 year effects are. We need to let some real life experimentation happen, somewhere, instead of accepting what every conglomerate wants.
I get that “it’s easy to say” for me as someone completely unaffected by this law.
The study that was posted last week regarding at school banning of phones was enlightening. It improved scores within two years after a bit of resistance. Boom!
I want them to have a chance at being healthy and well-educated; we can’t stop teens from smoking altogether but we can sure limit their access by default.
> I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.
I mean... you can say that about most of things in life. Behind every social movement or policy, it's always a mix of good faith, cynical fearmongering, and opportunism by people or organizations who stand to gain something from it. Does it matter?
If you think that social media and smartphones are harmful to the youth, you (a) should probably be glad that someone is doing something decisive about it; and (b) you get a large-scale experiment that will hopefully prove or disprove that.
This is an extremely unethical experiment.
I think adults are barely able to take reasoned political positions in today’s online environment, but at least an adult has the experience to make the attempt. Exposing kids to the type of online political persuasion we have today means that we are exposing them to something they have not got the tools to navigate. They just get swept up into whatever the popular idea of the day happens to be. To me, the argument that separating kids from social media separates them from today’s political onslaught is one of the best arguments in favor of it.
In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out?
The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.
The insistence on perfect age verification requires ending anonymity. Age verification to the level of buying cigarettes or booze does not.
Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained, and most kids are locked out.
In the same way that kids occasionally obtain cigs or beer despite safeguards, sometimes they may get their hands on a code. Prosecute anyone who knowingly sells or gives one to a minor.
> Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...
Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?
The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple times
So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution as though they've sufficiently thought about the people affected and the harms involved.
>The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification
Yes, that's what they did.
It could be designed to be anonymous.
Government runs authentication service that has your personal details.
User creates account on platform Y, platform Y asks government service if your age is >18, service says y/n. Platform never finds out your personal details.
OAuth for age verification.
The government then knows all the services you use. No bueno.
There are better ways to do this including zk proofs, but you gotta work against people mass reselling them. Could do some rate limited tokens minted from a proof maybe.
The government still knows your identity in this scenario, so it's a pretty limited form of anonymity (i.e. only suitable for activities the government isn't hostile to)
I know Americans don't want to hear this, but once the government turns hostile, internet anonymity won't save you, just like how guns won't save you (hello propaganda and a large and very active brainwashed minority that also has guns).
The only thing saving you from a hostile government is a well educated populace that really wants democracy and is willing to fight for it (through constant activism, peaceful & other types of protests). This is where many democracies are failing now. No amount of technology or rules can replace large amounts of constantly vigilant eyes that understand how democracy is subverted.
I would rather optimize for not giving companies too much power and end up with a Kafkaesque patchwork of corporate abuses and regulatory captures.
Some concerns: - government gets a list of every website that requests your age - every website has to register with the government to initiate age verification checks
Which pretty much puts an end to any notion of an open internet. But maybe a system I prefer to one where a bunch of random startups have my age verification biometrics .
Would zero knowledge proofs work here? I'm not enough of a cryptography nerd so I don't know if it would be a practical use-case.
I don't see the danger of pornography, tbh. Oh, much of it is sick, sure, but violent video games are far more harmful. Would it be better to depict loving, caring relationships? Hell, yes! But there are so few of those these days.
My teenage son struggles to have any meaningful dialog with any of the girls his age. It's like he doesn't exist. The few kids who are "dating" is basically the exact scenario that MGTOW depicts--girls only go for the elite jocks and ignore everyone else like they don't even exist. Everyone is miserable. Many will eventually grow out of it, but I don't think the females will ever view themselves as doing anything but "settling" because of the nonsense programmed into their heads. And yes, social media is largely responsible for how extreme the situation has become. In the 90s, girls were picky, but nothing like now. So all that young men have left is like AI chatbots and porn and it's better to not take that away from them, too.
The enemy (AUS) of my enemy (social media's effect on kids) is my friend (this ban). Their motivation is only mildly interesting.
It's four horsemen of the infocalypse 101. Look at the platforms they allowed to continue - discord and roblox, the specific worst of all socials with the most predators, least effective countermeasures.
The purpose of a thing is what it does. Australia's policies do not protect children. They quite brazenly and blatantly leave children vulnerable and exploited. The question of what those actions accomplish has a simple answer - narrative control, censorship, and weaponization of public discourse against dissent.
The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education and more information.
None of the policy Australia crafted does anything good. It's just another power grab using "won't you think of the children?!" as the excuse. Next year it will be terrorism or drugs or money laundering, and they'll keep constricting around civil liberties until they have absolute control.
They'll also put various racial and ethnic officials in prominent positions, so that you may not criticize anything lest you be deemed a racist or bigot (super effective social engineering.)
> The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education and more information.
This is just complete bullshit. Ah yes, my solution to this problem is just to require every single family to be infinitely better in every way imaginable. What is the proposal if that can't happen? We just execute people who don't meet the "stable loving family environment" No doubt in my mind you are from the generation of a stiff upper lip
Maybe. Do you forget that people use to not have phones or social media and they still had independent thought? Just because kids aren’t introduced to videos and comments about politics at a young age, doesn’t mean they’re going to be brainwashed by the ruling government. Societies operated just the same before social media.
Edit: Dont get me wrong, there could be ulterior motives, but kids will have other ways to educate themselves on the happenings of the world beside social media
¿Por que no los dos?
Current social media is terrible for children - this is known. They've been told many times they need to change or they'll get banned. They have not. This is known. It reminds me a little of when Australia banned Amazon because Amazon refused to charge GST (their version of VAT or sales tax).
The surveillance part is about adults having to upload their identity. This concern is entirely separate from the part where children are banned.
Maybe they will use more common sense then getting manipulated by bot farms.
Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a political or commercial context, but it should not be the only one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.
All popular grooming platforms were already excluded from this policy
I thought that was curious as well. Roblox is allowed? Really?
Just my anecdote addled opinion but i seems like most of the people being mentally "cooked" by social media are in their 30's ,my generation, and up to maybe late 60's.
I don’t think the US will ever enact a similar ban. The power to shape young minds is too great, even if these service also increase suicides in children to some degree.
The same algorithms that showed IDF war crimes compilations and turned a generation against Israel can be reshaped to push a different, right-wing narrative. The David Ellison’s of the world have too much power to allow regulation getting in the way of this.
>We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions,
When Twitter added its location feature and it turned out that political accounts with millions of followers are run out of Pakistan or India you have to be crazy to still deny the scope of foreign influence that is exerted over social media.
You see it with the rise in anti-semitism or Russia's explicit promotion of influencers targeting Western youth. Why on earth would we let our kids be brainwashed by foreign intelligence agencies? There is no reason to assume this is some "hidden agenda", this is as big of a public issue as the mental health of teenagers. The United States used to have media rules that limited foreign ownership in companies with a broadcasting license, and now 14 year olds get their political lessons straight from Moscow, it's ridiculous.
To be fair, "anti-semitism" claims have been 90% bad faith. Gaza was the internet's Vietnam.
We got just as mad at the internet letting our citizens at home see the brutality as we did with Jane Fonda and calling her "Hanoi Jane" after she traveled to Vietnam to bring light to the conflict(not a war).
I don't think there's any merit in being upset at dead children being reported because it messes with our national security goals. If the goals don't have public support with truthful reporting, they're basically illegitimate.
I would reject the notion that shifting public sentiment is a result of foreign influence campaigns, which is not to say it doesn't exist to an extent.
I've seen plenty of real information, from non-anonymous American journalists that I'm certain are the largest factor in any sea-change amongst Americans.
And despite the claim, I've yet to see solid evidence of large, pakistan-based accounts wielding massive influence on twitter. Most anonymous accounts that focus on current events tend to be located in America, Europe, or Canada from what I've seen.
I think not letting children get barraged with misinformation and foreign propaganda might help them.
The policy has like 70% popular support.
"What are they really doing?" is a stupid conspiracy brained question: trying to win the next election obviously and whatever you may think, representing the electorate.
(I hate the policy personally)
A conspiracy theory? This time of the year? In New hampshire????
Apologies, you might be right, you might not, but unless you have some actual evidence you might as well be saying "The Moon landing was a Hoax"
Whether intentional or not, one consequence of a success in this area would be to isolate older people from the views of young people and to stifle the younger generations influence on these communication media in the future.
Personally I suspect these elderly people in powerful political positions to be quite afraid of kids, it wouldn't be the first time in history, but it's likely the first time they're this old and as alienated from younger generations as they are.
Perhaps we're seeing patriarchal class societies mutate into primarily gerontocratical societies.
I chuckled when I read that, when over-16 is considered elderly.
What will we do when we no longer have the views of 14 year olds at our fingertips? Well, hopefully they will write their views down on notepaper, and in two years we'll hear all about it.
unfortunately there is nothing we can do in any society without seeing comments like this… whatever “move” is done comments like this will be there with endless “analysis” about “motivation” for the move… it is what it is…
The nature of democracy and open dialogue I suppose.
But really, when banning a large portion of the population from social media, political motives should absolutely be entertained. Politics is inextricably related to social media in 2025
Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan support and the Labor government has a significant share of the young voters who are over 18.
Kids being banned from social media is just one side of the coin. _Everyone_ else being forced to KYC with random websites is the other. I can’t help but wonder, which of the two outcomes is the actual goal here.
It's wet dream of politicians that think the key to reducing crime is invigilation. So, that goal
I don't think there is all that many politicians gullible enough to think that kind of massive breach of privacy is a worthy tradeoff
Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are attempting to but are blocked by federal courts. Will be interesting to see if the tech industry allows it, or decides to break up the federal government before it becomes too powerful.
> Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are attempting to but are blocked by federal courts.
When much of government ( federal, state, local ) communication is done via social meda, would it be legal to ban anyone from accessing it?
Or are official government social media sites required to be accessible to everyone?
People under 18 don't have the same rights.
[delayed]
Agreed. What rights should they have though?
The Australian ban doesn't block anyone from accessing content.
Unless the social media site puts up super random login gates and A/B testing anti-patterns that blocks you from accessing content?
Break up the federal government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn%27s_Early_Light:_Taking_B...
That is basically what the Heritage Foundation wants to do.
Not going to help the tech industry given their largest audience bases are in blue states, who will happily just regulate them to death if the federal government doesn't.
We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next step is dissolving congress and installing a new constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining the law of the land on the whims of a senile man
There's no need to dissolve congress. You instead make sure that (1) a single party stays in power (through gerrymandering, voter suppression and more), (2) the courts are stacked with loyalists and (3) the legislature and courts rubber stamp all decisions of the executive regardless of legality or anything else.
You also need a country name with 'Democratic' in it:
Democratic People's Republic of America.
That's how you know it's a fully totalitarian state.
Yeah this is usually how it happens. Whether its ancient Rome, modern Russia, Venezuela, etc all the dressings of the old Republic stay but become subverted by an autocrat.
Yea, US is probably gonna end up as Russia if nothing changes. On paper a democracy with elections. In practice a dictatorship.
Democracy with Chinese Characteristics
There's no need to do any of things you mention considering that both parties are owned by the same people and are essentially two faces of the same party in practice. Also - almost all the powers that be - including courts and Congress are already for sale/at the service of big tech.
Both sides are not the same,not even close, and the voting record proves it.
> the voting record proves it.
Putting on my tin-foil, devils-advocate hat... AKA I don't necessarily believe this but I also have no counter-argument:
Mostly performative. When it's decided that something actually needs to pass, then you'll get some sacrificial lambs that vote across the aisle. Typically they'll be close to retirement or from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote.
I mean at some point arguments like this become more akin to Russell's Teapot. If you're making an almost unfalsifiable claim, then the burden of proof is on you to prove it and not others to disprove it.
From a political standpoint, the statement "from a state where they won't be heavily punished for that specific vote" is a weird way to put it, since if you framed it in a positive light it would sound more similar to "the state population falls on both sides of the issue and thus either vote could make sense from their legislator depending on exigent circumstances and other factors" or any number of other explanations depending on the vote and populations.
TBH these steps are not that easy and probably are not possible in a federated country like US.
Gerrymandering already exists. Voter suppression was huge in the past, and may become huge again. The supreme court made sure of that.
And also... the supreme court keeps issuing partisan decisions.
So... what is left? Number 3?
I guess you're arguing that federalism protects people, but how does it do that in a way that isn't already being eroded?
Sure, but also why wouldn’t they? It’s historically unpopular as an institution, and clearly toothless.
For the same reason russia and north Korea has elections? It sounds better to pretend the dictator is chosen by the people
Democratic institutions only have as much power as they're given.
Have you not been paying attention?
I will bet you up to $1000 at 2:1 odds that in 5 years we will still have the same constitution and congress will not have been dissolved at any point.
perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for adults or maybe just dystopian movies.
Russia still has a constitution, a parliament, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary. It even has opposition political parties and elections.
And yet...
Motte meet Bailey
Right, because there's no need to change the Constitution when you have a captured Supreme Court to help you ignore it, and no need to dissolve Congress when they've steadily made themselves less and less relevant over the past few decades.
I do wonder about the normalization of dystopian ideas. Take even a show like Scandal. The fact that one of the big reveals is that billionaires stole the election by targeted hacking of election machines is kinda messed up.
Everybody seems to have missed the memo that all power was concentrated in the Executive branch since the Bush Doctrine, and that since 2016 people have started insisting that the Executive doesn't even have any obligation to the President, the only important vote left (although limited to choosing between two private clubs funded by the same donors.).
If Congress steps away from doing anything but serving donors (helped by the filibuster), and the captured regulators don't have to obey the President, there's actually no democracy left. We're in the impossible situation where Trump not being in control is scarier than Trump being in control.
Even scarier is that the people saying that we're on the way to becoming an authoritarian state are saying that because they think that the voters get too much say. Authoritarianism is when we don't beatify Dr. Fauci, or agree that it's fine for pregnant women to take Tylenol. The upper middle class, in its complete narcissism and fall into self-indulgent fantasy, is entirely focused on aesthetics.
edit: when replies that say that there's already a problem, but seem to be heretical about the covid response get flagkilled, there's a blessed opinion. I have no idea how elite echochambers are supposed to avoid an authoritarian state. Your bosses are kissing Trump's ass, and you're working hard doing things that advance their agenda. They couldn't do it without you.
I believe they're implying that there's an unhealthy amount of regulatory capture in favor of big tech
It was a clever riff on the current situation where business tells government
How about we break up the tech industry instead?
This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of bricks.
Because Fedgov stopped any real anti-trust regulation over a century ago and have shown they have no will nor ability to change that since.
Is the assumption that non "tech industry" communities (e.g: voat, parler, ovaries, gab, truth, lemmy, mastodon, 4chan, 8chan, etc) are less likely to be a problem or to negatively impact teens than the mainstream "big tech" ones (e.g: facebook, twitter, youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc)?
The thing with those alternative communities is that they sort of orbit around the larger tech platforms. Their agenda is set by the news-of-the-day within certain X/FB/YouTube subcommunities. Its sort of analogous to wire services in traditional media.
Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them.
I think if you run a website as a main source of your business profitable or not you’re in the tech industry. It’s a question of scale not industry classification or purpose classification.
Not my point. The original comment said the tech industry can decide to break up the federal government because they don't want to be forced to clean up their act. Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. If the tech industry is against that, then they should be the ones broken up.
> Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity.
I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing.
States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for.
Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms.
But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps.
Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too and really need to act early. States can become one person or party and it's game over for a long time. Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of faith in it.
> I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment.
As long as it's not farming, defense or healthcare of course. Historically speaking at least.
> They are closer to states than they are to algorithms
This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.
Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.
I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media.
* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared
* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic
* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon
Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?
I agree. It’s just there has not been a pro-EU vote in any form or capacity by any EU population. So the stopped doing referendums but the EU grew only even more unpopular- and lately with VDL and KK, its as if its a cruel joke we all expect for it to end soon.
EU is holding, but the fact that every authoritarian (US, China, Russia) is trying to break it apart should tell you something. It's like the only one remaining, and they don't like it.
You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history.
If they had any, they would be in front line… not asking me to go get myself killed :-)
What are you talking about? Lots of countries have voted to join EU. Any country can leave when they want. EU is still popular in most countries.
Can you name a referendum of a country within the EU that has to do with the EU in some form or capacity and received a positive vote? Netherlands, France, Italy and Greece all voted at a certain point in time. The result was always a “no”.
The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not.
Why not both?
It's not going to happen, at least not in the land of crony capitalism.
Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
Socialising != Social media. Teens can still use messenger, WhatsApp, phonecalls, text or even....face to face!
That's true. I'll say this though: my social life skyrocketed thanks to Facebook when I was ~18. Not sure what kind of impact it would have had earlier, I was def. more of a kid and social medias were not a thing anyway. Makes sense to me to have an age limit considering cyber bullying and teen suicides and all.
Facebook then wasn't what facebook is today. The social media of the early internet was largely a digital expansion of otherwise healthy social norms. Then the internet blew up. Now it's more akin to the drug dealers DARE warned us about. Still waiting on _those_ free drugs, tbh.
Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.
If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.
It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.
What year was it when you were 18? Facebook was enormous for me when I was 18, in 2008, for similar reasons. However, these days facebook is mostly just ads and generic modern feed garbage content in general.
It's crazy that social media is banned but kids are still subject to gambling ads prior to or after watching the footy on free to air TV.
I don't think it's just the ads, I mean we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
> we had magazines, TV, and the web, they all had advertising, and no population-level impact on child & teen mental health impact was observed as these were adopted
That is not true. Distorted body perception, anorexia etc. due to omnipresent photoshopped models in magazines and poster ads where a thing decades ago.
Things escalated with social media, but there were issues long before that.
The previous static ads of the past are completely different beast compared to targeted advertising and attention driven design(leading to doomscrolling etc).
It's the combination of ads, analytics, personalization, and scale.
Ads mean that you want to keep the user on your platform as long as possible. They are incentivized to make it addictive at the most fundamental level. A company selling movies doesn't care how often you watch the movies you buy, they just want to convince you to buy them. A company that makes money for each minute you spend watching a movie would put out very different products.
Analytics mean they can precisely see the effect of any given change to figure out what makes the product more addictive.
Personalization means they can tailor your experience to be addictive to you, personally, rather than just generally addictive to people.
And scale means they can afford to pay enormous amounts of money to a lot of smart people and have them work full time on the problem of making the product more addictive.
I don't know what you do about it.
My own theory is that kids are rightfully anxious and depressed as they can now easily see the state of the world and the direction it's going. This is the world they have to enter soon, and they can do almost nothing to change it, so of course they're more anxious/depressed.
The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
You're not wrong. Even simple "page hit counters" became a target of manipulation once they were common. Human nature is tough at scale.
How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.
>How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.
Well arguably TV did destroy people's brains, just a lot slower and less efficiently.
And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
It's worth noting that this was a pretty active debate as TVs were going from one in the household to one in every room. "We don't want to put a TV in our kids' room, it'll rot their brains." And there was research to back up that it had a negative effect to some degree.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
I pretty much agree with this.
We were able to go back to one TV in the house (at least I was), and even avoid a big chunk of the ads when watching TV (by paying for Netflix/etc) and even radio (Spotify/etc).
Except we now we put a garbage TV in every hand.
It's a terrible idea because it's a tiny screen; because it's not a shared experience, but an isolating one; because it's been proven that it's bad for eyesight/myopia. But most of all, it's terrible because the content is crap.
Spending hours watching a never ending sequence of low effort 2min videos that need to deliver on the first 30s (or they're skipped) is not the way to make anyone smarter/saner.
"Do you or a loved one suffer from an abundance of brain cells? Speak to your doctor today about whether The Jersey Shore might be right for you!"
In Australia TV is very commonly referred to as “the idiot box”.
Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.
> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
TV programming has to broadly appeal to society generally... you can't really go down a niche algorithm that progressively feeds you more specific content until you're radicalized any certain way (it can sorta, see conservative media, but there are some guardrails). Social media can with much less restriction.
We had the same fear mongering in the 80’s and early 90’s about TV. And in the 20’s and 30’s about radio programs.
Same shit, new generation.
I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.
Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Jonathan Haidt is someone who nobody should take seriously. Pretty much all of the data he cites is cherry-picked and the vast majority of people in trust and safety and similar will tell you that he is probably one of the least reliable authorities on this subject. He's aiming to sell fear, not to actually solve the problem.
I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.
Oh, alright, I guess we just need to overthrow capitalism and install a different economic system
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
I suspect kids just find their way around things.
And then they're on platforms with zero protections because nobody knows they're a teen... end result is worse.
This is a pretty common cycle.
Government steps in to "fix" a "problem" and then:
Solve nothing.
Create problems with their "solutions."
Implore the populous to reelect them to fix all the problems.
Rince. Repeat.
A paragraph from an email Reddit sent me presumably because I created my account in Australia:
> Users confirmed to be under 16 will have their accounts suspended under the new Australian minimum age law. While we disagree with the Government's assessment of Reddit as being within the scope of the law, we need to take steps to comply. This means anyone in Australia with a Reddit account confirmed to be under 16 will be blocked from accessing their account or creating a new one. Note that as an open platform, Reddit is still available to browse without an account.
“Confirmed to be under 16” sounds like they’re not trying very hard to identify them. But maybe I’m just spared any attempt at checking since my account is 12 years old.
I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant with the letter or the spirit of the law—an account is not required for at least some forms of damage. But I’ve paid no attention to this law since I live in India now.
> I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant with the letter or the spirit of the law
Haven't read the law, but I don't think they considered this, since the most popular social media sites make it very hard or impossible to browse without an account. I guess with adult content bans they do consider this, since people don't tend to make an account there.
And a very similar fun fact: You can't browse facebook marketplace if you're logged into an under 18 account, but can without an account (at least here in Hungary).
Somehow, things are going to work better when you're not logged in...
If you gave them an email address, it's possible they were able to verify you with 3rd party data brokers without your knowledge.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them.
In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email?
I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
> YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments
Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist (what???), notifications (why???)
Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.
Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.
So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.
But what about hn?
Are you describing the difference between a social network and social media?
It looks like for now the ban is just limited to 10 apps. There's quite a few which are arguably worse that received an exception.
Communication over a distance between people who don't know each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it, like customer service... is a disaster in general.
Excessive social media is detrimental (to everyone). Age restrictions are not a good solution, it effectively categorises it as an adult activity, and glorifies it further.
Kids are very good at identifying hypocritical behaviour and scare tactics. It'll end up counterproductive like the D.A.R.E. program.
If the kids are forced out, the adults should be too.
Discord and Roblox exempted. This is a joke.
To include discord you have to extend it to messaging services. To include Roblox it should be all online games with chat.
When I was a kid, online games with chat were a no-no. Most of the ones designed for kids specifically avoided having a chat feature aside from preset phrases, like Toon Town.
Then of course by teens, most boys were in the notorious MW2 lobbies.
> This only protects 90% (made up number) of children so it's a joke.
To suggest this protects children at all is the real joke.
Are you saying there is no harm to children, especially girls using social media or are you saying it will not protect enough of them?
Absolutely, Roblox should not exist given the problems it caused.
Goes well beyond scamming kids to work for scrip. =3
Despite how little they pay their game devs, offering like 20% I think, Roblox itself continues to make a loss so there case that they are scamming their devlopers isn't the strongest
Roblox is making a loss? How is this possible? I've always thought it was perfectly maximined.
Most their users are don’t pay, their services are all hosted by themselves, development of tooling for games and the platform itself is costly, legal issues, etc.
Must be awkward discussing how "AI" is supposed to solve the Roblox "problems".
GTFO, no kid under 16 should be on that platform unsupervised.
The feds should have section 7 that firm years ago. =3
Here is an overview of related restrictions in other countries [1]. Actually, in many European countries, Google does not grant access to Gemini for people under 16yo [2,3].
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/clyd1dvrll1o
[2] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409
[3] https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16109150
Quite a decisive move by the Australian government. I don't know if it's a move in the right direction or not but the research clearly shows that around the time social media became mainstream, teens' and preteens' mental health took a nosedive (Especially girls).
I can't see this as decisive.
* The ban only targets ten services.
* The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
* Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
maybe it's a step in the right direction but you can't regulate away ALL parenting. I know kids in the 5th grade getting brand new Iphone 17s! i've even seen one kid at the age of 7, getting their own Ipad. some parents even force their kids to use play on their iphone, just so they don't have to keep an eye on their kid anymore. My jaw really dropped to the floor on that one.
at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that bad.
How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is just band-aid.
the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens" until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed device that just lets them get their homework done.
The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.
If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.
The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.
If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.
i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?
in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.
is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
it does help. i think this is a good step in the right direction.
but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).
Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the problem. They still see the exact same content shared by friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do damage.
> you can't regulate away ALL parenting
This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then blame everything on parents.
Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad thing, even though they paid for all the public infrastructure we use every day.
As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the better.
Not just mental health: ability to concentrate + engagement with people around us.
There is no evidence that social media use shortens attention spans or reduces social engagement offline. This is a meme, and a false one.
What you’re implicitly saying here is that we should wait until there is empirical evidence. That could take multiple decades, and even then will be tenuous at best because you’re dealing with a soft science. At that point the damage will have been done and much harder to address.
If you don’t think attention spans are on the downtrend & that social media has something to do with that, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear.
Except that there are studies linking social media use with reduced attention spans. Here is one: https://www.dialoguesreview.com/index.php/2/article/view/930
There are at least other two that I could find
Hugely decisive! Feels more like a policy for idyllic hypotheticals. "Suppose we could ban social media..." well, hey, they actually did it.
I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We shall see!
I think one must also re-evaluate how in modern times a parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the crime of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove unrestricted outside (within reason). I've heard of this happening in both the US and Australia, the HOA mindset really needs to die.
> a parent can be charged (by a perfect stranger) for the crime of neglecting their child when allowing them to rove unrestricted outside
This is more about criminalising poverty than anything about parenting. I live in a rich part of Wyoming. The kids are fucking feral.
I live in Philadelphia in Mt Airy. I see kids of all races around all the time. Sometimes my kids. The only place I read about parents being jailed for their kids being outside is HN.
Where are you from? Sweden? Denmark? Fun fact for Europe: America is quite a dangerous country. At the very least, this is why parents fear the outdoors. And much of our nature is polluted. There are cases of this. I agree it's wrong, but it's good to understand the background.
And as far as the internet: I am part of the younger generation and I welcome this change. I see how it affects my generation every day.
America isn't universally dangerous, but it is very diverse. Where I am (Western Pennsylvania) there are kids outside running around all the time (maybe less now that it's very cold out). It just depends where in the country you are.
I am also from a younger generation and from a state that has experienced quite a bit of pollution, but before the popularity of the smartphone ~2012 or so, there was still much more play outside. As for crime, it has been on a downtrend for decades, and many areas are the most peaceful they've been in years¹. I admit this may still be higher than in Europe, but this is exactly the fearmongering message platforms like X try to spread to garner support for authoritarian policy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
These are very very isolated outliers amplified by a media hellbent on ragebait.
You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then. Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on them for riding their bikes around the block, and the cops followed the kids back to their front door and then talked with the parents.
I have. I also, crucially, don't live in America.
This article, also crucially, does not relate to America
when did kyrra mention they lived in America?
When they spelt neighborhood, when the kids rode around the block.
When they said they live in a country where a police force follows kids on bikes
The clues were all there.
I think a huge part of that is context. Age, location, time of day, etc. I’d be curious to see numbers on this, usually it’s just asserted as “back in my day we played outside and got dirty all day!” but then I hear those same (usually now grand-) parents talk about all the tv shows/movies they watched as they espouse their views on modern media!
My assumption is a lot of those people who proudly proclaim that lifestyle were raised in (segregated) suburbs and have rose tinted glasses. But I’m also making assumptions like them, so again I’m curious to find info on this.
The success so far is really just political, which has largely been shutting down debate and dismissing calls for some kind of cost analysis of what we risk losing in enforcing this.
Whenever someone brings up this stuff, the politicians take the tone that "we won't let anyone get in the way of protecting children", and this is in response to people who in good faith think this can be done better. Media oligopolist love it because it regulates big tech, so they've been happy to platform supporters of the policy as well.
Third spaces won't reappear because the planning system in most cities shuts anything down the moment someone files a compliant. They get regulated out of existence the moment police express concern young people might gather there. The planning system (which in NSW/Sydney is the worse) has only gotten worse since the 80s after the green bans. It was largely put in place to allow for community say in how cities are shape, which sounds nice but it's mostly old people with free time participating who don't value 3rd spaces, even if they might end up liking them. They just want to keep things the same and avoid parking from getting overly complicated (and this is a stone throw away from train stations and the CBD).
Third places can be fixed by reforming planning which is slowly gaining momentum via YIMBY movements, but this social media ban is just not a serious contribution to changing that. If anything Social media phenomenon like Pokemon GO contributed more to these third places lighting up.
Governance in Australia is very paternalistic, it's a more high functioning version of the UK in that sense. I think it might be in part due to the voting system being a winner takes all single seat electorate preferential voting system which has a median voter bias for least controversial candidates.
As a kid I always felt being in Australia you missed out on a lot of things people got to do in America, that has slowly changed as media and technology has become less bound by borders but looks like that being undone.
I know! Let's hang out a THE MALL!
The Seventies are BACK!
>well, hey, they actually did it.
They passed legislation, its not clear at all that they succeeded.
Given that “social media” is in fact not banned and all this does is impact a select (and frankly logically inconsistent) list of services, this seems very unlikely. Children are still free to be groomed and gamble on Roblox and join servers belonging to The Com on Discord. To be clear I don’t think those services should be regulated by this obscene law either but this isn’t going to bring back any kind of halcyon era for kids. It will expand the surveillance of and shame around young people’s internet use, however.
Roblox blocked communication between adults and kids. I can't chat with my own children in app even though we don't live in Australia.
That's for the better, as far as I see it, I can just shout :p
It will also massively expand the surveillance of adults: if a platform introduces face scanning or checking government IDs for "age verification", then they don't just scan the underage users.
I still prefer my kids to play roblox over being on X or tiktok much.
It is still more ok then most of what any other todays tech provides. No matter how much geeks on HN hate it.
And it can inspire them to learn programming with Lua(u).
How so? It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation. The age verification service doesnt get browsing details, and the site providing content doesnt get any additional user details beyond what they would likely already have, including those subject to PII legislation.
This is false. Like all the age restricting laws being passed around the world, the implementation is not being specified and is being left to the individual platforms, which are using some combination of photo ID and video selfie in order to validate people's ages. Each platform is implementing it differently, and on different timelines. For example, X has failed to even respond for a while, but it's finally said they'll comply.
> Companies have told Canberra they will deploy a mix of age inference - estimating a user's age from their behaviour - and age estimation based on a selfie, alongside checks that could include uploaded identification documents.
> It has been implemented so that age verification is a token only, a yes/no authorisation.
This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify a single particular implementation for age-based verification and there's absolutely no single "age verification service" that platforms are legislated to use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based on several recommended methods, including age inference. https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-need-t...
Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding whether she's concerned about people bypassing authentication-based age verification checks: "If you’re an adult - you probably won’t need to do anything extra to prove your age, because like I said before, these platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
The mental health trends are real, but pinning them exclusively on social media risks missing a lot of context
At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.
Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.
Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
Is this around the same time we started over diagnosing mental health disorders?
'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2pvxdn9v4o
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46172682
Thinking about this this will of course fail. Because teens will do what they did before online: make their own social networks. But by necessity these will be small.
I hope that's what will happen. That this is only really a problem for FANG, for the tech industry and doesn't actually prevent social media.
Funny, but I (and I believe many who support this law) would say that's a good thing. The problem is not (and never was) social interaction online, it is large corporations designing their algorithms to be as addictive as possible to tie kids as early as possible to their services.
I have had to recently get back to using Facebook (after creating the account ~15 years ago and leaving it dormant for >10 years), due to several sports clubs using it as their only means of communication. It's scary how good these algorithms have become, I often only want to look up something related to the club and end up being roped into 1h of doomscrolling. And I'm an adult with significant better impulse control than most teenagers.
While FAANG undoubtedly have chosen profit over safety I'm not yet convinced non-FAANG social media is significantly safer, in terms of mental health, antisocial behaviour or predation.
As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.
Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
> Pretty well executed
There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.
I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.
All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.
I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.
As an Australian the only platforms I have that asked for an age check were Discord and Bluesky. Which is funny as neither came under this legislation, they're implementing this because they chose to.
Nothing from Reddit or any of the Meta platforms which have to comply with this legislation.
Can you give examples of what your friends had to do for each platform? No one I know has been affected, so it does seem “invisible” to me. However I’ve also been an adult for quite some time now. If you don’t mind me asking, are your friends young adults?
Apropos social media and age, I have some relatives with the last name of Aam. (Åm or Aam is an old farm in the Volda area of Sunnmøre, Norway).
If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it does.
This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed it. Go and try if you want.
So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media friends to notice.
You have to see if it's in a corporation's interest for false positives or false negatives. For you and AAM, it costs Facebook almost nothing for a false positive on "age abuse material" so I would expect them to continue to flag your family name as a false positive.
With snap and others, I would expect them to focus on reducing false negatives and give the benefit of the doubt to the kid who is under 16. Worst case, you say "Mea Culpa" and update your algorithm accordingly to any cases that you missed but the state has found.
Nothing has changed for my 15 year old either. It’s business as usual today for her.
She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection check on her behalf.
> pass the facial age detection
Are you kidding me? So the answer is let's let some random vendors used by said corporation scan her face? This feels like using DNA sequencing to confirm you're tall enough to ride the rollercoaster.
It’s just as reliable as you’d expect from a system that relies on shitty cellphone camera pics.
They’re trying to guess the age of someone who could pass for 11 or for 22, and who with careful use of makeup could push that figure in either direction.
For some reason (and this is one reason people think there's a conspiracy), that is the "preferred" form of age verification. It certainly saves the government from having to do IT.
Interesting, was she unable to pass the test just didn't even risk it, thinking the algo is good and can reliably detect reality?
> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this
I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.
>Pretty well executed - I'm impressed.
It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over. Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for older people was the only metric.
The execution didn't finish; it started. Big policy changes typically take time to solidify, and it'll probably take a bit to get a reliable read on its trajectory. But there is international momentum on this, so making predictions based on whatever percentage of people that were supposed to have their accounts deactivated actually did the day of (if we even have that data, and I doubt that we do), is probably not going to be useful.
The government have previously stated they won’t pursue breaches unless they’re particularly egregious anyway so this is basically shameless political theatre.
ABC did a poll of a large number of kids affected by this, and only 6% estimated the legislation would be successful.
ABC polled a cohort that's going through the most rebellious period in their lives and asked them whether they think authority figures can effectively prevent them from doing something they want to do. Had I been asked the same question as a teenager, I would've answered no every single time, regardless of the actual circumstances.
Pretty much aligns with how I have felt it here in Aus as well
I actually feel that teens shouldn't be on social media at all. But I also don't think I should be able to lord that opinion over other people via fiat.
Sugar is pretty bad for teens as well but I don't think banning that will solve health issues anymore than this will help teens.
Personal decisions > a government trying to be mom
Governments always end up doing the most damage when their control is "for the good of their constituents."
This might seem like a good thing while they're parenting for you on things you agree with, however, there will likely come a time when they do something you don't and by then it will be too late.
I agree with you when I believe a choice can be freely made. But peer pressure as a child is extremely intense, and if you're the one weirdo you know whose parents don't allow them on Snapchat, it can cause lots of strife and probably be ineffective anyway.
So I'm assuming weed laws have put an end to the "peer pressure" of teens getting other teens to smoke it?
Life always comes down to personal choices and it's always the hard ones that are the most important. No law will ever change that.
If it's bad for teens it's bad for everyone. Banning for only teens makes little sense
I have kids and I like this but as we know, prohibition only makes the drink stronger and the thirst deeper.
This bit a community discord server of mine where I am a mod last night since we have a large oceanic contingent, somehow NZ got swept up in it too and we scrambled a bit to change our onboarding and other general policies.
These platforms are heavy censored with a direct line to governments. This will push kids to other platforms with less censorship. That's a major benefit.
As we go down this road platforms will need to be banned for everyone. For example VK wasn't on the list and they won't implement age checks. They and many other sites will need to be banned until you are left with a white list of acceptance sites. Add in age verification on those sites for everyone.
Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the standard.
Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the standard.
This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
Historically consumer access to security/privacy tools has always been something the govt has wanted to restrict or prevent entirely.
> This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
...then the rest of the world will see what the people of China and Russia already know: bans on VPNs cause them to explode in popularity and development pace.
There's a reason that the most sophisticated VPNs and tunneling tech are built to evade the GFW.
I recently visited a remote part of Siberia, and I was amazed at the ubiquity of VPNs. Grandmothers who grew up in shamanic traditions knew how to get around apparent traffic shaping (even on youtube!) to listen to their traditional music. It was quite inspiring.
I'm not saying bans are a good idea - I'd much rather the adults in the room read the writing on the wall and bring about peaceful dismantling of legacy states in favor of a censorship-resistant internet.
But it is coming either way.
They already started moving to different platforms. No VPNs needed. At some point they'll stray off the Internet (because gov.au of course barks at every platform except discord, mysteriously).
Just what we need, even more government censorship.
And, of course, as usual, this law, like all it's others in the rest of the world, will do absolutely nothing in protecting kids. It will instead only create a huge national security hacker paradise because everyone will use these so-called "age verification" services, which aren't exactly known for their security.
Ban kids, implement identity verification checks, remove ban on kids, keep identity verification checks.
> Ban kids
yep, done
> implement identity verification checks
nope, not done so what's your point?
How are kids banned without an ID check?
My belief is that late stage capitalism pushes democracies to fascism and the overton window requires politicians to break-up unpopular changes into a smaller changes. I am prognosticating why politicians would pretend to care about the mental health of children.
Controlling access to any substance is a long process, and the motives aren’t always clear at the beginning.
I’m not sure why Australian policymakers chose to take this step now, but regardless of the motive, it feels like a meaningful starting point. Social media’s engagement-driven echo chamber model has contributed to a deeply divided world, and governments stepping in can at least make parents’ jobs a little easier.
Is the mechanism of the ban actually going to work, or is it just going to train more kids how to use fake IDs and VPNs?
Not sure it matters.
It's a relatively uncontroversial ban, with public support in Aus because of mental health concerns, and key social media sites complying.
VPN's come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's. As do the credit and debit that are usually required somewhere along the line to pay for the services.
Historically, if it's awkward to circumvent most people tend to comply; which means in turn that minority that can figure out a way around it are unlikely to find many of their friends present. While for majority there's unlikely to be much of a draw or peer group pressure to circumvent.
I'm sure Aus gov will monitor, media will highlight problems etc, but would be surprised if it was not actually quit effective.
It's not ID based so why would they need fake ID?
This feels like one of those policies that sounds great at a podium but is going to age horribly
While I'm not sure about this ban, _something_ is causing normally nice, peaceful Australia to be somewhere I don't feel safe anymore. My relatives in Melbourne have left, after being physically attacked and had their property vandalized by mostly young "activist" types who, no doubt, get all their news from social media.
Look. As gen z person who basically grew up with tech and social media and had it since I was ~12, there is no way that any ban that is not direct id verification will work, this will instead make the forbidden fruit more tasty and teens more tech literate since they will look for ways around the ban. It feels like a lot of older people are more detached to the times when they first got access to Internet and social media and assume that its all dopamine hits and brain rot, while in reality its curiosity for a bigger world beyond school and limited things that you can do while being underage, cheap entertainment, knowledge.
I kind of get it, except youtube... which has much more educational, news, and long form content. Also also forcing face/age verification sounds ripe with issues.
It has some educational content, most of it is brain rot like everywhere else though. Open a brand new youtube account and check out what's being pushed by default, you either get room temperature IQ political analysts or "shorts" with softcore porn thumbnails to bait people for a click
Open a new YT account then feed it with [1] for few hours at least then you will unleash the full power of Youtube... unless you missclick even once into some popular blog typically they very clearly aimed at low-IQ people which accidentably might be your kid or somebody else like you know who I mean. But to prevent that slippery slope at least partly, just increase the feeding time of your YT account with the best requests possible which are carefully stacked at [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com
FYI the article is from back in December of this year and there's already been articles about teen circumventing the process of verification:
https://www.wionews.com/trending/australian-teens-defy-under...
Besides this being ineffective for the motivated, it might have a subtle antitrust effect.
As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
I think you're 180° backwards on that.
How many alternative platforms are there really going to be that can afford to develope and operate the legally-mandated age-detection ML-models?
Especially after the bureaucrats see that the law isn't working and start looking for scapegoats without massive lawyer teams to make an example of
Why would they do that? There are plenty of platforms that simply won't care, and there's stuff like Mastodon et al.
Hacker News is social media, isn't it?
I don’t know why they don’t just ban or restrict the hardware. It’ll be easier to enforce.
Although I think that social media causes issues with underdeveloped brains, If this is about confirming age at the point of login, then this is really about identifying everyone and not protecting children. If this is the case, you know they are going to use this data to target people for speech related things.
Future generation of hackers.
This is great. Even if it doesn’t actually keep teens off, it sends the message that social media is bad for you. Just like smoking and drinking.
I've said this before, but if countries want to mandate compliance, they should be required to provide the mechanism for compliance.
The rollout of this has been pretty rough all things considered, much of it because the mechanism for compliance is flawed. Anthony Albanese's latest instgram posts are full of comments from teens saying things like, "how am i still on instagram if you banned us". The primary reason for this is most providers are leveraging age-estimation techniques, because the law specifically states:
In an effort to prevent identity theft, the bill as originally written(1) was updated(2) to forbid platforms from collecting government IDs as a proof of age. Even if you support the intent of the bill, the design-by-committee approach made the requirements so easy to circumvent that it's effectively security theater.(1) Original bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
(2) Bill that passed after rewrites: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
So how does someone locked out wrongfully prove their age? Some people just look kinda young
The platforms all seem to have a fallback "support a ticket with your government ID, and we pinky promise to delete the ID after verifying you".
But thats what this law does not allow according to the head of this chain, specifically government ids are not allowed to prove age, even if you delete them unless I read it wrong
There is a pattern of government using moral panics to exert greater control. Australia and New Zealand seem to be used as a testbed for projects which are introduced elsewhere.
The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
The offline-socializing point is good, but it's also a cultural shift that won't magically happen because a law is passed. If anything, the hard part is rebuilding the offline spaces and social norms that used to make that easy.
Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for them to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids outside. Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens supposed to be where they won't be harassed. When I was a kid we used to just wander around and chat. There used to be a whole event on Friday evenings where high schoolers would decent on this mall across the street from two movie theaters. We went to the skating ring. There were teen clubs. More. Right now, I can't think of a single place a teen could just hang out besides at each other houses which is mostly what I watch them do. It makes sense why they end up in virtual spaces. They can socialize privately that way.
I agree. I had to coax people out after lockdown and it took years.
We do need offline spaces. I've been out for a Christmas lunch today. Much more meaningful than meeting on Zoom or whatever. I don't hate technology but I think we have to use it widely.
What do you think is happening in New Zealand with regards to "moral panic" projects?
Putting "teens" in the title is misleading. The ban is for ages 15 and below.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
It's half of the "teens" someone experiences before hitting the age of majority. I think it's fine to say "teen" in the title.
TIL English teenager isn't necessarily the translation of Dutch tiener. Wikipedia at least says 10–19 for us and 13–19 for English. In German the word teenager is also used and the page gives both definitions on the same page without realising it's self-contradictory
Idk that anyone takes this so literally (as that you're only a teenager if your cardinal age ends in the literal word teen and so twelve is definitely not a teenager), I've always understood it as "in their tens" but that may be my origin
Where I am, "teens" is 13-19 because they are all suffixed with "teen". Ten, eleven, and twelve are generally called "pre-teens", if anything.
Not very useful without saying where that would be :P
Well, it's useful for explaining my first comment, at least.
But North America, for the curious.
> But North America, for the curious.
Just say canada. I don't understand why canadians always do this.
I'm in Michigan. Is that Canadian now? Will have to update my passport asap.
Then say michigan or america. You may be "in michigan" but are you "from michigan". Why would you say north america unless you have ties to canada.
>You may be "in michigan" but are you "from michigan".
I have literally 0 reason to answer this, it has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation, but to placate whatever weird obsession you have, yes. I was born in Michigan.
>Why would you say north america unless you have ties to canada.
Why do you care? Is North America offensive now or something?
I said "North America" because, for the purposes of this specific conversation, it doesn't matter at all. Except to you, apparently. For some unknown reason.
I try not to be super US-centric on international forums. First time someone's ever started questioning me about it, though.
> Is North America offensive now or something?
North america encompasses the US, Canada AND MEXICO. Not sure what the age range for "teen" is in canada. If you are not canadian, why are you speaking for canadians. Don't think they even use "teen" in mexico as they speak spanish in mexico.
> I try not to be super US-centric on international forums.
HN is an american forum. You can be US-centric if you want. I give you permission.
This has to be one of the most meaningless, pedantic, strangest string of comments I've had the misfortune of participating in.
I cannot possibly muster up enough energy to care about this anywhere near as much as you do.
Good luck, fellow North American.
The ban is also for anyone who refuses to submit their private data (face scan or government ID) to an unrelated 3rd party company which will invariably store that data with insufficient security.
The ban does not specify how companies are supposed to do it.
Eg Snapchat is not requiring ID (which the average Australian 15yo wouldn't have anyway), they're trying to determine age with the user's camera, and this is trivially spoofed using video played back on another device.
Honestly, this feels like another case where the headline sounds bold, but the real impact will be minimal. Any age-based restriction ends up in the same place: platforms are forced to collect more data just to “prove” someone’s age. When the target group is teenagers, that’s basically a privacy disaster waiting to happen.
From a technical perspective, this is impossible to enforce cleanly. Anyone with even basic internet literacy can bypass it with a VPN + fresh account + throwaway email. And of course, the teens most determined to get around it will be the ones the policy is supposedly protecting. The bigger issue is the false sense of security. Parents and politicians get to feel like something has been “done,” while the actual online risks don’t disappear — they just move somewhere less visible. If the goal is genuinely improving teen mental health, digital literacy and real support systems work far better than regulations that will inevitably leak.
Please don't do this here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208058
Got it, thanks for pointing it out.
What, because they used a single em—dash?
Frankly, I would have been pissed if this were the case when I was a teen and I got a lot of healthy & useful value out of social media.
That said, some of the subcommunities I've seen created, particularly among young women, seem obviously unhealthy/toxic and regulation is probably needed there. I'm thinking of things like '#edtwt'.
But I also think we need to avoid ruining things for smart, responsible kids by focusing on the worst.
Its crazy how the AusGov has just tried to turn this into some kind of nationalistic celebration. Passing laws isolating children isnt to be celebrated by lighting up national monuments.
Do you have kids ? Do you see kids in your day to day life ? I do, every day, and even <10 years old already have permanent neck damage from scrolling as soon as they haves 5 seconds of free time. I see groups of friends walking back from schools, they're side by side, scrolling on their phone, not talking, not even looking in front of them. I walk by 3 schools multiple times every single day and that's all I see as soon as they're outside of the playground (because they're not allowed while inside). Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
They already excluded many popular and addictive services that are used for grooming
This will enhance surveillance and state control of content, but not address the problems you’ve mentioned
Isolating children from what? If anything, this will make they spend more time with their friends and family
Absolutely second this, and I am part of the younger generation. Technology is isolating. Social media feeds superficial relationships. The anxiety it creates is so worrying.
What about the kids who are bullied and isolated at school? What about those who have an abusive family?
What about the kids who are bullied on social media?
One of the good things about the Internet is that you can leave such sites and find people who don't do that.
Most kids don't really have such a choice when it comes to school or their family.
Online abuse works the exact same way. Most kids don’t choose to be abused online either.
Yes. What I'm saying is that people can choose to leave online spaces that are abusive, as opposed to abuse at school or home, which are much harder (usually impossible) for children to escape.
Ah yes brilliant. Instead of trying to address these issues at their source let’s just let kids form immaterial connections online and guarantee they never learn how to form any sort of in person communication skills!
I'm sorry what does a gay kid do about parents that think they are fundamentally immoral? What does any kind of abused kid do? Because my parents were abusive, but not in the way that left marks and the internet was the only thing keeping me sane. I lived in a neighborhood with no kids my age and across town from my school, so even the friends I made there lived nowhere near me. The internet was not a place I made immaterial connections. It's where I maintained what I had until the rare occasions I could see them outside of school. It was where I got to interact with people who gave me the motivation to keep going until I could escape. What does a kid like me do without the internet? No one was going to step in because my parents isolated me and where a bit mean (from their POV, not mine). Not when I was clean, had food and clothing, and was a straight A student, be real.
You are framing this as if you had no in person social connections due to your circumstances. By your OWN admission elsewhere in this thread, this is untrue:
> Kids are in these spaces because there is no place for them to be. People call the police on unaccompanied kids outside. Teens are banned from malls. Where are teens supposed to be where they won't be harassed. When I was a kid we used to just wander around and chat. There used to be a whole event on Friday evenings where high schoolers would decent on this mall across the street from two movie theaters. We went to the skating ring. There were teen clubs. More. Right now, I can't think of a single place a teen could just hang out besides at each other houses which is mostly what I watch them do. It makes sense why they end up in virtual spaces. They can socialize privately that way.
What I am saying is that we should work toward bringing those ^ spaces BACK, rather than allowing kids to wallow in digital space. The more we are online, the more difficult that becomes. The more time we spend in digital space, the more we lose control over our physical spaces.
That's the spirit. Gotta get that ad revenue.
Ah yes brilliant. Let's keep trying to solve these issues that we've been trying to solve for centuries. That's clearly going well. Instead, let's put a bandaid on it so we don't have to look at the issue for a little bit.
Alternatively, letting some kids who struggle to form connections IRL learn to form them online might give some the confidence and self-assuredness to form connections IRL when they want to.
Anyway I'm not sure why you think that I'm suggesting we don't try to address bullying and family abuse. Did I say we should only do one or the other?
We very clearly are making progress on these century long issues, unless you somehow think kids now are growing up in more hostile physical environments than they were 100 years ago.
This ban does not prevent kids from using IM platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Discord so your argument that this somehow restricts the ability for online communication is false.
What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
> What you are arguing against is the restriction of access to apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat —- all of which are filled with predatory algorithms that have shown to have negative affect on the mental health of teens, young adults, AND adults.
Actually, what I'm arguing against is the restriction of whatever apps a government chooses to apply their very loose definition to. What happens when the kids congregate on another platform? Presumably they'll just add that to the list too, right? Does a cat and mouse game seem productive? To say nothing of the precedent set being used for political ends.
What I'm arguing for is stuff that may actually solve the underlying issues - like, for example, addressing those predatory algorithms you refer to.
Isolating children? They’re schoolchildren! They see their peers at school every day.
Isolated from ads sold by the social media companies lol
RIP freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press.
The real danger isn't the ban itself... it's the precedent that could be built on top of it if governments decide they like controlling digital participation
Texas SB2420 requires age verification to download apps. Now, both the government and corporations have a new lever to identify exactly who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and can selectively cut you off from everything. Government-endorsed technofeudalism with inverted totalitarian features normalizing deviancy to become shameless, traditional totalitarianism.
-> Scenario
Want to use cash for lunch or parking? Sorry, no, you must be banked, and have an app.
Want to use a bank? You must use an app.
How do you get an app? You must have a phone and an ID.
Want to buy a phone? Whoops, conundrum encountered.
(And don't even think of wanting to get an ID.)
-> In summary
This further disenfranchises the extremely poor, and takes power and freedom away from everyone who isn't a billionaire.
If you're in Australia, you never had any of that.
How so?
Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?
> since when is speech I don't like speech?!
Since about 10 years ago, online platforms are a major part of how many people speak, publish, and associate.
The only way to enforce it is basically a very dangerous game and will normalize gov control of the internet down to the individual level.
Just online, which has been a bad idea from day one due to the evertrending centralization of the Internet, the primary catalyst thereof being people's laziness. Offline, it still exists.
If all the kids start pretending to be grownups, they end up escaping all the protections put in place to protect kids in the first place.
In football we call this an own goal
I'm fairly confident that's not how it works, but am happy to be proven wrong?
Not really, it gives them justification to more thoroughly remove privacy and anonymity in order to make sure the age and identity of the user are more confidently known.
"It's just kind of pointless, we're just going to create new ways to get on these platforms, so what's the point," said 14-year-old Claire Ni.
Claire Ni concluded it best. They are just going to find new ways. Imagine a kid stopping using something because of the law or government ban. Those lawmakers are just delusional if they think they can pass a law and the kids will stop using social media.
It can still be worth making a law even if some people find a way around it. Some teens will stop using social media as a result. That's enough.
That’s like saying we should let children smoke because as a fifteen year old I was able to acquire cigarettes.
I might have taken up smoking (to be fair I took it up when homeless from being around older homeless people who smoked) but a large cohort of my generation didn’t.
If it has no effect, why complain?
So Australian teens will finally learn how they computers and home wifi works.
Been seeing ads all over NYC for a teen edition of Instagram.
I’m not against teens communicating with each other online, but I’m very much against the algorithm-driven dopamine addiction factories that are social media today.
Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
If you ever worked with people who fully grew up with modern social media and just entered the workforce you know we're already doomed, there is no recovery from this, that's why governments are starting to act
alarmist nonsense
By all means tell us why
younger generation is earning more in the workforce than past generations, clearly they haven't been too cooked by phones.
even though i'm in the younger generation and have less experience in the world, i can recognize pearl clutching and moral panics when I see them.
how Corporate/Gov knows who is Teen on these account???? isn't this is just precursor to digital ID ?????
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
The aussies are huge fans of big brother
I thought Meta was "the Party".
Age verification, digital IDs and no more anonimity... coming soon to your country too!
Awesome. I hope they do the same in Europe. Children should not be addicted to TikTok.
Forget the children, no one should be subjected to the brainrot that is TikTok. Or any form of vertical short videos for that matter.
I'm not sure that "vertical videos" are any worse than horizontal ones, round ones, pentagonal ones, or any other layout.
True.
Could not have said it better. The harm these apps are doing is so immense. Why form any hobby at all when you can scroll four hours of tik tok a day?
I'll take on the low status role of not knowing if this is a good idea.
I've seen the data showing teen sanity nose diving concurrently with social media penetration. I'm also a borderline kook libertarian.
So I appreciate the arguments in both directions, and I think the only way to find out if it works is to try it out. Preferably on a remote isolated island without nuclear weapons, in case things go badly :)
I really hope other nations, including the United States, copy this. Australia proved that it is possible. I think the results will be so overwhelmingly positive that others will take notice. Good job Australia!
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Isn't it a little early to declare success? I think the bigger worry with the US though is not whether it is technically possible, but whether anyone in power cares to actually help kids versus using this it as an excuse to implement Orwellian surveillance upon citizens.
Alcohol, tobacco and many other products have age restrictions, so do cars and many other products of the modern society. Social media can and should have age restrictions.
This is a nonsense take that gets perpetuated over and over. For some reason.
Purchasing alcohol or buying a car is not the same as verifying your age on an internet property. They aren't even comparable. This is just as dumb as saying "well you have to verify your age to go into a bar". Sure, but does the bartender or salesman who sells you the alcohol completely remember every pixel of your photo or video selfy, permanently? Or do they just remember your face more generally?
The problem with these age verification laws is that they harm everybody, adults and kids. They don't do anything to protect kids and their sole purpose is a way for governments to suppress things they don't like. Any age verification technology (be it age estimation or similar) has a permanent record of the photo ID or video selfies (or whatever you use to prove your age) that you give it. Forever. If these systems didn't have those records, the result would be you having to verify your age every time you visit the website. There is a massive, massive difference between getting alcohol at a bar, or going to a strip club or similar, and providing your photo ID to a bouncer or bartender, who probably won't remember your ID after 5 minutes, versus a computer which permanently remembers it. That is the differentiator.
Surveillance could be part of it, if you let it be. Improved mental health, education, and social outcomes for each generation is also pretty darned important.
> Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Great, another Oprah's book club book that assures parents that there's just one easy trick to saving your children.
While I am definitely in favor of the US causing itself more damage, its actually quite sickening to see people spruiking this legislation.
First of all, Australia has proven nothing, kids are stepping politely over this barrier without issue.
Second we are already hearing from disabled teens losing their only social lifeline.
Congratulations, you have isolated and disenfranchised a bunch of kids.
The changes are not even 12 hours old for most of Australia and people are declaring failure. Far out.
For people in an industry that is _built_ on A/B testing, HN sure expects governments to get everything perfect first go with no edge cases or externalities doesn’t it!
push it to prod!
Of course it is possible, why would it not? I'm glad this is happening and I'm sure it'll follow in other countries, probably not the in the US though. Frankly I really hope most people just get off social media's grip and start interacting the way we used to.
I hope it won’t, because the whole thing is just a medium to enable digital ID using fears as a justification, in this time it’s kids.
The whole ‘anxious generation’ isn’t because of social media, it’s because the new generations are hopeless and helpless (incl genz and millennials too), wherever you look in any domain, it’s bleak times waiting ahead for them, boomers fucked them up severely and now want to suppress them with laws and bills and control them because they know for a fact something will snap at this current rate.
I don't necessarily think this as it is will "work" but I'm all for someone at least trying to do something. Yes, there are a bunch of externalities and potential second order effects that don't sit well with me but, at this stage, I'd rather some attempt at trying to regulate than throwing up hands and saying its all too hard.
Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they did this or not frankly
Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10% but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
If you just want to try something that doesn't work, why not legislate touching grass every morning without all the downsides of a dumb blanket ban?
Yes, excellent idea. Let’s do that too
No, not too, but instead. What's your argument for doing dumb harmful stuff instead of dumb harmless stuff?
"I don't necessarily think this as it is will work" != "harmful" or "dumb"
Like do warnings on cigarettes work? I definitely saw a guy move cigs to older pack he had from china because he didn't like ugly warning picture on the new pack. Do mandatory id checks work? If I saw some kids get their hands on smokes does it mean "it doesn't work" and therefore there should be no limits on big tobacco?
is a start
I like to win another poster said about addiction to cigarettes other things. The world drugs was an absolute failure. I think that is how this is going to go, lots of regulation and expenditure for something that's going to ultimately fail. Can't really work unless it's a little authoritarian, such as permitting Websites to only allow youth who have a permit. But I am in agreement, we need to do more, and we can't really depend on the parents anymore. So I think in a way, we have to make it costly for children to do things they're not supposed to be doing, but without disadvantaging certain groups.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
How does a country effectively enforce this? Below is how they propose doing this. If you don't have any form of verification of your actual age, it's seems like they are just going on what the user says ( self reports). How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their age?
>the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature, but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued identification as the only way to prove their age because of privacy concerns.
> How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their age?
You make them bleed money when you find they are in violation. They either figure it out or they go under as a company. There isn't a natural law saying companies have a right to exist.
Go and read the actual report of what the eSafety commissioner is requiring.
The company can't be found liable if they have put in reasonable age verification technology, particularly if the user lied about their age or found a way to circumvent the restrictions.
They clearly aren't going by just what the user says as the companies have implemented age verification tools that try to do that detection.
How can seatbelts be enforced? This is preposterous and imbecilic- if there isn't a policeman inside every car checking every minute how will we make sure that people are wearing them. Clearly there is no point in trying!
There is seatbelt cameras in Australia.
They are everywhere, they can also be mobile and placed almost anywhere. These camera are mounted high so they can view down in through the windscreen.
They automatically issue a $1,251 for not wearing one to the license holder.
Huh, interesting. Australia keeps surprising me.
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-australian-state...
I sense a great disturbance in the force - millions of teens muttering "for fuck's sake" and tossing their phones onto the sofa.
Well it's Australia, this is just one more drop in an ocean of anti-youth policy...
The force is the sunlight that will shine upon their skin when they go outside!
any kid who cant figure out how to slide right by a government hack is a looser, and while we should feel a little bad for both of them, presumambly someone will take pity and fix there phones up , and let them know that there is sex and everything on the net
Starting Jan 1, 2026, Texas SB2420 is also requiring ID verification for all app stores. It's not about "think of the children", it's lazy parents who chose unAmerican totalitarianism and billionaires weaponizing government to eliminate privacy and make data brokers rich.
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=btkirlj8
Australia compliance etc etc...
....
But then also global measures?
> Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
Saw a screenshot last night of someone who can't get into JIRA (or some other Atlassian product) until they either submit two forms of government ID or record a face scan. Seems like a great and effective initiative /s
Text of the screen:
"Your Atlassian account is not age verified.
Laws in your country require us to verify your age before accessing some products, including Jira and Confluence. This process takes 5-10 minutes. This can be done using two pieces of government ID or by performing a face scan."
No Atlassian products are included in the ban. I think you have seen a joke.
Sounds like a great excuse to not have to partake in office BS.
Now, all we have to do is mandate that you pass a psychiatric test in order to use social media or LLMs. In this way, we can protect the mentally disabled. People are killing themselves after going on sites like Reddit. It's too dangerous to the mentally disabled.
this is an egregious violation of their civil rights.
the law of unintended consequences looms large.
Like what?
Kids not being able to do particular things until they're of age? That's much of an egregious violation of their civil rights.
Kids not being informed about the war crimes of their state, and other states.
> Kids not being informed about the war crimes
Interesting to frame this as a bad thing. As a parent, I would take that as a feature, not a bug. To me this is very suspicious why there seem to be so many people here, who I am assuming are mostly adults, advocating so strongly strongly for <16 olds told be on social media, as if it was something they need.
You sound like a Russian government official.
Haha or a person who's been around lots of children of all ages.
An under 16 year old not seeing the social media version of war crimes is a good thing. And that's the upper limit of the age range of this ban.
I think you could argue teenagers have a right to discuss political issues in the public forum. That's basically the definition of good citizenship, and (for better or worse) social media is the public forum of the day. Kids don't go from zero rights at 17 to full rights at 18; minors' rights are limited, but they do have rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
Nice! Soon enough they'll be forbidden to be outside during the day too, to avoid taking any risk crossing these "adults" thing probably.
Curfew laws are quite common aren't they?
And cigarettes! What next booze!?
Libertarianism really does hit a wall when it comes to kids, in so many ways, doesn't it?
The only appropriate comment here would be invoking Goodwin Law. Everything else is too mild to describe the journey of former democracies to totalitarian regimes.
Let's not go overboard. While I don't agree with this law, it's not much different from other underage laws that are commonplace: alcohol, tobacco, driving... I don't think it's an indicator of totalitarianism, it's just the same-old lawmaking philosophy updating to new developments.
My personal favourite analogy is gambling. The constant microdosing of dopamine to get you to hang around and spend just a little more ~money~ attention.