9mo ago

Australia plans social media ban for under-16s

Summary

Australia's government plans to introduce legislation banning social media for under-16s. The proposed laws aim to mitigate the harm social media inflicts on Australian children.

The government will consult with parents, social media platforms, and experts about the age limit.

The legislation will not apply to young people already on social media, and there will be no penalties for users.

12 comments

This one is for the mums and dads... They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids
Evergreen. Becoming a parent makes people paranoid. Catering to that paranoia is not helpful.
The only way to enforce these types of laws is to verify age, which means providing ID, which is ridiculous.
- I can't understand how someone hasn't explained to them that it's impossible to enforce. I can only see two possible ways:
  Require every social media platform operating in Australia to do rigorous ID checks on all users to ensure no-one is under the legal age, or
  Somehow lock down the whole Australian internet so that users must login and then validate the identity, and therefore age, of all users. Then maintain a huge filter table to restrict under age users from social media.
  Both of these are clearly never going to happen. Have I missed a simpler way to do it?
  
  The simpler way is hard. It requires parents to be present in the lives of their children.
Y’all probably will be luckier if you try to give parents tools to decide and manage it, rather than doing a top down mandate…
- Testing ground for 5 eyes secret police mass surveillance
  
  Their fists got hammy from genociding so many people.
- I agree with you but this article really reflects the australian way of handling things. Rules and regulations. It's good that they're going to ask first though.
16 seconds is very young.
- Yeah, I don't feel well at all with the idea of letting newborns who may not even started suckling use social media. It's a bit too soon.
Even if this were enforceable I guarantee kids will just go elsewhere.
I ran servers for dumb shit like this off various free hosts in the early 00's when most of my friends still had dialup ffs.
Chatgpt will have them setting up their own federations in minutes nowadays...
That doesn't work kids will just lie about their age.
We have had a 13 minumum age for social media here for 15-ish years, and that's not working at all. It's unenforceable.

12 comments