https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy54q80gy9t
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-soci... (https://archive.ph/Ba2JR)
My concerns about this are that it will lead to
(a) normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams. This won't be just kids - scammers will be challenging all kinds of people including vulnerable elderly people saying "this is why we need your id". People are going to lose their entire life savings because of this law.
(b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.
The risks are not worth the rewards of half-heatedly trying to stop kids communicating with other kids. They're still going to bully each other and what have you. They're still going to develop unrealistic expectations. They're probably even still going to use social media in practice.
This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept.
Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make phone calls.
Kids are not banned from the consuming content on those platforms. They simply can't have an account to create their own content as it was too often abused. For example, my 12yo daughter was asked by a friend to message bomb and abuse a 12yo her friend had a crush on. That's mild compared to some of the stories I've heard from platforms like Facebook, and between about 10 - 16 many kids are just nasty.
I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that leverage account history to supercharge the already addictive behaviours caused by UI designs optimised to manipulate your attention and direct your purchasing power towards whoever is paying them. Something kids are particularly vulnerable to. The algorithm doesn't care if it is pushing you towards radical content as long as you are watching it for as many hours in a day as possible.
A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying....yet a recent death in the news this week, the kid was literally bullied/sextorted via SMS....not social media.
Without banning SMS and possibly calls as well, it debunks this argument
Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.
The internet has evolved meaningfully over the last 10 years, even. Evolved might be generous, though.
I seem to remember real bullies would do it to your face before the internet. Not just anyone behind a keyboard.
Adults are however also better equipped to deal with that, especially if they have not been subjected to such abuse as children. It is worth noting that online bullying is however not the most serious matter here, rather (in my mind at least) it is the systematic targeting of kids/teenagers to get inside their head and get them to perform violent acts against themselves or others around them.
Following your reasoning:
Alcohol is banned for children. How long until they ban all drinks?
Driving is banned for children. How long until they ban all self-directed transport?
Voting is banned for children. How long until they pan all political opinion?
No. Just no.
Just ban Australia themselves.
> A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying
Oh really now? It has been going on for so many years... A big reason they've been pushing this is it impacts their own pockets i.e. the traditional media companies.
It could happen that they ban all communications, but if you think so, it needs its own argument; it can't hang off the social media ban. Otherwise it is like saying that if they ban children from drinking beer, soon they'll ban them from drinking liquids.
Why do these services have to lose? That's a choice made by this country's government. They can change it.
That's like saying every government should copy the new tariffs too. If only it was so simple...
> They’ll lose revenue in Australia.
Why is it always 1-way? Australia can also lose people and lose people's interest.
(That's also not what «walled garden» means. You're thinking about «deep web».)
You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.
> This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving
No it's not. Is every social media platform banned? How is it defined? This is the equivalent of going into a supermarket with a "kids" alcohol section and 1 for everyone else hand-picked by whoever in charge.
> You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.
As a parent myself, it definitely helps when you can collectively avoid having your kids on these platforms. I can’t express how much easier it is to restrict it and not seem like a kook when authorities are also on board.
No, they aren't just that, because they are government regulations requiring everyone wanting access to something that cannot be marketed to children under the rules to prove that they are not a child, which is not inherently essential to a regulation of what can be marketed to children.
There is a difference between regulating what can be marketed to children and mandating that vendors secure proof that every user is not a child.
(Just as there is a difference between prohibiting knowingly supplying terrorists and requiring every seller to conduct a detailed background check of every customer to assure that they are not a terrorist.)
When uploading ID documents, your account gets tied to your real world identity. That's not a precedent the government should be setting, because private entities having an excuse (the law) to require identification erodes privacy, and because in the future other services could be required to ask for an identification, too. Yes, it's the slippery slope (aka "boiling the frog") argument, but that's how laws that erode privacy evolve - step by step.
Now it's account for social media, then it's porn sites, then it's forums where you might see porn or discussions on suicide, drugs or anything deemed morally hazardous. They might require an ID just to view the site or require the site to not make it public. If (or "when", if we don't oppose such laws) enough countries mandate something like this, most sites will likely require an account for all content, regardless of where the person is located, as otherwise they'll likely have to prove that they've not only geolocated the IP of the visitor, but checked that they weren't using VPNs, Tor or similar services.
As for using zero-knowledge proofs and similar technology to make it less infringing on privacy - I very much doubt the government (any government) to implement this with 100% privacy and security.
Actually in Australia, IDs usually do get scanned and stored. About the same time I was getting too old for clubs, they were starting to introduce ID scanners. You line up, hand over your driver's licence or passport, they slap it on a wall-mounted scanner, the scan goes into a database and in you go. No scan, no entry. Nowadays I think they just use phone/tablet scanners.
Yes, handheld is now used. If you use the digital licences app on your phone in NSW/QLD the licence details are picked up by a QR code and cross verified via an auth API with Services NSW / TMR QLD. You are also checked against a database of banned patrons, against court ordered exclusions, and police issued exclusions. If you use the physical licence, an extra step of ID —> licence details extracted occurs, then the same process is followed.
I agree that people will lose their identity online if age checks become normalised. That’s not been the case with the club and inner city alcohol venues checks.
In Finland the government has allowed banks to offer (2fa) identification services to those that are using their services. If I sign into a government site using my banking ID, the bank gets paid for providing the service. To my understanding none of my actual ID information is transferred to a party wanting to identify me.
The Linkedin 'validate your identity' was the first time i was asked to actually take a picture of my passport/scan the chip. I'll refuse until they'll allow me to identify with my banking ID.
Actually, in lots of places it was porn sites first, but...
I wish they did, that would be huge.
---
[1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal).
In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).
Of course, nobody is sure what "reasonable steps" actually means, other than a selfie or ID upload.
Here is the text of the bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
The slippery slope is long behind us, we're already at the bottom.
Do you think there should there be police on every corner you must submit your ID to to prove you're not an illegal immigrant?
This law isn't letting anyone use social media freely until they're suspected of not being an adult, at which point they have to age verify. It requires everyone to identify themselves whenever they want to view, interact, reply or share content on the internet.
Additionally, the law makes no judgement on the technology used to identify age, just that social media companies need to make an effort. I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
Everyone who wants to view, interact with or share that content has to verify their age to do so.
> I suspect that companies will not want to deal with the data security issues (very illegal to share pictures of underage people without consent), and will not be "sharing" with 3rd parties.
There are countless instances of exactly this happening, over and over again, not to mention that it's the way age verification's implemented now nearly everywhere lol
Pretty much every company will contract a 3rd party service to perform those checks, making sure they get as much bang for as little buck as possible. Said services are usually the weak link that shares the data with others, often through PNGs in public buckets so that Russian teenagers have an easy job CURLing them.
If the government took security seriously, it’d endorse a solution and then take responsibility for it, given it came up with the law in the first place.
This pattern of thought is exactly the issue. Stop offloading parenting of your children to government! That won't end well for neither children nor adults.
You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves.
This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society.
What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
From my point of view I'm already paying for their brats with higher taxes, now I will also have to gradually give my documents to random web sites more and more just to reduce the "burden" of parenting on lazy parents...
As an actual parent, I have never heard of this or seen it. Can you provide some real examples?
How is the quote from OP's comment that is right at the end of the sentence you cited not a "real example"?
It's an extremely American religious belief that everything is an individual problem. Luckily, almost no other country has this religion.
Here is the law: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
4chan, Mastedon, BlueSky, PeerTube, Pixelfed
They have millions of users. They're about to get more.
No, you can't block these. No, you can't order these to do anything.
The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.
There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes.
The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization.
Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink.
Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing.
In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
*allowing our citizens to make their own choices about what they consume
Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be?
Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest.
At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do?
The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population.
Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm?
Why not?
I've got a marketing campaign ready that will sweep the nation and convince millions to ReVitaleZ!
Meanwhile, years after the actual Radithor radium water [1] scandal, the very same government was merrily blowing up atomic bombs in open air, in the desert [2].
And even today there are crazy people around the world happily consuming radioactive gas in specially designed spas [3]. They should be locked up for their own good, the government always knows better!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
[2] https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/downwind-upshot-knot...
I'm shocked the same government which supports global warming and mass species extinction, and which threatens to bomb "shithole countries" "back to the Stone age", has a less than perfect attitude about nuclear weapons. Shocked I say!
Next I suppose you'll say that this same government hasn't clamped down hard on coal power plants which, in addition to their CO2 emissions, generates ash which destroys waterways, kills people, and is full of radioactive waste?
I'm so glad our governments always know better than that!
It would be a shame if food and drug laws were in place mostly because even rich people and politicians can't ensure their food and drugs are safe.
It's time to take my protein powder supplements. I'm glad the government inspects every manufacturer so I don't have to worry about doing my own lead tests each time I buy some. Thank you Orrin Hatch for your diligence!
When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks.
The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
You're also missing what folks keep saying: the network effect isn't there. It needs to be popular enough that there's social pressure to be there. If it's that large, it's going to be large enough to be on the radar and then be under enforcement.
Slippery-slope arguments, for the most part, exist to fear monger folks away from change, even when the argument itself is non-sensical.
well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.
I don't think it's just corruption, there are people who are trying to do the right thing, even if flawed.
YouTube’s tendency to push extreme rabbit holes and funnel towards extremism and conservatism in young men is what led to them being included.
That's the point, there are always fringe social networks you don't know, and they are probably x10 toxic than reddit comment sections.
Slippery slope arguments exist because the act of governing has the tendency to converge on ratchet effects. It never bloody loosens, do every damn inch has to be treated with maximal resistance.
There would be nothing new here?
The argument is that kids being online isn’t the governments business one way or the other.
The slippery slope argument is always secondary, but how often has government regulation not grown in size and scope? Combine that with how norms shift and the type of large scale identity infrastructure put in place to support this, can you honestly say this isn’t going to grow?
All of that also ignores the possibility (read inevitability) that a bad actor/authoritarian would exploit this access further without popular support.
And they tie your SIM card with your ID.
Maybe the civil rights movement wouldn't even be possible in this era.
This is a very narrow scale when taking the bigger picture, as these are just prominent events in Middle Eastern history since the growth of social media usage, say after 2011.
You are not even considering the travesties avoided due to social media, what regulatory action has been avoided (or taken) to avoid social media backlashes.
You are being extremely disingenuous, and you are directly attacking some peoples' only hope of minimizing repression. I urge you to reconsider your beliefs. This directly and critically affects me.
Where I live, we’re already free from repression and social media threatens to reintroduce it.
Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when everyone has been triggered and trolled into limbic system mode by rage bait.
Liberal politics speaks to the neocortex. Authoritarianism speaks to the brain stem.
That's odd because I don't see a lot of that. Care to elaborate?
>downvoted out
Erm...
Also there’s a world of difference between people registering dislike on an online forum and the use of state power. It seems like a lot of people these days draw no distinction between removal from a private space or even people just showing disapproval and actual state force.
It created a world where: when disapproval inside an echo-chamber fails to a critical mass of people telling the truth, just pretend the content doesn't exist and then gaslight people using official media outlets, including Congress and the White House.
So it gave people the impression there's no difference between the two. Not only were disapproval and state force in agreement, they colluded.
I would say that much bigger problem is possibly the influence of these sites on development of young people. We know it's addictive, we know it's harmful. Cigarettes and alcohol are banned for the same reason so I'm kinda glad for this Australian experiment. We'll see.
And yes, I mean engineers. Just a few “inventions” off the top of my head that got us here:
- infinite scroll - Facebook’s shadow profiles - recommendation algorithms
Don’t pretend it’s not engineers that came up with these.
We did, though. The chances of getting caught were slim to nil. Will kids (and adults for that matter) have the same easy opportunity to evade enforcement here?
But baked into that is the idea that enforcement isn't perfect so you can still disappear into the night when you have that urge to do whatever it is that is technically illegal. This allows acceptance of laws that might be considered too draconian if enforcement was perfect. However, it seems in the case of these digital-centric laws that enforcement will become too close to being perfect as, without the need to hire watchful people, there is strong incentive to make it ever-present.
Or maybe not, but that is why the question was asked.
Its a two sided bias, on the one, governmemt authority is categorically bad and on the other you cant participate and change it. You could frame social media corporations in the way, but not, when you are a libertarian, i guess.
Without that, it just comes off as hand-wavy anti-government fear-mongering. It's telling that you used the term "authoritarians", as if any law that's passed that can restrict what someone can do is necessarily authoritarian... which, well, as I said, it's telling.
I'm more concerned with the fact that these sorts of laws don't just affect kids: they require adults to supply government-issued identification in order to use these services, which I think is crap.
What’s more, the idea that this puts children at the mercy of authoritarians is laughable. The US tech industry has shown us beyond doubt that they are perfectly ok with genuine authoritarians in charge, provided the dollars keep rolling. Fuck them, and good on ya Australia.
Plus, this is asking everyone in the country to give up their biometrics (face scanning is one implementation) or link your government issued ID to your social media account (look at the UK to see how this turned out - people are being arrested for simple tweets against the government). Sacrificing the freedom to be anonymous online to "protect the kids"
That is by no means the only solution. A lot of work is happening in the area of cryptographically verified assertions; for example, a government API could provide the simple assertion "at least 16 years of age" without the social media platform ever seeing your ID, and the government never able to tie you to the service requiring the assertion.
It will always be cheaper to go with a vendor that forces you to scan your face and ID, because they will either be packaging that data for targeted advertising, selling the data to brokers, or making bank off of using it as population-wide training datasets.
Governments will want the data and cost savings, as well.
Both corporations and governments will want to use the platforms to tie online activity to real human beings.
Arguments like these end up like arguments for PGP in email: yes, in a perfect world we'd be using it, and platforms would make it easy, but the incentives aren't aligned for that perfect world to exist.
Yes, it could, but we don't have that, do we? They launched the ban without implementing a zero-knowledge proof scheme as you described. In a very short amount of time the providers will have associated millions of people's accounts to their biometric information and/or their government issued IDs.
If the API asks for a users minimum age at a certain time, how can the government not know which data set it has to check?
Some worthwhile reading on the topic if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Zero-Know...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature
It should even possible to construct a protocol where you can prove that you're over 18 without revealing your birthdate.
Zero-Knowledge Range Proofs: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/430
"Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval."
Umm, no. That is not how a scheme like this would work.
When implemented correctly, yes. I've edited my wording slightly to indicate that.
I just don't have faith in most countries, including Australia, to implement it with protecting the privacy of their residents in mind.
I disagree. I can't think of an implementation mistake that would allow just the government to see what services you sign up for.
You could of course screw it up so everybody could see. If the government put a keylogger on your device then they could see. However broadly speaking this is not something that can be screwed up in such a way that just the government would be able to see.
The protocol wouldn't even involve any communication with the government.
Not just theoretically posdible, people have done it: https://zkpassport.id/
Also, I'm really struggling to think of examples where people have been arrested for "tweets against the government". The Linehan case? Most of the ones I can think of are like that — so basically culture war bullshit and overzealous policing of incitement laws.
Decades ago when the Australia Card—an ID system for Australians—was first proposed there was an almighty outcry from the citizenry and the project was seemingly shelved. What's happened since is that our Governments quietly ramped up their computer systems and collected the data anyway, this Law will only enhance that collection further. Moreover, recently Government introduced what at the moment are voluntary digital IDs which it sold under the guise that having a single ID will make it easier to deal with government services, etc. Unfortunately, most will unquestioningly swallow the official line and miss the fine minutiae.
I've never heard any politician or Government official come out and say "We'll never introduce an Australia Card because we're free people" or such and I'd bet that I never will. Fact is, we Australians already have had an 'Australia Card' for years, it's just that we don't carry it around in our wallets as we do with our credit cards.
Our democracy would be vastly improved if those whose governance we're under would actually tell us the truth.
Edit: Despite my comment about this new law, I agree kids need protection—so we're damned either way. I see no easy solution.
Which tweets do you have in mind? Because it not does not describe any of the high-profile tweet-related arrests I have heard of.
In other words: this legislation is useless, and entirely stupid, and kids will bypass it trivially. Teenagers are exceptionally good at bypassing that which they find stupid, or gets in their way of what they consider to be fun, or a right.
Until these controls on American tech companies Trump (via all the tech CEOs fawning over him) had more control over Australian society than your own government.
The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media unless we all want to have American bonkers (and increasingly authoritarian) politics fully exported to us.
Yes, it does but don't kid yourself, all of Big Tech will cooperate with governments for mutual benefit. Big Tech collects data that governments would otherwise have difficulty collecting, if Big Tech is refrained from collecting data because of regulation and privacy laws then both lose out.
We should never expect governments to maintain our privacy or protect us from Big Tech leaching our data. In short, we're fighting different enemies on two fronts and that's a difficult and invidious position to be in.
There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.
Lawmakers in the US have said this explicitly[1] concerning laws like KOSA[2]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
> In a video recently published by the conservative group Family Policy Alliance, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture” should be among the top priorities of conservative lawmakers.
A bill that implements mass surveillance, chilling of free speech and the hurting of marginalized kids is really killing two birds with one stone for some legislators.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
The sticking point is that it's politically controversial to point this out because of progressive beliefs about gender identity as an unquestionable facet of someone's being.
And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324768316_Sex_Ratio...
"Social contagion" is social science terminology. It's meant as an analogy not a pejorative.
If that's the one and only paper you have, then it's a single UK paper that covers seven years of GIDS referrals from numbers that are near zero in 2009 to 1800 referrals in 2016.
Statistically, looking at the last graphic in the paper, it's less a case of "becoming so heavily skewed" and likely more a case of "taking several years to reveal the pattern and weights".
There's scarce numbers to begin with to make a strong claim as to the "natural balance" of referrals being evident at the start and this "being skewed toward" the later clearer pattern.
As the commenter upthread noted, the adult demographic is more weighted towards men who want to be women. Why would childhood referrals have become shifted in the opposite direction, much more towards girls who want to be boys?
> There's not really any plausible explanation as to [..] other than social contagion.
is a leap.
> Why would childhood referrals have become shifted
\1 Have they really shifted, or have the stats on a relatively new thing in a few countries firmed up from nothing, to bugger all, to enough to see a pattern?
\2 As to the pattern now seen - a few boys question whether they like being boys at an earlier age than a few more girls then question whether they like being girls ..
there are other factors, eg: I heard there's a "big change" in the lives of young girls at an age that coincides with a 'surge' (small numbers in a country the size of the UK) in girls exploring whether they want to be girls after all.
Social patterns, depth of communication about places existing where gender question can be asked, word of mouth, etc are factors that play a role - but they are not the sole factors at play in these very low incident observations.
My suggestion to yourself, looking at the questions you've raised and how you've framed them, is to perhaps study some epidemiology and find a mentor with first hand real world experience with low frequency data that gradually comes to light as social norms about reporting evolve - eg: SIDS data in the 1970s / 1980s.
You seem to be making a great many mistakes based on preconceptions and "feels".
If only the Dutch hadn't destroyed quite so many records in "their" East Indies .. there might be other gender frequency records to draw on <shrug>.
Some social scientists say the analogy is misleading, the term is poorly defined, and contagion has a pejorative connotation irrespective of intent. They are correct.
It is doctors who first drew attention to this phenomenon. See for example Tavistock whistleblower David Bell.
Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.
Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.
I have no interest in your JAQing off[1].
At one end of the scale is very little data that gives an unreliable picture with a high degree of variability, at the other end of the not very long in time scale is somewhat more data that provides a better picture.
To make such a fuss about " this demographic change " indicates a lack of exposure to such statistics.
Why are you attempting to make such a big deal of bad data here?
When my parents were kids, there were no left-handed kids. Social contagion is the only explanation for as to why there are suddenly so many left-handed kids today, especially since many of them are boys and not girls.
It’s about the social safety of transitioning. The paper you referenced is from the UK, which is famously a TERF island (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). In the TERF island, it’s much less safe to be a trans woman than a trans man. Adolescents can sense the risk of being a trans woman is much higher, so many trans women stay in the closet and don’t come out.
The radical feminist movement in the UK has existed much longer than this, since around the late 1960s to early 1970s.
2015-2016 is when rhetoric online and globally shifted towards villainizing trans women that weren't on the public's radar before. This was exported to UK politics and has been an incredible political success.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
It's actually quite the contrary, the rest of the LGB looks at gay transphobes as the hypocrites and useful idiots they are.
If it's about monetizing child attention not about speech control why isn't every single toy ad, food ad, movie ad, also banned?
Kids are not banned from communicating and posting with each other; the ban exempts a number of direct messing apps, as well as community apps like Discord:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/dec/10/social-media-b...
If I had to over-simplify it, then the ban appears to mostly target doom-scrolling apps. I say mostly, since I'm not sure why Twitch and Kick are included
We do ban the things that consume children the way social media does.
Alcohol, addictive drugs, etc.
This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
True, but let me remind you that we didn't have conclusive data on smoke harm until the 50s, but this doesn't mean that smoking was not harmful before, nor that we were lacking any clue before coming to a conclusive study.
At the moment we don't have any conclusive study about e-cigarettes, but I'm sure you would never give kids e-cigarettes just because we don't have 30/40 years worth of data.
> This is nothing more than speech control under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children"
This is a bit more complex than this. Kids and adolescents online are targeted with all sort of techniques to leverage their attention in order to make money. I understand the speech control worry, and I agree up to a certain point, but I don't see how ignoring the problem makes it any better. What are the alternatives we have? I'm genuinely asking, not advocating for TINA. I have two kids and I see the effects of social media on them and on their friends.
Keep in mind that this cannot be offloaded to families, for multiple reasons: - many family just don't have enough data or knowledge to make informed decisions - until the network effect is in place, banning your kid from social media while all of their friend are online can be impractical and cruel - parent decisions can affect kids health and overall society outcome; allowing a wrong decision by the parents (because the society doesn't want to handle the problem) would be unfair for the kids and no wise for the society.
As in many aspects of life the best solution is neither white nor black, but a shade of grey, and is far from being perfect. Looking for a perfect solution is a waste of time, resources and unfair for those that are affected in the meanwhile.
I understand the concerns, and probably Australia approach is not the best, but it's also the first. We probably will need a period of adjustments to reach a sound solution.
I generally agree with parent commenter - some of this will be helped by the ban but theres a serious risk a small number will go through fringe social media even less policed or normalised than the big American ones and have much higher risk on some of these issues than before.
The Social media platforms of today are very clearly harmful to our youth. Just like alcohol and cigarettes are to a developing brain. Why can we ban those and not this?
Sure, but the Australian government's definition of an age-restricted social media platform doesn't mention advertising or algorithms at all. Technically, their definition also covers algorithm-free social media like Mastodon, which I'd argue isn't nearly as harmful.
The framing of social media as something that's inherently bad no matter how you do it is a framing that helps social media giants like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to continue to "do it" in a way that harms people. I'm sure they love the idea that the ills of social media can be solved by banning their least profitable users while doing nothing to regulate what they do with the others. They're probably thrilled that their healthier algorithm-free competitors haven't even entered the conversation. They want to be the tobacco companies of the future, because making addictive things for adults is incredibly profitable.
we didn't ban cigarettes, we disincentivized them. Why can't we do the same here? regulate the algorithms, not the platform (the platform ultimately being "the internet").
This is just a cat and mouse game where every few years the government will ban whatever the kids like. That's not how you create a high trust society.
In Australia, not that much and we (Australia) passed the point of diminishing returns and moved into the zone of incentivising a criminal black market.
The state of play today is that foreign nationals, Syrians and others, are chasing billions in illicit tobacco revenue, denying that to the Government as income, firebombing and shooting up cars, shops, and families of rivals.
The brutality levels have risen to the point where old school leg breaking Chopper Read era crims are speaking out about going too far, involving families and "breaking code".
Social policy always has a balance.
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...
It’s not that I have an opinion either way. Having anything that messes with my lungs is something I don’t touch. Not that I’m a health nut. But I have been a gym addict for over 30 years.
Hallucinogens are generally considered not very addictive, they are drugs that people use infrequently and their direct health effects are usually pretty minimal - LSD for instance is a mild stimulant and vasoconstrictor, but that's no real health worry for younger users. There are mental side effects in a minority of users (HPPD etc).
Compare this to tobacco which is well known to be one of the world's most addictive substances and kills fully half of lifetime users, I'd say a society in which people 9% of people used hallucinogens in the last year is preferable to one in which (like the US was in 1965) 42% of people smoke daily.
Cannabis consumption doesn't have to involve your lungs, people consume all sorts of edibles and drinks these days. Vaping cannabis is definitely worse for your health than abstaining from both vaping and smoking, but it doesn't contain the combustion products from burning plant material. Smoking cannabis; well I honestly don't know how that compares to smoking tobacco in terms of health risk, but it is less addictive and users are less likely to be "pack a day" types than they are with cigarettes AFAICT.
Vaping nicotine, similarly, is widely considered worse than not vaping nicotine and users may be more prone to respiratory infections, plus there is often poor quality control on ingredients. But again, tobacco kills half of lifetime users.
So yeah, if I had to choose whether to have higher smoking rates or higher hallucinogen and weed use rates in society, based on expected health outcomes, I'd go with the hallucinogens and weed.
If you want to read about the comparative risks of drug use (including tobacco and alcohol, but written prior to the explosion of vapes) I highly recommend "Drugs without the hot air", a book by Prof. David Nutt, one of the UK's foremost experts on the topic. The general takeaway is that heroin, cocaine, tobacco and alcohol are the worst, and that most other drugs slot in below there somewhere.
Nearly everything about it that’s bad for teens also sucks for the rest of us.
As with addiction or clicking a ratchet forward, they knew that reversing direction would then be nigh on impossible. Society seems to have little or no defense against such threats and I'd bet London to a brick that it'll be repeated with AI.
Government assumes zero expected trust reciprocation because they don't have to provide trust reciprocation and can do what they want, and government is comprised of co-opted humans.
Err on the side of sovereign freedom. Arguing about banning this or regulating that is all second principle stuff, and nanny states all strike me as the tail-end of civilization.
The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.
Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.
People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.
These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.
But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.
This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.
I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.
His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.
It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.
Funny enough I lived in the Atlanta metro area from 1996 to 2022. I had a house built in Decatur in 2003.
I started dating my now wife in 2011. She lived in Alpharetta. As soon as I met my now step sons who were 9 and 14, my first thought was in going to have to sell my house and move. There is no way in hell they are going to survive Decatur public schools.
We moved to Johns Creek at first and then had a house built in Forsyth County. Yeah this Forsyth County
https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=qfgRouGzQvm_nI1h
The attitudes in the burbs of Forsyth changed since then as people came from other places and it grew. But we very much stuck out. My son loved it there and still lives in that area and rents a house nearby where you use to live.
Agreed, but observation suggests that it takes much more effort to do something about it—effort that the majority cannot muster or are unwilling to commit to.
That's the Orwellian payoff: people self-censoring and frightened to act for rear of retribution or their reputation. It's the authoritarian's ideal approach to control.
You've never been more free.
Providing age assurance is what banning teens from social media requires. This is already happening in the US in several states.
Regulating social media is the alternative.
Facebook Instagram Threads Kick Reddit Snapchat TikTok Twitch X (formerly Twitter) YouTube
Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.
They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.
If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.
This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.
Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.
Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.
We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.
Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.
But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.
Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.
The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.
Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.
Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.
Youtube for one is an advertising machine. On the other hand it is one of the few places where one can find some amazing educational and entertainment content. Prohibiting it I think is a crime.
Besides, lately Politicians stick their noses everywhere. It is just way too much.
Tech is trying to push all these wonderful LLM's on us, telling us how it works like magic. Meanwhile, it can't even follow basic public TV labeling.
I think that is a surprisingly good solution. You can still access educational information, or really whatever videos you want, but you have to actively seek them out rather than ingest whatever is spit out at you.
You really should think about how idiotic this libertarian talking point is
It would be valid if you had a populace that was educated (implying that when people heard the inconvenient truths, they would be able to parse fact from fiction and not be ideologically driven), combined with a tyrannical government that would be in power and afraid of the general populace knowing that information and starting a revolt.
This situation is pretty much impossible. How can an educated populace elect that government in the first place? If the population was dumb and elected a fascist government (i.e USA), they would just ignore anyone speaking inconvenient truths (i.e how MAGA is blind to all the stuff that is going on).
Secondly, information dissemination is pretty much impossible to stop these days with everyone being on the internet all the time.
The only people who complain about government silencing them these days are racists who wanna push some racist or "anti-woke" narrative, or the brainrotted people like anti-vaxxers. Because in their mind, they live in this false reality where they believe that everyone is brainwashed by the evil government and they are the actually "woke" ones.
The rest of the Anglo world is much less obsessed with government control than the US is; UK is absolutely fine with cameras everywhere, for example, and has almost no protection against parliament. Law enforcement is much more seen as by the people and for the people in these countries.
Australians think of themselves as carefree but good hearted larrikins who snub their nose at authority, and would always be ready to duff a steer or two from a wealthy cattleman for some hungry orphans. The reality is this type of Australian only remains as fading memories in Henry Lawson stories, the few that ever existed. The real Australian is not only a spineless sticklers for the rules completely subservient to authority, with little sense of adventure, but is also very envious of others driven by their greedy and selfish nature.
During covid "lockdowns", Australians were far more eager to tattle on other commoners for breaking the precious rules than they were concerned with questioning government's hypocritical behavior or unscientific rules and policies. It was fine in their minds that their rulers misbehaved, so long as their neighbor didn't get to take their kid to a park if they weren't allowed to as well.
EDIT: I don't mean this to sound overly harsh to Australians, it's not unique to them. What is funny is just their opinion of themselves. At least the British are admittedly subservient sticklers.
A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.
"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.
Targeting platforms is like only banning one brand of cigarette. People will just find another. We should instead attack the "seller" here, being the algorithms optimized for selling and not for the enrichment of society.
That said smoking and Instagram are probably best avoided by kids
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.
I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.
There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.
The important point is that such invasive approaches are not required; clearly, however people already authenticate with government agencies for getting a driver's licence or passport would suffice. I think it's the responsibility of knowledgeable tech people to advocate for this.
Or do you expect the government to understand there are other operating systems out there?
IOW, this problem is as "unsolved" as the problem of deciding who's allowed to drive a car, or travel to another country.
You might want to double-check your definition of "hard drugs", "libertarian" or both.
That kind of binary framing doesn’t really move the discussion forward.
A more constructive approach is case-by-case. Different things sit at different levels of harm, and "ban everything" vs. "ban nothing" isn’t a workable model for society.
"In 2015, 9.3% of high school students reported smoking cigarettes in the last 30 days, down 74% from 36.4% in 1997 when rates peaked after increasing throughout the first half of the 1990s"
Tobacco and porn have been more strongly regulated lately. In my teenage years, they were easily available to anyone with coins in their hands. Turns out: that didn't destroy us either.
The first beer, the first pack of strong tobacco (Rothändle, the dirtiest, hardest stuff), the first tiddie magazine from the railway station kiosk, those were rites of passages. It was a way for teenagers to push the envelope, realise alcohol makes you wobbly, tobacco causes diarrea (believe me, that Rothändle stuff was more chemical weapon than 'smooth'), and ultimately, all women look about the same undressed, so it is pointless to keep buying. They were small, recoverable mistakes that taught teenagers where their limits were.
Now we have banned all that away - but the teenage urge to self-realization and rebellion found a new way to social media. And: social media is safer: no-one got lung cancer from TikTok. No-one woke up in a hospital for facebook poisoning.
Ultimately, it is the rebellion the fascists dislike, not the fact that people earn money with it. So we ban that, driving teenagers to ever-more-destructive behaviour.
Teenagers need an outlet to be teenagers without living in a state sanctioned panopticum. If society pathologizes every form of adolescent experimentation, if you let control freaks raise your children, do not be surprised if they turn out to be either actual rebels, or something much, much darker.
We do that for drugs already. Of course, the correct way to do it is not to try to ban a substance or control supply but simply to ban advertising for addictive stuff. I don't think that works for social media, though, due to the viral nature of it.
People usually reference things that they are ashamed about as a reason to justify this fear of ID based services. I don’t find this compelling whatsoever. Every platform I’m on that is even mildly associated with identity is more enjoyable and interesting. The idea that the marketplace of ideas is slowed by identity is not something I’ve seen in practice. In authoritarian regimes we already see ways to circumvent internet anonymity. So no, I don’t see the downside.
Open to being persuaded here though, about 5 years ago I would have agreed with you.
Why make it easy for them.
I wasn't told to hate government regulations. 30 years of horrible, ineffective regulation taught me to hate these poorly thought out regulatoins. I grew up under No Child Left Behind. I saw the TSA form before my very eyes. I'm right now seeing ICE roam free, regulations be damned.
I don't hate the idea of regulation. I don't trust the people who are trying to regulate.
Aussie, Canada, much of the Europe have no issue.
Australia has had a pretty good track record with writing/implementing regulations.
So, when the government issues this ban, the kids would listen to their parents a lot more easily.
Government says you can't chat with just anyone in Roblox, and suddenly it's accepted that this is just what it is. Not only that, but limits and rules on how much and when you can watch YouTube and the like are also suddenly more acceptable.
So far what my kids are saying is that this is broadly true across their peer groups. The exceptions are just that, exceptions. The peer pressure to be in on it all is lessened. And in turn, that means less push-back on boundaries set by us, because it's less of a big deal.
(And I face less of a dilemma of how much to allow to balance out the harm of not being part of the zeitgeist vs. the harm of short form, mega-corporation curated content).
So many people are looking at this from a technical stand point and how water tight or perfect its going to be.
But there is a large psychological part of this that helps parents and I know that part of it is what a number of parents I've spoken to like about it.
Its not just about the current generation, but the next wave of kids who have grown up under these laws, the psychology of it will have changed.
This also works with other things such as alcohol and (old school) smoking (neither of which has watertight control, but the control is still very effective).
I don't think this is much of an issue at all. The path of least resistance, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, is just using a proxy, TOR, or whatever else to bypass the filtering. Sites will be doing the bare minimum for legal compliance, and so it won't be particularly difficult.
Beyond that I'd also add that for those of us that were children during the early days of the internet, "we" were always one click away from just about anything you could imagine in newsgroups, IRC, and so on. It never really seems to have had much of any negative effect, let alone when contrasted against the overwhelmingly negative effect of social media.
I don't really know why that is, and I half suspect nobody really does. You can come up with lots of clever hypotheses that are all probably at least partially true, but on a fundamental level it's quite surprising how destructive 'everybody' communicating online turned out to be. And that obviously doesn't end just because somebody turns 18.
I've been grappling with this all afternoon and I still cannot determine what my stance on this.
I grew up when the internet was a bit of a wildwest, and I've definitely seen things online that I wish I never had without my consent.
But there's also a bizarre thought that mayb exposure to this isn't such a bad thing because it keeps us human, and aware of privilidge and our safety - and why that is such an important thing to think about
I'd equate it at some level to seeing the inside of the production of food and being put of eating meat, or eating anything non-organic again.
I'm not sure I would like my own children to see it, but I'm hyper aware of what conflict and crime looks like as a result.
Comparatively to social media at least I was making a choice to click on something risky or that I would not like to see rather than having a algorithm choose for me. Not sure if I am just becoming a middle-aged tech dinosaur though.,
When someone wanted to do something counter-culture (i.e the *chan websites), there was actually a shared interest behind it. People would spend time making content and actually doing things on the web.
These days, internet is so ubiqutious that the majority of the users are simply consumers. There is no drive to build anything. Modern day kids aren't going to be spending time trying to figure out how to get around social media bans with technology, because most internet users simply just don't care enough to organize and build something.
It means the current generation gets exposed to a lot of toxic content all in the name of driving advertising revenue. In the olden days you could get everything, but it wasn't forced down your throat, or rather your reels.
You watch something, you like it, then you get all the time similar things.
Simple example: you click on a post about vegetarian meals. Then the next you see is cows ending up in a slaughterhouse. And then etc.. In less than a week, your posts are all about "why become a vegan".
The end effect is that they shape our children culturally, and it's very hard to explain what is true vs what is fake. Or why something is right vs wrong. They are just not there yet.
‘Fringe networks’, and ‘off the radar’ feel like a very negative framing for a kind of smaller, more intimate, and often pleasantly communal feeling internet that I quite like!
Old fashioned online forums—maybe even Hackernews itself?—would likely fit into this ‘fringe’, ‘off the radar’ internet, and yet, it still feels much less toxic here than it does on twitter.
> The real problem is social media. Their machine learning algorithms are optimised to boost toxic content
…and you need a massive network to enable this, right? You can’t do it without the money, and the volume of content, that the giants in this space have.
If this just pushes kids onto the small web—sure, it’s not _all_ wholesome—but at least it’s not as carefully, as deliberately manipulative.
Remove those apps that make you do so, and the world becomes a little bit brighter over time. I did it years ago with FB apps (which was draining battery while unused, typical fb crappy engineering when they can't even snoop on you in more subtle ways) and have 0 need to put anything there. I can check FB on desktop if I need to, and do so rarely due to lack of any actually interesting stuff there.
Same can go for any other social cancer out there.
The issue is that now the government knows what you are doing online, and that should never be allowed to happen.
I grew up when the Internet was truly free, before Facebook even existed. People shared source code, videos, MP3s, games, regardless of "copyright" or "intellectual property." To some extent, it is still possible to do all of this, but these freedoms are being eroded every day by making the Internet less anonymous. The endgame is obviously to force people to pay for things whose "marginal cost" is zero in the language of economists. "Protecting the children" is just a convenient excuse.
There's zero technical necessity for this. You could do zero knowledge proofs with crypto key pairs issued together with the eID.
The Swiss proposal for eID includes stuff like that. If a service needs proof of age, you use an app on your phone to generate the response, which is anonymized towards the requester and doesn't need to contact a government server at all.
There is a distinction between getting data from an ISP and getting it via your use of their portal, but I’d argue it’s without much of a difference in reality.
Since we don't see a whole lot of moderately healthy democracies arbitrarily jailing people for life, one might reasonably assume these sorts of controls work.
The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.
And nobody should trust their government.
Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!
Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's why we have democratically elected governments. All these power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some extend at least.
51% of a vote can go the wrong way now and then.
They also have more direct means of accessing more specific data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.
The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a tourist or something. They statistically don't care about me. However, the US morality police might decide to statistically care about everyone who watches porn.
But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a government might have a specific motive to do me dirty and not care about being honest.
I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious treatment.
(If you watch porn online, you can be pretty sure they already "know" it, because you're not doing it in the privacy of your own home, you're doing it on a public network with next to no secrecy about who you are or what you're doing).
The fear of an evil government misusing something, more often than not, is a thought terminating cliche. It means we cannot regulate, or create any laws about anything, because evil people could abuse those laws. In reality, evil people do evil shit, irrespective of the laws available for abuse.
Are you and I living in the same reality? They're constantly just making things up out of nowhere from nothing and refusing to back down. Now to the point of arresting US citizens with a secret police and committing international war crimes in open waters.
Just because people lie, doesn't mean we need to shrug ok lets just hand over all our private data everywhere.
But I dig ya! What the current US government does is abhorrent.
That you categorize all of those things in the same boat is very partisan. And it is exactly why a government controlling access to information is a very bad idea. Some of those things aren't real phenomena, others are just over hyped and some are real and very much proven. The news sources you got those opinions from are highly partisan but you trust them implicitly even though you have access to the Internet and can cross check many of them. That you can make such blind mistakes is exactly why elected officials should never control the flow of information. And to give you an example of an opinion that very much matters, consider is nuclear power green or not? The wrong answer about that is doing more damage than your most hated official could ever do.
- January 6th was an attempted coup of the government coordinated by Republican interest groups and antagonized by Trump.
- Vaccines do not cause autism.
- Climate change is real and anthropological in origin.
- The 2020 election was not rigged for Biden and there exists no evidence of impropriety of any kind.
- Haitians did not eat people's pet dogs in the USA. This was just plain, out-in-the-open racism.
- The US military is using the WMD, sorry, I mean the "drug boat" excuse on vessels 1,200 miles away from US waters to execute a dozen people at a time. They are providing no evidence and performing no seizures or investigations. Then they are violating international law and their own documents on war crimes and service member's duty to refuse by having them execute shipwreck survivors.
Everything above is a fact. Not an opinion. Not partisan. A fact.
And that's assuming the technical solution is deployed everywhere. I'm in the EU with one of those IDs, and I still had to upload photos of my passport and scan my face to open a bank account. The identification process even had its own app that I had to install.
But I also think some of the consequences you fear (widespread scams, a mass shift to “dark” networks, extreme social isolation) are not guaranteed. They will depend heavily on how the law is implemented, how platforms handle age verification, and what healthy social alternatives (offline or moderated) are offered. I do believe it’s possible to design a safe system.
Personally, having seen many dire predictions fail to materialize in the past, I don’t view this as either a “clear net benefit” or an “inevitable disaster,” but rather as a social experiment with real potential for success as well as serious unintended consequences.
I support the Australian law and would like to see something similar in my own country. We can’t simply assume an invisible hand will resolve this issue for the better. Still, it’s worth watching closely and following the empirical data over the coming months.
The antisocial media may be irrelevant, but I still fail to see why a government should be able to proxy-control the flow of information. So I am totally against this. I am also against antisocial media, but I don't see why a government actor should filter and censor information here.
1. Kids are already moving to platforms that are not included in the ban, groups of friends will choose their own apps to make their group home, including Russian and Chinese apps ( already happening now)
2. Some kids have found ways around the included platforms...not surprising
3. One of the reasons they are spruiking is to stop Cyberbullying. Its ironic then that a big problem in schools across the country is physical bullying in the school grounds, with the educational authorities doing nothing about it. I know this one to be fact and have multiple instances that I personally know of where it happens and no action is taken. Our Government doesnt want to know about this at all
4. The platforms that have been banned are mostly "Big Tech" something that our Government hates with a passion, while many others go untouched. Discord is not included nor Telegram (how are these not social media, they literally allow people to socialise). I feel this is more of a weakening jab at Big Tech by our government to "stick it to them"
5. Day 3 and its pretty ineffective so far. There are many under 16's still have accounts on the blocked socials, and within the Family circle the only one that has been banned is actually 17, having her Instagram blocked ??? so not an awesome start at all.
«Big Tech» is a bad term to use IMHO, but if you do, why wouldn't it cover Discord(/Tencent) or even Telegram ?
Arguably parental control should have been enough to avoid all of this but the regulation still helps parents. It’s way more difficult to ask kids not to have social media when all of their friends have it.
I would have preferred stricter social media platform regulation for everyone forcing tech companies to take responsibility for what happens on their platforms. It’s not that they are dangerously only for kids
Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age
Here you go. If you’re concerned about your personal data, only use platforms that integrate and use this.
The Australian Governments IT Security is a joke.
This law in Australia explicitly prohibits companies from using ID document verification for their age gating specifically because of concerns like this
Platforms may offer it as an option but must also offer a reasonable alternative, so no one who is 16 or older is prevented from having a social media account because they choose not to provide government ID. This includes situations where other age check methods return a result the user does not accept."
Those who do that, are not interested in this ban working, they are the individualists assaulting the community.
> a) normalising people uploading identification documents...
we have technical measures for which there is no need for the end user to upload anything. With oath you can basically have a simple age check; nothing more.
> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
You can always minimize the fraction, but you can never make it go away.
> Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.
This was a politically bold move and there will be no harms that will come out of it; especially when compared to the status quo.
Those who feign concern about this usually have vested interests into stopping this bill; their "interest" is just another attempt in stopping it albeit with a more "nuanced" approach.
Soo... we already have a problem with some youths running into extremist content on Facebook, TikTok, Telegram ... no "fringe" network needed.
I've seen this argument a lot, and I don't think it really matches reality - I very much expect that the problem users of social media who are teens will tend to be the ones that will want to get around the ban (and will easily be able to).
Kids who just have an account because they are "pressured" to probably aren't actually really using it much or problematically?
And the other problem is that everyone knows it's a silly law so I don't think there will be any less pressure to have accounts because enough kids will be evading it. The ban will only motivate many kids (if you know much about how teenagers think)
The reasonable approach to solve this problem is verification protocol that mandates integration with the apps chosen by users. You have your wallet with digital ID and you use only it on any website, sharing the bare minimum of details. No uploads of anything anywhere. Independent wallet providers ensure privacy and prevent state overreach.
> (b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Unfortunately dark places existed in mainstream social media too. It’s something that should receive sufficient attention from law enforcement, nothing has changed here.
I don't get why people believe there's a conspiracy here. There's perhaps a large tent, but "social media bad" is not a controversial opinion! "The gov't should do something about it" is more controversial, though I think the controversiality is less heavy in spaces with parents, teachers, places where people have to deal with kids.
Not that this is how things should be determined, but... I think reading this as a "get more data and track people" play feels like giving everyone involved too much credit. It really just feels like what it says on the tin here.
We've long lost this war.
I'm in Italy, staying at my 3rd Airbnb. I was surprised when the first asked me, casually, to drop a photograph of my passport in the chat. I checked with Claude: yep, that's the law.
(I'll remind you that Italy is in the EU.)
On checking into this place last week, the guy just took a photo of our passports on his phone. At this point I'm too weak to argue. And what's the point? That is no longer private data and if I pretend that it is, I'm the fool.
The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).
The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.
> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.
Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.
I do agree that "not without a warrant" is a pretty load-bearing thing and it _should_ be tedious to get information. When a lot of info is just so easy to churn through that can activate new forms of abuse, even if from an information-theoretical point of view the information was always there.
And it's not even just about public officials. All those stories of people at Google reading their exes emails or whatever (maybe it was FB? Still) sticks to me.
This pretty much lowers the bar to any random website on the internet can ask for ID to do something as trivial as look at a photo.
In a world where social engineering is the last unsolvable security vector, this is significant even if it is just a matter of degree.
Consistency at school means more and more parents and families are practicing their internet exposure the same way as well.
How this is being done might not be the greatest, and it might change how social media is used, or invite the next thing after social media. Most platforms have dreamt of being a users core identity service as well and that might be it.
The multiple independent studies that show the effect on children developing brains from scrolling and screens alone, let alone the content (be it social media etc) is something worth offering an approach to as well, parents can't be expected to be DIY and self-educate against the types of software that are so optimized to achieve their independent objective of the software - keep us using them.
This already happens, and I don't see how a law like this would significantly change the volume of edgelords and incels funneling into imageboards
4chan's origin itself fits that archetype, as well. It was created when a hentai subforum got banned on a larger forum, and the community moved over to the new imageboard.
It acts as sponge for more than just edgelords.
I personally think, Facebook and Twitter need to be taken down because Zuckerberg and Musk are using the ppatform to interfere with politics.
But most importantly, there's no expectation of kid to be on social media anymore, which is much more important than whether they are actually there or not.
it’s a difficult balancing act, and I tend to agree as blocks are put in place, there are very likely two groups of outcomes: the kid gives up and finds other alternatives which can be healthy or unhealthy, the kid perseveres and bypasses the block
both provide good learnings and shape development, but blocking isn’t the answer, communication, understanding, and moderation is
the alternative that one could flood the kid with unfettered access till the kid becomes nauseated and desensitised doesn’t really work either because it can be too risky
the best solution may be something in between, make it a hinderance more than an inconvenience, like the parent post, and go for the greatest impact on network effects, the evil genie in me would make all these platforms super unreliable, spotty at best
but hey, it’s a developmental milestone for the average generation member to rebel against the member’s previous generations
It's also important uploading to where. To Facebook. And the bulk of advertisements Facebook runs are literal (with literal meaning of the word literal) scams. And they are powerless[1] to stop it.
[1] not incentivised
The network effects doesn't matter that much for the Tiktok's of the world.
This is dependent on implementation.
From what I have heard (from ConnectID), some sites are using services like ConnectID as a way to have your bank verify you are of age without releasing any ID or specific details.
But I don't think it's all of them, and I agree it's a risk.
Congratulations, Australia, you just drove a ton of kids into the arms of psychopaths like 764.
If you think Instagram and even 4chan are bad, that's nothing compared to the groups that sadly, are usually kids that were groomed themselves, who goad other kids into self-harm, violence and suicide through extortion, love bombing and literal cult shit.
Instagram might make you feel sad, but it doesn't threaten to kill your family if you don't strangle your pet cat and carve CVLT into your chest for a bunch of organized pedophiles online.
You might not know it or think too often about it, but most "real life" services we use require online identification, at least in Europe. Even on a simple rental agency portal in Germany it's recommended to "verify" your online identity to get more chances. Which means: just do it. Sure, you're free not to do it, as landlords are free not to care about your application at all.
Do you want to renew your car papers? E-ID is there (or whatever existing alternative).
Bank? The same.
In Germany the government[s] are pushing for Digitalization since years, which many laugh at as "ahah, what a joke, it's just filling an online module and sending a fax". It was true 5 years ago. Now I was super surprised because I recently had to do some bureaucratic BS and it's like any "normal" internet service that would require an identification (which is not just via a credit card or so). It's still not 100% accurate or "frictionless" but they're seriously getting there, which is super hard in a country where govt office A won't share data with govt office B. Compared to standing 1 hour in line to get just a stamp on a paper this is light years ahead.
The same will happen to these platforms, because that's the only solution we can think of, as of today. We all stand and watch Facebook making profits off our kids, making them depressed, etc. If you fine them, you're a communist, if you block them, you're a Nazi.
This is the most balanced alternative: you can still run your business here, people can still use social media, but let's not fuck up anymore our new generations, children, teenagers. They are the grownups of tomorrow.
Also, as some other comments mentioned elsewhere on HN: assume your data is already stolen or "publicly" available (maybe hidden somewhere).
A good law would just have completely banned these platforms from the country. (Even the Canadian Kik, because freeware, therefore closed source, therefore a platform.
EDIT : Looks like it's instead the Australian Kick, The Register had it wrong ? Same deal. (Especially with its owners having a gambling background.))
I wish the EU would be bold enough to do this, especially with Trump's bullying, but I have already been disappointed in the past, despite the situation clearly calling for strong actions like these...
I ask if those harms are worse than what social media has done to a generation of young people?
I fully support this ban and even restricting online time marginally, tbh, until they're adults. The internet is not the place it once was. The primary focus of the internet today is to entrap you and monetize you at any cost. Social media is absolutely vile and ruinous for the development of young people (it's not helping adults either, mind you).
1. State level actors and well funded not for profits are fighting an information war to influence our kids. And they are very good at it. Down to having troll farms to talk one on one. Every time something new happens in the world, my younger kids ask me about what they saw on Tik-Tok and their initial understanding is shaped by a well funded actor, and is often completely a false narrative. The solution is be open and talk about it with your kids.
2. Criminals are even better at social than state level actors. They are smooth. And they are on platforms you wouldn't expect - like games. And criminals aren't all about fraud. They sell drugs, they try to physically steal in real life from your kids,they'll try to get your kids to do something embarrasing and blackmail them with it, and even can be human traffickers. Again, the solution is be open and talk about it with your kids - and make sure they know it's ok to ask, and it's especially ok if you think I shouldn't share this with Dad or they person is saying not to show your parents.
3. Sexual predators are even better at social than the criminals. The difference is that the predators can't hide behind national borders so they are very careful. Same solution as $#2, but this one is really tough because when your kids come to you about it, they may have shared something with the predator that the predator is using to extort them into hooking up. Don't attack or blame your kid, focus on making sure the predator never gets to them
I do not believe for a minute that social media was good for my kids as they grew up, but I'm not sure that you can even begin to fix it the way AU is trying to - regulating speech, association using prohibition is dipping a colander in the river to filter the silt.
Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or TikTok on anything like a regular basis is zero, and the likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since it ain't happening supervised.
Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent? Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that they'd need an account or anything.
A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?
The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.
But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.
> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.
No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".
[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.
If stranger danger is a motivating factor here, statistically, you should side-eye your close friends and family much, much more often and never leave them alone with your kids.
> But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.
You can say the same thing about social media interactions.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-se...
Immediately upon reading your comment, I thought about the general overprotection and over-supervision of kids which leads parents to drive their kids everywhere, prevent them from learning to use the subway on their own, or even live in cities. But what I think you were getting at is more about smaller hypothetical physically analogous places, but it's hard to think about what those places are in real life without relying on assumptions that may be more likely to occur online than in any significant concentration in the real world.
Imo, the most threatening place for kids to be in real life in terms of external factors, day to day, is around cars, bullies, bad actors within the family, and then maybe church/sports teams, but all of those are usually safe unless they're not, you can't realistically do anything productive about that without sacrificing their development as a human, except prepare them and guide them.
Online, it's just a whole different beast, and I'd think it would be games and social media, anywhere a gaurd would be let down, but imo the greater threat isn't criminality as much as it is nearly every other aspect except basic chats.
It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.
Because the issue is:
- your street smartness is an outdated smartness
- there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about
When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized.
The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it.
Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.
Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be?
Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not?
Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.
It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.
- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.
- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.
The predator example sounds pretty flimsy and unlikely to me as well.
Honestly, your reaction to this just seems to follow the fear-based rationales that people put forth for a lot of things, when the fears are overblown or the risks are low.
A very US-centric problem that requires a very US-centric solution. No need to drag rest of the world into that sh*thole.
Anxieties of parents who can't manage their insecurities and other issues shouldn't propagate into how kids are raised in general, especially on families which can handle their emotions better. Some freedom, some unknown and yes some form of risk is part of it. I love my kids just like the next person but this emotional need to helicopter parent them is pretty toxic to their personality further down the line.
The stuff about abuse is so typical about any such topic - a slippery slope when there is no end on how many additional restriction on society should be applied just to prevent some potential next situation. If you live in properly dangerous place, then move and don't just follow money at all costs life is too short for that, much smarter and easy to solve than enveloping your kids in ever-increasing surveillance and security.
You have to realize that this approach really harms them in subtle but powerful ways. Then ask yourself - is the extra safety I am gaining not actually outweighed by extra damage I am making on them? I don't claim I know the objective answer, but gut feeling tells me they may be +-equal at best and at the end everybody loses.
We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering.
There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.
I see tremendous correlation between restriction of access to some websites and straight up dictatorship that pretend to protect it's population from the evils of foreign influences.
In ideal world those are all good expectations. In actual ugly world out there, seemingly getting uglier each day, its dangerously naive. We talk about children dammit, its first and foremost responsibility of parents to keep them safe from all serious harm. You want to have contact? Give them dumb Nokia and they can never use an excuse it ran out of battery, and if lost it will be cheap to replace.
Or whatever else, but don't give them full access to whole internet and then be surprised when they go straight to its ugliest and most addiction-forming parts. They face peer-pressure? Tough one, but having some mental resiliency already during teens is great for rest of life, and maybe the shallowest and most pathetic of peers aren't the best crowd to hang with anyway. And its not like any actual popularity is gained, just blending in a faceless crowd.
You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis.
It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.
> all online services
Not even close? I don’t know how you got that.
> including multiplayer games
Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those)
> community wikis
Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.
For online gaming, that's 5ish game lines ?
Then Splatoon communities are pretty active, with third party tournaments, discord channels especially during fest flourish. Private matches are a pretty core component of getting good at the game in team events, and Nintendo rightfully limits how much it wants to deal with that side of things.
As a result, if your kid gets into the game, they'll be looking at that from the sideline while other kids get a lot more support.
> game wikis
In general any wikis that allows for limited scope communication, like a discussion between two users in some obscure thread where only the two will be notified of updates, is ripe for abuse. Then game wikis are where kids will be found.
While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job, it's a cat and mouse game with utterly motivated attackers and highly valuable targets. So stuff will happen.
That kind of stuff won't surface outside of very egregious incidents, but working in an adjacent field to gaming communities, it's definitely a thing.
People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.
Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].
This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.
> Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? [...] I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok.
Ideally I don't want to supervise my kid, in the sense that trying to watch over everything they do, every service they use and every possible interaction is a lost cause.
They can IRL go to toxic waste dumps, buy razor blades at the store and let them rust, there will be no way to foolproof even at that level, and I don't to have to watch over them every single time they go to the store in case they buy razor blades. Teaching them to not buy sharp stuff, avoid rusty things, and not listen to people advising them to do so has better time/effort ROI to me. Kids not allowed to go to the store without parental supervision also has to me a lot more negative impacts.
Arguably teaching kids what to avoid on Tiktok or Youtube is a lot trickier, and there will be craftful attempts at bypassing most parent advices, but I hope we have enough of a safety margin and communication occasions to detect when something's going wrong. And if it happens, I'd prefer it happens now when there's many eyes on the kid to detect the issue, than 5 or 10 years from now when they're alone in the ir dorm, can sign contracts, buy a lot of delicate stuff, get access to drugs, drive, get people pregnant etc.
This is an assumption, that I would argue, is more muddled in practice.
T&S teams largely want to do a good job, but they are a cost center, and currently they are being defunded or shifted into simple compliance.
The biggest weakness, and the current shift, is for the conversation to move towards talking about the benefits of moderation to community, rather than only reduction of harms.
That process has largely started since last year, and the defunding of teams is also underway.
All of that aside, we do not have any publicly available data, or independent third part assessment that gives us some estimated prevalence rate. (Not that prevalence is truly calculable)
I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.
I really don't think the opposite order would work.
Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat?
My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams.
Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there.
And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying.
The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying).
Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.
Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.
I think it will be a good idea to try and get other parents on board. Other parents of the kid's classmates. Maybe they are struggling with this too, but don't see the way forward. And you can show them the content of feeds and shit that kids consume. You can come up with some minimum age or other idea, which you suggest for children to have, before you as a group of parents allow them to access things. Or you can come up with a once a month special lesson or something, where you show what can go wrong to the kids, and cooperate with the school.
My kid has a smartphone but no data plan; no social media; can't take it to school.
When I did that, I was the annoying one, who they fought every inch of the way.
When the school banned phones in the playground, I was suddenly one of the first to get it right, in their eyes.
I'm trying to do my job too. But we need certain rules to be consistent throughout our society. Even if they will be broken, it matters that the rules are there and we can agree to them.
I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.
I don't have answers to give. Certainly not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done. (casual listening to Security Now podcast about this for a long while now)
That depends on the implementation. Do it the wrong way, like many countries or US states, and that is a problem.
Do it right, like the EU is doing in their Digital Identity Wallet project, which is currently undergoing large scale field trials, and the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.
Not really. Either you have freedom of speech or you have restricted speech. The more restriction, the less freedom you have.
> the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites you have proved age to or when you have done so.
As long as the broker in the middle can be trusted, cannot be extorted by government power or private wealth... in other words: unpossible.
Briefly, your government issues you a digital copy of your identity documents cryptographically bound to a hardware security module that you provide. For the first iteration this will be the security module in your smartphone. Later iterations will support standalone smart cards and plug in security modules like YubiKeys.
If you wish to prove your age to a site a cryptographic protocol takes place between you and the site which demonstrates to the site that you have a government issued identity document that is bound to a hardware security module, and that you have that module, and that the module is unlocked, and that the identity document says that your age is above the site's minimum age requirement.
No information is transmitted to the site from the identity document other than the age is above the threshold. There is also nothing transmitted that identities the particular hardware security module.
Let's hope that this project you mention works out, if indeed it works like you describe.
Doing it right like the EU? You mean like the EU, scan everything that is sent through anybody's phone in the name of protecting the children?
> the site you prove age to gets no information other than that you are old enough, and your government gets no information about what sites
That is the case for now. What happens when the lobbies get in there and decide that this info is actually very valuable and that they should have the right to know who is visiting their client's websites and apps, will the anonymity remain? I think not.
And what about the defense industry who in the name of fighting terrorism will demand that users that identify themselves on "suspicious" sites now need to have their data recorded?
The issue is that once everyone is using this system, then it's very easy for any government to come and start expanding the scope of the data recorded and as always under the cover of good intentions.
This is how it goes: - In 2025, they record nothing - In 2026, they start logging IP addresses and passing along suspicious log ins to the cops - In 2030 they start recording more and more data until all anonymity is gone
I wouldn't touch the EU's identity wallet with a 10 foot pole and I certainly wouldn't use anything that the EU is doing now as a benchmark considering what happened with the Chat control law recently.
I remember ISPs and Web cafés complaining quite a lot.
But I guess you mean on the client software side itself ?
Ha! Tell that to an American and they would laugh if it wasn't for ICE threatening to shoot you for trying to get close enough to ask.
Currently speech is shaped by producing a glut of speech, and then having the most useful narratives platformed by trusted personalities. Simultaneously, any counter views which do not support the goals of the media-party, do not get aired. Education, science, evidence and journalistic standards are eschewed and authoritarian techniques of loyalty and trust are used to take advantage of whatever story is currently most engaging.
The churn in anonymous forums is used to identify narratives that are the best evolved to spread and gain engagement.
Don’t mistake me for saying anonymity must be given up. Do recognize that worrying about anonymity today, is very much like people talking about the way things were back in their time.
If it helps - from a utilitarian perspective, free speech enables the free exchange of ideas in the service of debates to understand reality. The marketplace of ideas.
Currently the marketplace is captured, and it is not a fair fight between state actors, media teams, troll farms, A/B tested algorithms, and regular folk on the other side.
The invisible hand of the market IS working, ensuring the optimum outcome given the current constraints, or lack thereof.
If we want to defend speech for individuals, if we want a fair fight, we need to address the asymmetry of powers, and lack of recourse.
With anonymous speech you don’t even know if you’re talking to a person or a program.
If you want to say something, then say it with your identity. You don’t get to be anonymous when saying something to my face so why should it be allowed across a screen?
> Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A frequently cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:
> > Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
> The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius " and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.
> The right to anonymous speech is also protected well beyond the printed page. Thus in 2002 the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proselytizers to register their true names with the Mayor's office before going door-to-door.
To build on that, the Fourth Amendment protections against general warrants stems from the fact that general warrants were used to identify and persecute anonymous authors, many of which were founders and framers.
While anonymity comes with its own issues for society, I am not convinced it would be worth it getting rid of it.
My face is not my identity. Do I have to tell you my full name and address when I talk to you? I sure hope not!
Beyond that, what about the threat of violence for saying something? As another commenter points out, this is a real issue for marginalized groups, but also could easily become an issue for your average citizen sharing their political opinion.
While I agree it would be nice having some level of assurance that you're talking to a human, particularly going forward, the only way I could support such a system is if no party involved would be able to track what I visit or pin an actual identity to me as a user - but, perhaps more importantly, it also needs to not be easily broken by those actors who it's trying to stop. Otherwise it's useless and just hurts your actual citizens.
Nah, it’s infinitely more identity than a screen name. If you speak in person I know which human being had those thoughts. In the medium we’re communicating over right now neither I nor you could tell if the counterparty was just a computer program.
> Beyond that, what about the threat of violence for saying something? As another commenter points out, this is a real issue for marginalized groups, but also could easily become an issue for your average citizen sharing their political opinion.
If you’re in that situation then you already don’t have free speech, so honestly that tradeoff seems like it doesn’t matter
> While I agree it would be nice having some level of assurance that you're talking to a human, particularly going forward, the only way I could support such a system is if no party involved would be able to track what I visit or pin an actual identity to me as a user…
That’s a lot of words to say you don’t agree with the idea. Pinning an actual identity to you is what makes it non anonymous
What? Are you saying that if you face the threat of violence for saying something, you don't actually have free speech? By this logic, literally nobody anywhere has free speech.
Nobody anywhere has freedom of speech. And a majority of people don't really think about what it means and don't want it in the purest form despite what they say.
Two examples of "free speech" that are protected in the U.S. under the first amendment:
1. Overt racism (less threat of imminent violence).
2. Nazi apparel.
Say the wrong word or show the wrong symbol in certain settings and you'll quickly understand what I mean. Furthermore I'm confident > 50% of U.S. citizens would find you in the wrong and would support whatever happens to you without much consideration of legality.
Freedom of speech is an ideal with no successful implementation and I don't think that's a bad thing. I prefer to live in the real world where saying stupid shit has consequences and people think just a little bit more carefully about what they say.
I’m actually surprised at your surprise. Is there a definition of free speech that includes not speaking because of violence?
To be clear I’m speaking of “free speech” as a right in the absolute sense. I am aware that various situations and events degrade that in every attempt to implement it. Having anonymous speech lets your circumvent that somewhat, but comes with the tradeoff of disinformation and societal manipulation we’re currently dealing with.
Also for clarification are you describing violence from other citizens or violence from the government? I need the clarification as I wasn’t specific enough myself in that I don’t think there is currently any anonymous speech if the government wants to identify you, only anonymity from the average Joe.
> but comes with the tradeoff of disinformation and societal manipulation we’re currently dealing with.
I'd rather solve those issues in ways that don't eliminate anonymity and privacy on the Internet. Furthermore, as I noted in a previous comment, any such system must be immune to being circumvented by those actors doing those things. Otherwise, they will quickly adapt and we go back to business as usual but with less privacy.
Is this the violence from other citizens? Is this the violence from state actors? Your answer is not clearly answering the question.
Then we will have to disagree. I think the anonymity is the source of the problem and there is no workaround for it. I would prefer this problem solved instead of waiting around for someone to possibly figure out an alternative while we suffer under the weight of all discourse being flooded by disinformation so that no one can agree on reality.
If your ideology leads to its own destruction than it’s a failed set of values, and that’s what I believe is happening to people who value free speech without divorcing that from anonymous speech
Furthermore, the idea that we can't address this in any other way is wrong. We can work to combat and ban misinformation and propaganda campaigns. We can outlaw it for domestic politics. We can work with other countries where such efforts come from to stop them. We can put warnings and other labels on misinformation. To say nothing of the education angle.
If I’m proposing that your statements are tied to your identity what’s the circumvention there? Just fake IDs?
> Furthermore, the idea that we can't address this in any other way is wrong. We can work to combat and ban misinformation and propaganda campaigns. We can outlaw it for domestic politics. We can work with other countries where such efforts come from to stop them. We can put warnings and other labels on misinformation. To say nothing of the education angle.
I don’t see how you can have a problem with making statements tied to identities as an attack on free speech but then suggest that the government decides what correct speech is. That seems like a direct attack on the “free” part of speech separate from the less important “anonymous” part
Edit: also sorry for the delay, HN’s automatic blocker kicked in
I mean... bypassed. Ignored. Fooled. This might be with fake IDs, it might be by compromising the system itself, it might be something else.
> I don’t see how you can have a problem with making statements tied to identities as an attack on free speech but then suggest that the government decides what correct speech is. That seems like a direct attack on the “free” part of speech separate from the less important “anonymous” part
Interestingly, I really haven't said anything about "free speech", nor have I taken the position that the government is unable to already tie your identity to your online activity. Anyway, those responsibilities I outlined could be put on the platforms, if you somehow trust them more, or perhaps a third party service.
Out of curiosity, supposing identity verification doesn't work out, what ideas might you propose for tackling the issues of misinformation and propaganda?
I think the trade off for a lack of anonymity is worth it. This is crass and old but the penny arcade guys identified this decades ago
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...
Government regulation is a ham fisted approach that risks unintended consequences / secondary effects, but it is generally good at breaking the game theory traps because it changes the playing field for everyone. That is fundamentally why we have government at all - to solve coordination problems.
This is not how the law is implemented. The vast majority of verification is being done by 'age inference', ie analysis of the content the user consumes or posts to infer likely age. Only accounts suspected to be children by the inference process are being required to verify or have the account disabled. In practice, the inference process means very few accounts are required to provide any proof of age. Personally, I haven't been asked to verify by even a single website.
The age inference process is described on this page under 'What is Age Assurance?' https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/social-m...
As someone who remembers the near lack of anti-war voices on network/cable news in the lead-up to the Iraq War (Donahue on MSNBC being the lone example), I'd like to get more details on your strongest example here.
Cable and network news did not question that narrative, aside from the exception I mentioned. Read David Barstow's Pulitzer-winning stories in NYT-- cable news shows even had retired generals pushing for war without disclosing all kinds of conflicts of interest.
Edit: I should add that in reality there were protests with record numbers of people during the buildup to the Iraq War, and there were many articulate arguments against the war by all kinds of people. However, that was not the narrative presented in Network/Cable News.
Not any of the three points you bring up there.
Those superpredator bogeymans you make up here, have to actively seek you out and have a limited budget in comparison.
State actors are after everyone, not kids primarily. In the current state of thing I would have no qualms just shutting down X, Facebook, YouTube Shorts and TikTok live for starters for all.
I bet that if I would meet you, I would unleash multiple similar cases to you personally for less than 1 hour. I am almost sure I can ask such kind of questions that would reveal your kids giving better (less brainwashed) result than you do.
I don't think the framers of this law are even worried about what kids are saying or who they associate with, as long as it isn't the criminals, sexual predators and state actors you mention.
Frankly if kids were visiting a physical hang-out where they could expect to be attacked by such people, any and every responsible guardian would order them to never go there.
The cutesy 'fun' language of 'troll farm' itself deflects accountability from what are coordinated psychological operations. It makes it sound like some rambunctious kids in basements having a little weekend fun.
The scale of the operations is immense now.
... and India. Wasn't expecting that at all.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Our societies globally have become hugely polarised and are manipulated daily because of social media. The damage done by social media is 100x greater than any good that came from it and the lives of adults have been affected by on it a societal level at least as much as the danger to kids.
It isn't possible, but if social media was suddenly completely unavailable I think the world would get a lot better in a very short period of time.
Watching 18 year old kids getting drone striked every other day has done more for the anti-war movement than a hundred years of post-WW1 globalist utopianism. The only demographic of war hawks you find online anymore are psychotics and boomers, both being unfit for military service.
This is the fundamental reason why western countries are turning on social. The TikTok ban had less to do with Chinese influence campaigns and more to do with it being a platform where Israeli war crimes were openly discussed without being hindered by shadow algorithms.
You’re seeing Zionists like Larry Ellison make plays in the media space for the same reason; military-aged white men are going off the plantation, and Zionists feel threatened by it. That is literally all these bans are intended to remedy.
What anti-war actions have you done to prevent the end your life by drone striking? Post some dislikes, duh?
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
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 problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.
If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.
People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.
Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.
The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.
Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.
You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.
It's not the same.
I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)
V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)
All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.
None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.
The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.
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.
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.
The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".
Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.
Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.
The law could instead prohibit scams and violence?
>These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.
Irrelevant.
>but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe)
Almost every other avenue, including doing nothing, has more merit than that which has been implemented.
>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.
Theres some basic negative freedom implications from those, but they dont intend to ban a class of person from accessing a mundane element of human society.
I hope we can agree that allowing every social media site to devolve into the above is the bigger problem. There can be some places that are adults-only; just like reality though, the world is better when open-by-default, with some places gated to adults-only.
Shifting focus to "Why are we letting some of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen get away with being a cesspit?" lets us keep kids safe by default, doesn't attack E2EE, and doesn't default to the internet becoming a surveillance state.
If we start by getting Facebook and Twitter (et al.) to clean up their acts, we can all work, yell, and vote together, instead of some yelling about their kids being shown unexpected pornography, and others yelling about the internet becoming a surveillance state.
Because both can be real concerns - but a starter solution can get the vast majority of voters on-board, and garner real progress, instead of giving Facebook more data and control, or governments a turn-key dictatorship.
Whenever platforms have taken even the smallest steps in that direction, the right-wing authoritarian political parties freak out and blackmail them into stopping, or in the case of Musk simply buy them out outright.
For instance TV was basically a drug for the last generation, there was people watching near 8 to 10h of TV a day. It might have been replaced by something else, but I don't think our current generation has this specific issue.
From that POV, currently people in their 30~60s are the more stuck to social networks and raging against fake news all day, while younger generations tend to be on different services with potentially a lot more reduced circle of users.
Do we really know how the generation that is 5~6yo right now will react to our social media landscape ? (put another way, are we fighting the last war ?)
From their users in Australia? Clearly not.
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".
Let's make some distinctions first.
On the one hand, you have violence and pornography, and also other crude content. There is nothing good about exposing children to these. It does not contribute to their growth or to their maturity as human beings and it is ridiculous to think it could. On the contrary, this content will cause psychological harm, causing distortions in their emotions, in their habituated appetites, in their self-understanding, and their understanding of normal relations. When deviance like that is tolerated, it shifts the Overton window. Children observe this tolerance and roll it into their sense of normality. Individuals suffer. The quality of society degrades substantially.
On the other hand, we have political agitation. This one is more difficult to define and handle, especially in a liberal democratic society. There are examples of obvious political agitation, of course, but children should generally not be exposed to political agitation at all, except as a subject matter at an age appropriate level and in an appropriate pedagogic setting. Children don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to examine such material in the wild on their own where they would be at the mercy of unscrupulous adult manipulators who couldn't care less about the well-being of children. (Ask yourself what kind of person would want to involve children in their political agitation to begin with.)
So, there's a big difference between common sense things like these and coddling children. We want to prepare children for life, not teach them adaptation to depravity. You throw them into the filth of social and psychological pathology. Neither violence nor pornography should be normalized even in the adult world - it is harmful to the adults who consume it as well - so the idea that we should prepare children for life in some violent and twisted pornland is preposterous. Nobody has to put up with that garbage, and the law should be making sure they don't.
The whole "don't talk about politics" is so toxic IMHO.
Sure you might not want to ruin your dinner with the family members you see a single day every year. But otherwise, making it sound like a taboo could be widening the tribalization and anchor the feeling deeper into people's identity. Let the people talk about what they care about, including when that affects who the next president is.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
There's people in this thread talking about jews being behind this ban to ensure zionism continues, using only a social media agitprop post to justify it. We are in the mud at the moment, so I'm sorry but I'm not taking that for granted, people have diverse views.
> 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.
Let me try explain this figuratively:
A doctor might give free care to someone in a medical emergency on a plane after all they have an ethical responsiblity to do so if they can, but that doesn't mean they're obliged to care about your canker sore.
Now imagine a doctor not treating one or the other because "It's not that serious". It's the extent of the harm or risk that actually indicates how insane or sane that doctor's response is, just as much as the doctors actually response to it is.
We can sit here and say "yeah it's not that serious" but one patient is dying and another basically fine. Just like those people that thought drink driving wasn't that big of a deal, people think social media "oh yeah that's bad but what you going to do", it's the same shrug and 'oh well' attitude. That's what I think is eerlie similar. Now whether or not that's appropiate or not depends on whether you think the patient is having a heart attack, or just has a sore lip.
I do agree people aren't generally saying TikTok is good, but people are saying TikTok isn't so bad as to regulate age verification. Do you see how these things play into each other?
I (not the person you're disagreeing with, BTW) would be interested in your demonstration of how you disagree.
IDK if this is how they would say it, but I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.
The idea that I have to give up privacy, expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged), increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud in order to get a solution that is not clear on how effective it will be makes the parallel a bit academic, if not an out right straw man.
Said like this, it looks to me that it has a parallel with social media.
> The idea that I have to give up privacy
You don't have to, though.
> expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged)
It doesn't have to be, we can have privacy-preserving age verification. Now we could discuss the specific implementation, but in general that's feasible.
> increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud
It's not enough to say it: is it actually the case? You can already get phished by trying to access a social network, how does that make it worse? I don't think it's obvious. While the problem with kids and social media is, at this point, very well documented.
> if not an out right straw man.
I, for one, think it's an interesting experiment. All the arguments above could be used against making cigarettes illegal for children. Yet I am very convinced that making cigarettes illegal for children is the right choice.
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.
This is exactly what conservative talk radio was like, and it radicalized a bunch of boomers – especially the ones with long car commutes who had limited counter examples. There’s a direct line between the guys joking about eating spotted owls or how feminists were too ugly to worry about rape to the modern environment, or saying that the government was discriminating against white men, but the difference now is scale and variety: now it reaches more people and there are more flavors available so the young woman who would’ve been turned off by Rush instead gets some wellness influencer talking about how birth control causes cancer.
- It's not young adults, it's 15 and under. Personally I would classify 17-20something as young adult (it's a bit subjective isn't it).
- The younger children don't really care about politics honestly. Curious if you have an age that you're ok with only ensuring irl politics for children? I think age to vote is a much bigger concern for me here in terms of civil liberties.
- Parents can still make that choice for their child (unclear how this will work to me yet, to be fair).
- I've become convinced no one really practises 'politics' online. People barely even debate anymore. They argue, they perform activism, they aggitate, its what gets attention (thanks to social media). I'm worried people think this is normal, it's not- political discourse used to be much more productive. I remember when fallacies were actually brought up logically on the internet and people actually cared about the accusation.
- I did explicit rp with adults as 7 year old on MSN chatrooms back in the day :')
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.
Lies upon lies about WMDs and going to war for our freedoms and how we need to "liberate" Libya and fund and arm rebels and insurgents. Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars wasted and stolen.
Someone who is not completely trusting of politicians or pharmaceutical corporations, or who wants to give birth like 99.999% of humanity has, really are so far down the list of "dangerous misinformation" they don't even register.
This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.
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.
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.
I assume you are a Zionist, based on your rhetorical techniques.
I did look, you’re being obtuse again, after all how else would I know it’s from an infowars adjacent account.
You strike me as the type of person who thinks e-safety commissioner is CIA, they also call me a zionist for doubting that- it’s the goto ad hominem for people embroiled with I/P conflict.
This sort of social media bs and the way it affects political discourse is why social media is so damaging, much of it is just political propaganda.
Tell me what do you take from the clip?
> 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?
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).
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
Whenever there's talk about car safety measures, e-scooters or anything else, the press goes to the official-sounding "Pedestrian Council of Australia" for comment. And obligingly, Harold Scruby who is the CEO, Chairman and entire membership of said council will hold forth.
He's been spectacularly successful at getting himself listened to, as if he represented something.
Collective shout are just as illegitimate.
The key to his success seems, at a glance, to be raising his media profile by taking controversial positions (which I suspect he may not sincerely hold) that guarantee news coverage. Similar to how populist politicians in the UK game the BBC's "balance" policy by always taking a contrarian position to any given topic to secure an interview or place on a discussion panel.
And I agree, he’s got a way of providing reactionary, contrarian soundbites, which keeps the papers going back to him.
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.
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 will normalize people thinking that uploading their state-issued ID to whatever contractor is validating accounts is safe and normal.
It looks like they're "doing something" while nothing really changes or potentially gets worse. Trying to regulate Meta/YouTube from there has IMHO become harder, as kids are on paper supposed to be out of the picture.
Education and believably honest offers of support are needed to navigate the world, which is ugly and evil in some parts. Restrictions are really just counterproductive because curious young people are drawn to restricted stuff, and age restrictions build a sense of 'us (the young) against them (the adults)', so it's hard to convince that you actually offer honest support. Restrictions also focus on the bad parts, while we should instead focus on the good parts, the advantages of a global network of anything, which is totally amazing. Restrictions are counter productive.
Humans need to learn to live here, and it starts when we're young and curious.
I feel validated!
Bless you the holy spirit of Bad Religion.
Honest conversations with your kids from an early age are key.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
Printing Press <=> The Internet
but
Social Media <=> Some specific forms of (mostly centralized) publishing
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.
It very much is not.
If social media is so compelling, then teens almost certainly will take whatever steps are necessary to access it.
That's not the point though. The kids can just not get a VPN, and instead do something else with their time.
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.
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)
This is such an older person take. Users really like Algorithmic feeds and see the removal of such a feature to be platform destroying. Cronological feeds are still easy to game and abuse.
>predatory platforms like Roblox
What makes roblox a predatory platform and what would you change to make it not a predatory platform? To me Roblox is a predatory platform because of the age group of people not because of the platform design.
The real question is: how hard does it make it for them to pretend to be adults? We just need it to be hard enough that most kids won't do it.
> platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"
If the law forces the platforms to properly ban children, I don't see how they can do that. If you're thinking that the platforms will just say "it's illegal for children to join, so we don't have to do anything because they shouldn't come in the first place", then I don't think the law is made like this.
> everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)
Some countries have been working on privacy-preserving age verification. I find it's a lot better than uploading an ID.
Silly though that sounds, it might work. Because it's social pressure from other kids to be online that drives many kids into being constantly on Instagram and Snapchat. If you're not online, you don't know what's going on. The big social networks monetize FOMO.
If a sizable fraction of kids aren't on social media, that's not where it's happening any more. The pressure goes away. Or goes elsewhere.
Freakonomics did a podcast about what you are describing.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-you-caught-in-a-social-...
Do you only use /new of HN...?
Most Australian schools banned phones a while ago. Attempts were made to measure the outcome. For example, South Australia saw a 72% drop in phone-related issues and 80.5% fall in social media problems in early 2025 compared to 2023 [0]. Other states reported similar results. These early figures are a little rubbery, but overall look very good. The social media ban is in part a response to that success.
The only major concern I have is de-anonymization of the web. It's worse than just de-anonymization. They've opened the gate for organisations like Facebook to demand government ID, like say a photo of a drivers licence. It contains a whole pile of info these data vultures would like to get their hands on, like your actual date of birth and residential address.
The sad bit is I doubt de-anonymization was goal, in fact I doubt they put much thought into that aspect of all. If it was the goal there far more effective ways of going about given the corporations permission to "collect whatever data you need to make it work". They could have implemented a zero knowledge proof of age service. But given the track record of their other computer projects, a realistic assessment is it had near zero chance of being implemented at all, let alone on time and on budget.
But if they had of insisted the providers implemented some sort of ZKP themselves, I would have found it hard to argue against given the past experience in schools.
[0] https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/school-behaviour-im...
> School behaviour improving after mobile phone ban and vaping reforms
Vaping !?
If we're discussing effect of phone bans at school, I think looking at a period where nicotine addiction was also strongly reduced makes the numbers pretty hard to interpret.
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.
They let voters express their preferences, and leave building the coalitions up to the politicians. Instead of expecting voters to understand that their preferences are expressed during the primaries, and the general election is just to pick which coalition wins.
It is crazy that no one in America is promoting a Constitutional amendment to fix the basic governance.
I think these are somewhat orthogonal.
Either way, majoritarian elections are a plague and must be avoided as much as possible.
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
if that would be the case, why is the adversarial system not working in its current practice?
Also, i think the difference between the judicial systems of parlementary/european and the american system have more to do with the difference between civil and common law.
European goverments are really the legacy of the revolutionary french idea's of a civic state, in which citizens have duties to the state, and have rights being garantueed by the state. The state itself is being granted the authority to do this by its citizens through some process.
I have to ask if you understand that "being easier" is not a guarantee of anything other than... wait for it...
It being easier.
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.
No amount of spending will get you a democrat senator in Texas, for instance.
Money won't get you a Democratic senator in Texas, but it makes you 100x more likely to get you a Republican lawyer than an average Republican.
For that matter there is an Australian billionaire whose "investment" also does not appear to have worked in his favour [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Wisconsin_Supreme_Court_e...
There are other ways for money to impact politics beyond individual general elections. As well as funding community organizing and creating long-term propaganda, it's much easier to impact ballot initiatives (paid signature gathering works, for example, where paid canvassers don't.)
The issue with the lottery is the need to ensure that the candidates both want the role, and are capable of doing it.
The latter, who is the right person to say "X is unqualified because.. " (and the Peter Principle suggests that just because someone was good at a lower job, eventually they're going to be put into a job they are unqualified for)
The theory with the current style that the person who puts themselves forward most definitely desires to win the job, and, as they rise up through their party system, have some level of competence, as adjudged by the people they have convinced to put them forward as a candidate.
Further, the adversarial nature is supposed to then mean that that person's opponents can call out the reasons that that person isn't suitable for the job.
Unfortunately, this ends up being a muck raking exercise, and the complaints might not amount to anything more than innuendo, further, there's no guarantee that they will even be heard (the supporters will provide evidence that the opponents themselves are not qualified to make any criticism)
Unfortunately a lot of elections these days, US or otherwise, tend not to end up being "This candidate is awesome, let's vote them in", but, instead "the incumbent is terrible, get someone, anyone, to replace them" - in the US Biden was voted in because Trump 1.0 was deemed a failure, and then Trump 2.0 was voted in because Biden was deemed a failure. Right now the Democrats appear to be on the rise again because Trump 2.0 and the Republicans are being deemed a failure. This isn't to diminish the wins by some actually good candidates though (although how good they are remains to be seen, and is a matter of... opinion).
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the young Dems with the biggest fundraising rolodexes are usually the ones supported by the fundraising apparatus that already exists.
I think it is structural about the medium because it elevates the profile of relatively rare things like crime or ‘wokeness gone amok’ that dems are losing on. Similarly, with regards to ICE, it is helping dems by also raising the profile of rare incidents. But on net I think this sort of coverage hurts dems more than it helps.
It isn't like the left was doing well in rural America before social media: people in the urban cores just didn't know what was going on there, and they didn't know what was going on the urban cores. But when I was growing up, people thought Bill Clinton was a communist in league with Castro.
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.
When I was 18 the legal drinking age had just been reduced to 18. That only lasted a couple of years. I don't think I'd vote for lowering it to that age again actually.
It really isn't a bad thing for kids to be told they can't do something occasionally. It kind of helps prepare them for being an adult where it happens all the time.
So what you are describing is just the base case.
News Corp wanted Meta et al to pay for the privilege of sharing links to News Corp articles (imo, ridiculous). Meta played along for a short period, but has now refused to engage, which has clearly upset News Corp (and their shrinking top line). It’s slowly changing, but it’s an unfortunate truth that News Corp still has incredible influence over Australian politicians, hence this had bipartisan support.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/12/meta-coul...
For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:
(a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service; or
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
(2) Subsection (1) does not limit, for the purposes of this Part, the ways in which a service makes content available.
The supporters of the bill then went around pretending that social media sites were ripping off whole articles and showing them on their sites with their own ads, when they are actually just linking and showing the title, thumbnail and sentence summary that the news site provides in its meta info!
In the end, the news media bargaining code is effectively just a shakedown to extract money for nothing from tech companies. Part 52B makes the whole thing indefensible.
“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.
Its not uncommon for laws that allow for teenagers (14 or above) to be tried as adults for more serious crimes.
Should we prevent kids from doing things we think will harm them? Yes, should we give harsher penalties for kids who commit more serious crimes? Potentially.
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.
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
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.
AFAIK this is strictly on having an account.
Here's Hillary Clinton onstage a week ago: https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1995961131215847749
There is a lot of Australian-American political confusion/conflation in this whole thread.
Adults actually are trying to solve this problem.
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.
Banning substances dramatically decreases use: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00414-015-1184-4 and legalized opioids dramatically increased heroin use: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15360288.2015.10... Access matters.
The question is always: A. What do people use instead? (banning pot, for example, increases use of heroin and alcohol, which is good for alcohol companies but bad for public health. If banning social media sent kids to 24/7 news channels, it might not help, but I haven't seen evidence of that.) B. How much is organized crime funded by the increased black market? (In this case, kids are a limited population that doesn't have a lot of money, so the answer is probably "not much".)
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.
It's still somewhat the case, but the propaganda in schools outside of the USA is much less than the propaganda on social media.
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…
I don’t care anymore about this emotive argument that you’re putting forward. The government knows everything about you because you pay for internet. Maybe you pretend to yourself you’re someone anonymous because you use a VPN but if they want to know who you are, they know.
At least maybe this ban will stop some of the idiocy bleeding into the next generation.
Information in America is free as in speech, not free as in beer: money talks louder than truth. That has let billionaires unravel the stabilizing features adopted after the Great Depression that kept capitalism limping along for an extra century.
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 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?
He was paid by Goldman Sachs to help Clinton get elected by raising massive amounts of money. During Obama's term he structured the DNC to be about his personal power rather than supporting Democrats across the country, costing Democrats the midterms. As mayor of Chicago he covered up a murder committed by a police officer and refused to comply with transparency laws.
On the other hand, this particular position is probably just part of the Israeli campaign against TikTok: Emanuel volunteered for the IDF and has long been an anti-Palestinian activist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_News_Australia
Where kids were reporting on and educating each other about news and politics.
Social medial is a drug, it has serious effects on the brain function and mental health of children and adolescents. On top of this social media allows predators to freely interact with children.
If people are going to do drugs, which they probably will, they should be able to balance the pro's and cons.
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.
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.
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.
However, I accept it may be a concern for some due to a history of stalkers. They have alternatives.
They can ask a friend to buy a token on their behalf. It's always legal to give alcohol to a friend you know is of legal drinking age. Same thing.
They could find liquor or tobacco stores with women cashiers. And rotate between stores to avoid showing their ID to the same person multiple times.
> So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases
I think the "problem" with my proposal you're harping on is the "~2% of use cases" you're talking about. My proposal isn't foolproof but it is anonymous. Just like alcohol and tobacco sales today.
If we're saying social media is the new tobacco and must be kept away from kids (I agree on both counts) then we must not intrude on the privacy of adults any more than we would when they buy actual tobacco.
It makes no sense to want to control access to certain websites more strictly than access to actual poisons that cause disease, violent behavior, and death. Otherwise it's clear it was never about "the kids". It was about control, speech policing, and ending anonymity online.
Forcing everyone to upload IDs makes all women vulnerable to stalking and harassment. It's strictly worse.
Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a surveillance database, one or two people that are probably going to forget immediately"?
> The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people
What chunk of people?
Are you trying to imply that this chunk includes women in general? It's really easy to find random women without looking at an ID. If this is about addresses, anyone taking actions based on "a woman probably lives here" has about the same effect as picking houses at random.
No, instead she is likely to avoid talking in abstractions and instead talk about personal experiences of getting stalked online by multiple people she has had to show her details to in the past, who may include storekeeps, police, university staff, etc, etc. Eva Galperin is an excellent source on the way many of our procedures are designed in ways that do not at all account for the potential of stalking and harassment, though her focus is on how this continues to unfold in the technology space.
Generally you can't get through life with no one knowing your name; even women at risk of stalking. As you already pointed out they may have to show ID to police, university staff, employers, landlords, medical staff, banks, social workers or other government employees. Buying a single-use token annually to get on social media doesn't meaningfully increase that risk profile. And as I already said, if they're that worried, they can ask a friend to buy it for them.
I'll believe it if you have proof, but you need proof.
Yes, that's what they did.
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 organisation asks the govt, and gives back a signed token.
The the only thing the government knows is that an age verification was requested. Once verification has been done once for one site, it can be used for future verifications.
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.
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.
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 .
Yes, but that would then require more infrastructure. For example, Australia does not have a national ID card - or a national proof of age card (each state, however, does implement a Proof of Age card, eg https://www.nsw.gov.au/driving-boating-and-transport/driver-...).
So, what is your zero knowledge based on? Who is the signer?
Under the Identity Verification Services Act 2023 we have IDMatch (https://www.idmatch.gov.au/). This whole setup can simply be extended to have third parties act as an intermediary between the government and the party attempting to get proof of age. Similar to AusPost's DigitaliD (https://www.digitalid.com/personal). But let's not have that company owned by the Government :)
It's pretty cooked that we are asking the social media companies to go ahead and prove to the eSaftey commissioner that they have measures in place to stop kids from getting access to social websites, yet they have to use unreliable measures like selfies to do it. The companies can't win here. This won't be the last you hear of this. https://youtu.be/YTwBStZIawY?t=306
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Really! My experience is quite the opposite. I see a lot of people explaining why it's a bad idea.
It's well known that foreign actors are all over social and that the west's foreign policy is (rightly so!) hostile to them.
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.)
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
We don't need laws for most things, and yet we've built ourselves a society where everything is a law.
It's not just about the kids either. People know those kids are going to grown up and impact them one day. An avalanche of broken people is not conducive to what I want on a purely selfish level as a non-parent.
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
This social media campaign though I believe actually came from a campaign by the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Labor are always trying to placate News Corp media, and News Corp media still blatantly tell their readers not to vote for Labor. It hasn't worked for decades, but Labor seem to believe that one of these days it will be different (it won't).
So politically it ticks some boxes for them, helps them suck up to the newspapers that will always hate them, helps diminish social media spaces where their opponents (actual progressives) congregate, and generally demonising "big tech" does just play well politically here.
The esafety report stated it was not allowed for sites to screen all users ages, and that all services had to provide a non id method of age verification.
What's the alternative? Going back to TV lying that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that in Libya there's a genuine rebellion against Gaddafi?
I'd rather have multiple actors fighting to push their views on social to be honest.
I also don't like how quick is social media to jump on labelling anybody with a different opinion as a troll or a bot. This is especially common on Reddit where basically every single subreddit is heavily biased in some direction, heavily moderated to push some views and some views only.
Instead, what we should teach in school is how to treat news (any news really, even your friend telling you he's got a Playstation 7 but he can't show it to you): questioning it, verifying the sources, questioning the possible motives and biases of the source.
I'll be frank: I didn't mind Russia pushing their own news through channels like Russia Today globally. I always thought it was very important to get the views of the other side.
But my view also requires my (normal to me) attitude: question, question, question, verify.
Problem is: it's hard, it's exhausting. Claiming something false takes 5 seconds, debunking it can take hours. Most people already got their problems, and just don't do any of it.
Current social media is terrible for children (and everyone, but we let adults drink and smoke) - 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.
"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)
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"
Labor have been failing at giving people what they want recently, and are generally considered rather lacklustre and weak. But like the vaping ban (which was predicted to be and has now been confirmed to be a backward step), this is something parents are generally happy about.
No conspiracy needed.
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.
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.
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.
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
Australian teens can still scroll TikTok, Instagram, and watch Twitch streams from logged out accounts. They just can't comment, like, or upload their own content.
One might argue that this removes the algorithmic feeds. But I would wager that social media companies will just use browser fingerprinting to continue to serve algorithmic content to logged out users, if they aren't doing this already.
My take. This ruling seems to impact the content creators (from Australia specifically) more than the content viewers. Which I'm not sure is the intent of the legislation.
Is this implied, or is this detailed in the law? I can see why this would make sense. So many businesses just have a link to their facebook page as their business website, which you should still be able to view. And presuming platforms like YouTube fit the definition, banning kids from watching anything on there would be pretty rough.
> One might argue that this removes the algorithmic feeds. But I would wager that social media companies will just use browser fingerprinting to continue to serve algorithmic content to logged out users, if they aren't doing this already.
On the subject of YouTube, I wonder if they would allow for the creation of teen accounts, which restrict all social media functions but allow subscriptions. But would that then also remove algorithmic recommendations? What about data harvesting off those accounts? If so, I might have to look up how to get a teenage fake ID.
This is going to be a poor substitute. New browser, updated browser, lost cookies, new phone, different device... Those all will reset your algorithm and the companies will have a hard time tracking down data they can associate with you.
As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got smartphones. We tried to be reasonably conservative in their introduction to devices and social media, on the rationale that it would do them no harm to delay using those for a couple of years through their early brain development. The real difficulty turned out to be the network effect of their peers having access to social media, which increased the social pressure (and corresponding social exclusion) to be online. Not having access to Snapchat/Discord/etc. at that point meant that they were effectively out-group, which is a Big Deal for a teenager.
We ended up allowing them onto social media platforms earlier than we'd have liked but imposed other controls (time and space restrictions, an expectation of parental audits, etc.) These controls were imperfect, and the usual issues occurred. My assessment is that it was a net negative for the mental health of one child and neutral for the other.
I realise that HN is primarily a US forum and skews small-government and free-speech-absolutist. I'm not interested in getting in a debate with anyone about this - my view is that most social media is a net negative with a disproportionate harm to the mental health of non-fully-developed teenage brains. This represents a powerful collective-action failure that is unrealistic to expect individuals to manage, so it's up to government to step in. All boundaries are arbitrary, so the age of 16 (plus this set of apps) seems like a reasonable set of restrictions to me. I am unmoved by the various "slippery slope" arguments I've read here: all rules are mutable, and if we see a problem/overreach later - we'll deal with it in the same way, by consensus and change.
Feels like a huge component to me as a parent. What do I now need to know and do and react to, and how does my behavior affect the mental health of my kids.
I strongly disagree with this legislation and have found it hard to 'steelman' the other side, which your comment/opinion does well. I found it very informative so just wanted to share my appreciation for you posting it here.
> As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got introduced to Rock n' Roll. We tried to be reasonably conservative in their introduction to music and lyrics, on the rationale that it would do them no harm to delay using those for a couple of years through their early brain development. The real difficulty turned out to be the network effect of their peers having access to Rock n' Roll, which increased the social pressure (and corresponding social exclusion) to be dealing with vinyl. Not having access to The Stones, AC/DC, etc. at that point meant that they were effectively out-group, which is a Big Deal for a teenager.
> We ended up allowing them a radio earlier than we'd have liked but imposed other controls (time and space restrictions, an expectation of parental audits, etc.) These controls were imperfect, and the usual issues occurred. My assessment is that it was a net negative for the mental health of one child and neutral for the other.
I'm being a bit facetious here but my point is that everyone who is in support of this kind of Parenting-as-a-Service is not identifying any real issue the government should concern itself with. Just that kids are doing something new and sometimes scary and gosh it's just hard being a parent when they don't listen.
Maybe just don't do that? It's never helpful in good-faith discussions and just indicates a lack of empathy and maybe a lack of understanding of the actual issue being discussed.
> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media though.
The problems GP raised seem pretty clear to me. Could gives us some examples of what you would consider to be "actual problems" in this context?
> Just that kids are doing something new and sometimes scary...
Any sane parent wouldn't send their kids to learn to ride a bicycle on the open road and without any supervision. You'd find a park or an empty lot somewhere, let them test it out, assess their ability to deal with potential dangers and avoid harming others at the same time, and let them be on their own once they are able to give you enough confidence that they can handle themselves most of the time without your help.
The problem with today's social media for children is that that there is no direct supervision or moderation of any kind. Like many have pointed out, social media extends to things like online games as well, and the chance that you will see content that are implicitly or explicitly unsuitable for children is extremely high. Just try joining the Discord channels of guilds of any online game to see for yourself.
Not all things new and scary come with a moderate to high risk of irreparable harm.
On social media kids will be subjected to undisclosed advertising for all kinds of products legal and illegal. They will be directly targeted and manipulated into real world harm situations and mental manipulation into harmful mindsets.
Most of this cannot be prevented by "being a watchful parent". If your kid watches andrew tate and you see and put a restriction youtube will recommend them a tate adjacent channel or one of the 1million alts that posts clips. Same for tiktok, X and Instagram.The only control you have is to ban them from using the platform which is a roundabout way of achieving the same thing.
> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media
Anonymous cyber bullying (multiple times), performative social exclusion (multiple times), anonymous death threats (twice), deepfake porn with their faces spliced in (twice).
Your straw-man example is absurd and TBH it comes across as patronising. I'm trying to avoid assumptions, but it reads like someone who hasn't needed to grapple with this issue personally as a primary carer. Apologies if that isn't the case; everyone has their own view for what parenting should be.
Somehow we've seen fit (as a society) to regulate the minimum age for sex & marriage, obtaining alcohol, acquiring a vehicle licence, etc. We (as a society) recognise that there are good & bad tradeoffs to these activities and have regulated freedoms around these (primarily via age). Somehow, our society hasn't spontaneously regressed into North Korea.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-a...
The first part of that article is an absolutely scathing, on-point criticism of mainstream social media. I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech". That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.
People and their governments seem to agree that modern social media is a problem. The difference is why. The people think it's a problem because it harms people; governments think it's a problem because they don't control it.
I think that the root cause of this shift to mass surveillance is that people in democratic countries still have a 20th-century concept of what authoritarianism looks like. Mass surveillance is like a novel disease that democracies don't yet have any immunity to; that's why you see all these "it's just like buying alcohol" style false equivalences, because an alarming number of people genuinely don't understand the difference between normal surveillance and mass surveillance.
Could you elaborate further on how preventing a sizeable proportion of its citizens from communicating through these established spy-nets, causing them to disperse out to unpredictable alternatives they might not be able to control, increases mass surveillance?
I suppose it depends on how effective these types of measures actually are, and also on how many adults refuse to identify themselves. I would assume governments are more interested in spying on adults than under-16s, so the adults are probably more relevant here.
I hope you're right, though. Maybe there'll be a renaissance of smaller platforms. Probably not, but I can hope.
My suspicion is that fairly simple heuristics of age estimation, combined with social graph inspection, are probably enough to completely disrupt the network effects of "social media" for kids, and achieve the stated objectives well enough that I never have to.
Maybe it turns out that I'm wrong, but why even risk it? If the true policy goal is extending mass-surveillance, why waste so much political capital on such a round-about approach which might yield nothing, or even set back your existing capabilities.
MyID (myid.gov.au) already exists, and could easily have been mandated, or "recommended", or even offered as a means of age verification now. But it wasn't.
It’s not Orwellian. If it were, then not allowing kids to vote or drink before they become adults would be Orwellian.
We are simply banning kids from a harmful activity until they are old enough to decide for themselves. The ban has to be at a social level decided by the democratic process, because there’s a coordination problem here: it’s not a harm that can be remedied at the level of the individual.
The real villains here are the social media companies that have profited from the misery and manipulation of children, to their ultimate harm.
I find it hard to believe anyone would argue in good faith against this ban. In tech circles there are a lot of vested interests that don’t want other governments to protect the children in their countries from harmful products. Shame on them.
This is a problem. You will not accept an argument against the ban.
Instead you paint anyone presenting any opposition to any part of it as a stooge of predatory businesses.
> We are simply [...]
It's a simple idea, but the implementation is anything but.
> The real villains here are the social media companies [...]
They're getting out of this easy. You're giving them a free pass.
Tax them. Sue them.
Hold them liable for the content they show users.
Ban social media for children without empowering the social media companies or the government.
> It’s not Orwellian. If it were, then not allowing kids to vote or drink before they become adults would be Orwellian.
To be clear: What do you think you're refuting? I don't think children should be on modern social media. I don't think anyone should be, but especially not children. There are plenty of ways of going about this. This is why I said:
> A lot of the arguments I see in this thread are about whether modern mainstream social media are bad for young people. When the debate becomes about that, it's very easy to defend these types of Orwellian laws. It becomes "This is a problem, therefore the solution is good", without questioning the solution itself.
You then claim that the tech industry, and by extension "tech circles", don't like this because it means they make less money. I'm not sure how forcing companies whose business model is based on surveillance capitalism to do even more surveillance would hurt them, but if it does, it's still not my concern anyway. And conflating random hackers like me with "big tech" seems to have become increasingly common recently.
This is a very simplified view. The topic has been disputed for years, and societies has tried to find alternative solutions. But turns out, there is no other well enough working solution at the moment, hence the nuclear option. And sometimes that is the only working option anyway.
Should be noted, this is not a first. Social Media has already been restricted to various degree for kids of certain ages in several countries. Australia is just raising the age from the usual 12, 13 up to 16.
> I find myself agreeing with everything said, and then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the article pivots to "therefore we need completely 24/7 mass surveillance of everyone at all times and we need to eradicate freedom of speech".
So it's a poor article, so what? These attempts are not new. There are regularly political attempts pushing towards stricter regulations and more surveillance. Some work, some not.
> That article is like a perfect microcosm of this entire international shift in internet privacy.
There is no shift. Those views have always been there, even before the internet. This is a normal part of societies, including democratic. There is a constant power-struggle between control and liberty in any society, and the balance is always shifting depending on how good or bad certain problems are at that moment.
But a certain thing which is missing here BTW is a complete ban of all open media, for everyone in all ages and groups. For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come. But people now, today, who are getting radicalized against the standing order, those are a problem. And nobody demanding for a ban is good sign for a healthy enough democracy. Because think about in which countries this is not the case..
I believe their point was to illustrate the disconnect between the problem and the solution. They agree with the problem, and experienced "whiplash" when the solution was described.
> For Government, kids on social media are not a big problem, that will only bite them in the decades to come.
In Australia the kids on social media are a problem for the government, today. A 16 year old is less than two years away from voting. Successive governments have laughed at the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 or 17. The government has very little influence on social media -- this is different to older forms of media / communication.
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!
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.
If you found a community on Facebook, you’d likely have found it regardless without it.
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.
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 escalation, the ubiquitousness, is the problem.
It's like the difference to your health between having a can of coke week and drinking a 2 L bottle of coke every day.
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.
Hey you spent 500ms looking at this pretty girl dancing, how about some ass now?
I get straight up PORN ads on Facebook too. Twitter at some point showed me porn as well, even if I had specifically curated it to show JavaScript content.
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.
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.
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.
And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
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.
Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.
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.
Same shit, new generation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
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?
The Supreme Court has even struck down state bans on selling violent video games to children because it violates a child's first amendment rights.
A full ban on social media full of protected speech? That passing Constitutional muster would require some legal gymnastics and overwhelming scientific evidence of harm - evidence that is sorely lacking despite what people believe.
In the previous era of principles, sure. In The Year of Our Dear Leader, 2025? The Republican Supreme Court just needs the order from above, and the Constitution will say what the ruler says it says.
That is basically what the Heritage Foundation wants to do.
Democratic People's Republic of America.
That's how you know it's a fully totalitarian state.
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.
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 would think at least some of this should be obvious, but I guess not?
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?
Italy transitioned from a regency into democracy - which the fascists used to seize power and form a dictatorship [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism].
When the USSR collapsed, there was a temporary fledging democracy that started to form - that was then hijacked by Putin and twisted to support his now obvious Dictatorship.
In the US, while one can certainly argue ‘they knew what they were voting for’, the Trump voters I knew vehemently denied what is now the obvious plan re: economic policies, starting new wars/crises, etc. that are now the norm.
The current actual behavior of the US gov’t seems to align quite well with historical norms on this front, and continue to escalate. If ‘the people give them the power’ means ‘it’s legal’ (aka it is within a law the people’s agents have voted on and made official), or was voted on by the people, it’s clear the vast majority of high profile behavior of the gov’t lately doesn’t care about it.
If anything, Democracies seem to be inherently ‘dumb’ when it comes to these types of situations.
It doesn't mean you couldn't unelect the party democratically and thus the leader. The public can unelect them from power by voting out the Nazi party of which Hitler was leader (through again, a vote). So this is a case of what I'm saying actually being relevent – if people voted against the nazi party, hitler would not have risen to power. He only gained that power because the democratic institutions, the people let him. This is a case for more and better democracy, of valuing that institution. I've encountered Trump voters who were actually bernie bros and accelerationists - they voted for trump as a fu to the establishment. I think the have a moral responsibility to not vote on those urges and whims. I think this that's bad, even if I can feel the sentiment sometimes, and I think that sort of "democracy bad" is actually a harmful to discourse and simply not true.
We need to bolster democracy for the people, not call it toothless while invoking communism and fascism. I don't ultimately blame Trump for his rise to power, I blame the people for being fickle and perfectionists. Democracy is precarious and precious, not a perfect ultimate catch all. The people need to foster it otherwise the rising tide of populism and fascism will drown it.
I don't think it's extreme to believe that democracy is the best tool to fight authoritarianism. That's why people like Trump deride democratic institutions and those important to it's function.
Your response is to… assert they didn’t happen, and to do nothing different?
perhaps we ought to consider banning social media for adults or maybe just dystopian movies.
And yet...
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'm old enough to remember when The Onion didn't just report the news.
[1] https://theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s...
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.
Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them.
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.
As long as it's not farming, defense or healthcare of course. Historically speaking at least.
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.
This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force?
And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do.
I have a degree in political science, and I wish that the reading material required to get that degree displayed more of the technique you've used here.
* 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?
Agree! let's get rid of these :)
> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant
Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.
> States ... pick winners and losers
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.
> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time
There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.
Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.
If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.
I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.
Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.
It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.
...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.
Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!
Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.
What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.
Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.
David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!
All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).
There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.
And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.
...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.
These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it.
Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds.
In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew
* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.
* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.
* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.
* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.
* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.
* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.
* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.
...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".
Facebook could throw all their servers in a wood chipper today and it would have zero effect on scientific debate in the world.
By this metric, who is _not_ a grifter? You have to be Scott Gottleib or Peter Daszak - shilling pseudoscience while sitting on the boards of corporations making billions from the pandemic - to _not_ be a grifter? Is that it?
You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history.
Ps. I know HN likes the EU very much because they see it as an opposing power to their home issues but it’s not that. The EU, in its current form, has many structural problems. That doesn’t mean that Europeans like Musk, Trump or Biden.
The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not.
Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself?
I'm a European citizen, stating the obvious. Happens to be the contrary of what most ppl in here think it is.
> Member states joined the EU through mechanisms of their state. (Acts of parlements, referendum or something else).
They did. That was a long time ago. When the EU was created the expectation was to align salaries, social welfare networks through access to cheap lending through the common currency, even though politicians like Margaret Thatcher understood the role of the ECB the moment it was proposed. Indeed her last speech as a PM in the house of commons is legendary[^1].
> Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself?
Most voters don't make that distinction. The fact that every time a government wants to implement an unpopular idea uses the EU as an excuse doesn't help ofc.
To recap: given the opportunity, the majority of countries in Europe would choose to live the EU today, if you ask them. It was much easier for the UK to do so, because they were not part of the monetary union.
[^1]: "[...] the point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single Parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which take all political power away from us.", M. Thatcher, Excerpt from her last speeh as UK's PM (1990).
To date, proving you are old enough is almost always (over-)implemented by having to reveal your legal identity and the exact date you were born.
If the whole world goes down the route of AV / age-bans then I hope we at least get some kind of escrow service where you visit an official office, prove your age to a disinterested public official, and then pick a random proof-of-age token out of a big bucket. The bucket’s randomness is itself generated when it was filled up with tokens at the Department of Tokens, and maintained by a chain of custody.
You could do it on polling day: ballot boxes get sent out to polling stations filled with tokens and get sent back filled with ballot papers, with the whole process watched by election monitors. Now everyone has (a) voted (b) picked up a proof of age/citizenship token. It would improve turnout, though I believe that’s already mandatory in Australia.
Also yes, voting is mandatory in Australia. You get a small fine if you don't vote.
Edit: in case someone decides to disagree with me, here is a non-exhaustive list of issues that social media has created: isolation from the real world, unrealistic expectations in terms of looks/status/success, dehumanization by turning people into likes-dislikes, dehumanizations by creating influencers whose sole purpose it to pump cheap crap to their "followers", a vessel for state actors to spread the current flavor of propaganda/racism supported by "the algorithm" that creates echo chambers rather than promoting diversity of opinions, dopamine producing machines that glue us to the screens.
There is nothing social in social media, in-fact, it should be called the "anti-social media".
You probably solve most of the problems with 10% of the legal/social/implementation difficulty.
I agree that would go a long long way.
When it becomes a place to share photos with your friends, like the OG Instagram, a lot of the harmful effects go away.
Books are bad because „list of bad things“, let’s not weigh in if people like it or not… just burn the books.
Social media has ruined my mental health, when I fell into a deep hole of propaganda. It took me a year to recover, and I'm still not fully recovered, and I'm still trying to separate between what I truly think, and what social media "made" me think. People underestimate the power of echo chambers created by the algorithm.
I saw how friends and family got radicalized thanks to social media. Social media is currently fueling at least one war and multiple regional conflicts, where people who know nothing about the events, get "educated" by social media. Social media is fueling hatred and bigotry, further diving already fragile societies. Social media disinformation campaigns were behind Brexit. And social media is used as a tool by government to spread misinformation or influence social opinions. All these in addition to everyone being an influencer and showing their phone into the faces of people in public places, while selling crap from AliExpress for 500% markup, as if you drink electrolytes, put a nose tape, and clean your face every day -- your life will become ten folds better.
I can't name one good thing that came out of social media. None. And even if there are things, and I'm sure someone will name them out, they are minor comparing to the negative sides, or could be achieved in a more sustainable way.
HN is social media.
You can't follow people or have followers. There's no notification system when someone "likes" your comment. It doesn't lend itself towards pulling you back with the latest comment or post. There is the front page algorithm, but you can always just go to /latest or /active. It's about the content, not the users.
Critically, there's no ads or monetization (which is where all that garbage comes in).
You cannot follow or be followed. There is no attention drawn to your username or profile. Everything about HN is designed for you to just read a comment and move on, not caring much about the human behind it.
It could be banned with nothing of value lost.
Reversing that would take some doing.
Using ML/Data to keep people hooked on content - I'd be embarrassed to be an engineer at any of these companies actively destroying our society.
Comparing modern algorithmic/addictive social media to print articles with cliffhangers isn't a serious argument.
No one outside of someone trying to be obtuse would put HN and Tiktok in the same category.
Definitely not the ones enforcing it, when it serves their purpose.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
Nothing from Reddit or any of the Meta platforms which have to comply with this legislation.
It did not affect them too much, but they had to use either their government issued id or consent to biometric scan (age estimate via camera).
Nothing particularly problematic, but nevertheless irritating and may become a deal breaker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, and I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but what about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the point where you have shared moments laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I’m a few multiples of the age in question and I haven’t used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the main issues is people only showing the doctored up highlight reel of their life. If that’s still the issue then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that’s also part of real life and a teachable moment. Granted I wasn’t bombarded with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI Edition”, but the concept of someone being ‘fake’ isn’t new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it and mentally deal with it. That is the world they’re going into, whether it’s a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex, or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.
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?
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).
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.
* 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.
This is considered a startup phase AFAICT, with others being looked at as necessary.
> 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.
Sure, but it stops kids bullying each other, and a service you can't fully interact with is not very interesting, stops kids putting their pics/videos/whatever online.
> 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.
They are using heuristics and then an external verification service if the heuristics set off an alarm. It's not perfect at present, sure, but I don't think it has to be.
We'll see how effective it is over time I guess.
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!
This is more about criminalising poverty than anything about parenting. I live in a rich part of Wyoming. The kids are fucking feral.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda McGurk
I read this book in school and it's about this difference between Europe / Scandinavia and a rural part of Indiana
I'm not saying kids don't play outside, just that the violence is why some parents fear it. I agree the internet makes this fear worse but frankly, EVEN ONE CRIME is scary enough if you ask me
A 26 year old girl was set on fire in Chicago public transportation. It's really unforgiveable to me when people then say I'm "fearmongering"
Yes, I fear being attacked on public transport!
This article, also crucially, does not relate to America
When they said they live in a country where a police force follows kids on bikes
The clues were all there.
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.
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.
They passed legislation, its not clear at all that they succeeded.
The Seventies are BACK!
That's for the better, as far as I see it, I can just shout :p
> 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.
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-...
It is still more ok then most of what any other todays tech provides. No matter how much geeks on HN hate it.
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.
There are at least other two that I could find
I would guess that this massive fine is more for situations like if a company can be shown to have wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly negligent. (But I have not read the law!)
violation would not be: a kid bypassing their reasonable effort.
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.
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.
'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis
Most people I know want to keep their kids off social media, but do not want them to be ostracised.
Given that law, it might now be possible to keep your kids off the networks.
In my experience, at least for younger teens, it’s a small subset of kids enabled by their parents that push everybody else into the mouth of the kraken.
Example from my life:
Kid A has an Instagram account curated by her mum, who is more than happy to set up all kinds of communities, etc., for the kids in the class to cite: “finally be able to better communicate and stay in touch”.
Sure, you can keep your kid out, but social isolation is not easy for teens. Given that law, you could get Insta-mom banned.
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?
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?
Hn and reddit are kinda the same concept, it's just the scale of them making it different, or?
I'm not sure there's a good example of a social network site left.
Even sites and services that can be used for social networking are designed to make that difficult. For example, on Instagram you can choose to follow and interact with only people you actually know and keep your profile private. That would be social networking IMHO because it's mostly one-to-one or at least one-to-not very many. But Instagram insists on showing suggested posts. You can turn that off, but after 30 days they turn it back on.
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???)
The YouTube Kids apps and services are not included in the ban for this very reason, only the "adult" YouTube app and service. I imagine Google absolutely could create a YouTube "aussie edition" that could avoid the ban for the main service.
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
Aside from YouTube I don't particularly engage with any of these often, but my Google, Facebook, Discord, Twitter, Bluesky, (current) Reddit, Slack, Telegram accounts all seem to be BAU without new requirements.
If the 80% of us currently holding unambiguously-over-16 accounts are exempt, and it only affects future over-16 users as they're onboarded, then it is a very blunt and very slow form of data harvesting which won't yield useful results until years/decades after all of the relevant decision-makers have moved on, retired and/or died. So this seems unlikely?
I have seen the way heavy social media use changes some peoples personalities. it's scary. these platforms don't just home communities: they're engines, with tendencies. including numerous ways in which these platforms are implicated in youth suicide.
I am absolutely convinced that children should be discouraged from these engines just as they should be discouraged from alcohol.
I totally recognise that if that means these platforms demand proof of ID, that changes their privacy profile and some people will choose to stop participating.
perhaps this can offer some stimulus for other ways of online community forming. Thanks everyone here: I've participated in a few online conversations about the topic this week, and this is the only interesting one :)
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S3fVC...
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S2nVb...
echo url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-social-media-ban-under-16.html \
|curl -K/dev/stdin -Agooglebot > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links -dump 1.htm|sed -n '/Effect/,/region./p'
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1S5G8h...
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echo url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-social-media-ban-under-16.html \
|curl -K/dev/stdin -Agooglebot > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links -dump 1.htm|sed -n '/Effect/,/region./p'When I was 9 we had a cheap TV for about 3 months and it broke. Family decided we didn't need one.
At 36 I got a TV for a couple years. My kids watched Blue's Clues, etc.
At 38, I again got a TV for a couple years. Then decided dumb late night shows were not helping the insomnia, so cancelled cable, but started streaming HBO.
Since then, I have enjoyed high quality streaming series on occasion. But no live TV, no TV "news", and strictly avoid anything with ads.
When I see a live TV on, with the strange voices and non-logic of ads, and the bizarre posturing they call "news", I get a little sick. Even "nature" and "history" shows have strange pacing and repetition. The transparent sucking sound of ads needing tamed attention-providers warps everything.
I think being sheltered from regular TV, TV ads, and TV news, has been tremendously positive for my mind and life.
Not being exposed to "social" media sites, which are often not actually social, and often unhealthy when they are, is a great win. Quality can sometimes survive in rare small social-conversation sites, not driven by ads or agenda.
Incredibly, you were able to do that without the government's help! I suppose people just aren't built the same these days, so we need laws instead of letting people decide on their own.
But I would prefer that surveillance-manipulation based practices be made illegal first. That would remove a lot of the means, and a lot of profits, from manipulating people via feeds, warped searches, and a host of other ways and uses for digging into, and leveraging, people's idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities against them.
Dossier's on children, resulting in manipulative feeds for them are bad. But it is a bad practice for everyone. One of those deceptive business practices, that gets claimed to be not deceptive, because the deception is "out in the open".
Fraud doesn't have an "everyone is doing it" defense. Neither should surveillance-manipulation practices.
It isn't just a case of individuals, who need to be "saved from themselves". Our society, as permeated with surveillance and manipulation, has become permeated with "personalized" media driven dysfunction. We all have to put up with the bullshit it creates, and divisiveness it magnifies. Dystopian.
AI slop would be less effective, and less promoted, if there wasn't a surveillance dossier to customize who saw what. People don't like it now. Getting non-"personalized" slop? That would create exactly the intense pushback that is needed.
--
My ad free life, and ad-funded media free life, has left me utterly disgusted with manipulative social media. When people mount a defense of keeping it legal, it makes me very sad for their quite visibly slowly boiling brains. The practices are clearly both highly unethical and toxic.
(I am all for social media as a service/resource. I don't even mind ads (too much), when they are placed to match content, not the consumer. Just not when both are irreversibly compromised by massive tech scaled conflicts of interest.)
Passing laws that affect all of us because you are too lazy and ineffectual to raise your children properly is unacceptable.
Yes this is true parents are responsible for their kids but it's also true that the village a kid lives in actually influences the kid more than their parents. So it's up to the parents to choose a good village. If every village has the same global social media apps then obviously that's more difficult and not a pit of success. Keep in mind most parents also have a shitload of other stuff to do especially with inflation requiring two incomes to operate a household.
Individualist types don't seem to get the whole village thing at all. It's hyper-individualism with no acknowledgement that we DO affect other people with our actions. Pollute as much as you like, fly noisy planes, drive oversized killer-SUVs. Let every company do what it wants because free market competition and better technology, or something. We're actually social animals and our happiness has a lot to do with how we stack up socially. Hence if just one kid has a device the other kids get jealous and want to keep up; The obvious answer is to enforce a culture of no-phones. But that would take a some agreement so a individualists don't like it.
If you just disdain children in general, you can go ahead and say that instead.
because they don't know the consequences and the question that was asked was literally "should kids be banned from social media?". You can bet the opinion will shift when more and more sites demand age verification and sending government IDs to random websites. It will also be widened to more than just the big social media sites, let's not kid ourselves.
And by prisoner's dilemma / double bind type phenomenon, such as being forced to choose between being a social outcast, or to be on social media. That double bind would not exist if you nuke the whole thing. The libertarian theory of the world does not have such phenomenon within its descriptive aperture.
Stop delegating action to the individual.
Me and missus are full time employees, I do not have oversight to what my kid is doom-scrolling on his lunch break.
> Passing laws that affect all of us because you are too lazy and ineffectual to raise your children properly is unacceptable.
How does it affect you? Unless you are a corporate mouthpiece this does not affect you at all.
I do not want my kid to watch any degenerate pornography on his formative years just because some lobbyist wants to shove freemarketeering ideologies down our throats.
Now it's very logical to spin that expensive infrastructure down, removing free communication channels which can dangerously synchronize people against the state, and leaving only channels of control: digital ID, CDBC and a white list of governmental "services", all else outlawed.
People of 2010s uploaded their personal data into the cloud because they thought that was cool, people of 2030s will do because their telescreens demand them so.
Everyone who thinks this will stop at "think about the children" is beyond all repair.
"Think of the children" is weaponized for censorious purposes, but also the harms of social media are well documented (unlike many of the other moral panics fuelled by this phrase). Communication channels are becoming managed spaces, but by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state.
I'm not sure a blanket under-16s ban on all social media is the right answer, but there are really good reasons why people support this that you need to engage with to have a useful discussion here.
> to have a useful discussion here
Typical dismissive tactics of a devil's advocate;
> by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state
This tale about corporations being separate entities from the state doesn't entertain anymore.
Seems like local school districts could reintroduce such a platform (perhaps one already exists) for class discussions to continue outside of the classroom... but without the temptations of the outside world [which these u16 bans rightfully seek to limit]. Hyper-walled gardens, actual community-based social spaces, sans predation.
As always, I imagine with the unlimited timelessness of childhood multiple clever work-arounds will persist, regardless of any law. May the cat-and-mouse be merry.
Initially, it will only be required if you're logged in. Obviously that won't be effective, so the next logical step would be to require that everyone logs in to use a search engine.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-sear...
Extremes are bad on either end. unrestricted internet access, even to those who can't defend themselves against harmful content is an extreme, some balance is long due. Since most other western countries chose to risk their kids in the name of liberty, let's wait and see whose trade off works out for the best instead of speculating what will or won't happen.
I wish more countries would experiment like this, and even more countries would learn.
You can't argue for UBI or drug decriminalization because some country experimented and succeeded and then oppose this sort of stuff. In the US, states are supposed to experiment with laws like this, but they don't have enough power to regulate interstate communication or commerce.
And then they're on platforms with zero protections because nobody knows they're a teen... end result is worse.
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.
> showing my ID [in person] was a simple, controlled transaction: one person looked at it for three seconds, handed it back, and forgot about it. The information never left that moment. But online, that same verification process transforms into something far more risky. A digital journey through countless servers, databases, and third-party services, each one a potential point of failure.
> What appears to be the same simple request "please verify your identity", becomes fundamentally different when mediated by technology. The question isn't whether these digital systems will be compromised, but when. And unlike that movie theater clerk who can't perfectly recall my birthdate minutes after seeing it, computers have perfect memory. They store, copy, backup, and transmit our most sensitive information through networks we don't control, to companies we've never heard of, under policies we'll never read.
Then of course by teens, most boys were in the notorious MW2 lobbies.
Goes well beyond scamming kids to work for scrip. =3
GTFO, no kid under 16 should be on that platform unsupervised.
The feds should have section 7 that firm years ago. =3
I refuse to explain that to you, as you are likely still a kid. =3
Just say what you mean already. It’s not somehow better discussion when you hide your point behind layers of misdirection.
It is essentially a judges forced death-sentence for a corporation.
An appropriate solution given Roblox manipulative behavior targeting kids, and a pattern of administrative negligence on the platform. Spend 5 minutes searching, and the history of the platform "problems" is trivially exposed.
Kids <16 should not be on there unsupervised, and there are lots of other better-quality games around people can play that offer far less "problems". =3
It goes through numbers, potential ways it's gonna be implemented, and also which other platforms are affected.
For example:
> Dating websites are excluded along with gaming platforms, as are AI chatbots, which have recently made headlines for allegedly encouraging children to kill themselves and for having "sensual" conversations with minors.
It wasn't enough the online pedo or weirdos trying to get your kids through chats or games.
It wasn't enough the instagram meat grinder that leads to depression, social anxiety, etc.
Now we even have to worry about chatbots leading kids to suicide.
What a hell of a world are we building - no wonder people don't want to make kids anymore.
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.
But it is coming either way.
At least that's a good incentive to build censorship-resistant internet.
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.
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.
This social media ban is not so much about banning kids from social media.
It's more about banning social media apps/companies from accessing kids.
The SM apps are entirely about exploitation of their audiences via algorithms to push advertising and political positions. That needs to be stopped.
This is a start.
It's a bit like the bans on under 18 (Australia) drinking without supervision. We know that the bans aren't "perfect", but they work for the majority of the time for the majority of the kids.
Talking about the dangers of D&D or the Satanic Panic seemed idiotic to me and still do.
But when people explained why something was bad I would listen. Did their concerns seem legitimate?
I'm 50 and I've never smoked a cigarette. In the movies it looked cool. But I saw older people with horrible health issues and also the smoke smelled horrible and made their breath stink. Those people were not lying to me about the danger of tobacco.
So are people lying about the dangers of social media? But if you think it is bad for teenagers then how do you convince them that it is? I would rather have commercials with teenagers talking about how they were depressed or developed eating disorders or whatever from looking at social media. Then they stopped and now they are happier with more real life interactions.
I can tell you that I deleted my facebook account in 2016 (didn't use it much) and haven't been on instagram in 5 years. I don't miss it at all. All facebook ever did was annoy and anger me.
As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
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
The counter point is that doesn't this basically mean everyone, including adults, now has to identify in order to use social media? Without a national electronic ID where personal data never leaves government's systems (they've already got it) and the social network just receives a yes/no bit when they ask "is this person old enough?" this would mean a huge amounts of identification data would be willingly and voluntarily "leaked" to foreign private services. Scan your passport and send it to China in order to use TikTok?
This mass identification process could either make also large groups of adult people leave social media sites or condition people to upload their ID data to whatever site happens to ask for it.
It is similar to the tax approach - it is not bad that we are paying taxes, what is bad that the Government implies how to count the taxes.
yep, done
> implement identity verification checks
nope, not done so what's your point?
An algorithmic bouncer guesses your age and if he isn't happy you have to feed him proof until he is happy.
Predicting it will lead to fascism instead is... humorous.
I also don't like antisocial media.
Still, I dislike censorship more than that antisocial media.
In football we call this an own goal
Unfortunately this legislation hasn't addressed any of my real concerns with social media (it's the algorithms and engagement farming) and it is creating new problems.
I will do everything in my power to keep my kids' connected to their social networks. I have a strongly opposing view: social media is one of the best inventions and there is no way or need to protect people from participating.
With all the negative effects they bring the society has to learn how to live with it instead of pretend fighting.
>Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
"Locking" Why not instead ban the social graph, or certain engagement techniques. Theres a whole other arm here, where the AusGov has pulled back entirely from promised gambling restrictions. Its easy to see a path where dark patterns in both industries are outlawed instead of banning half.
Not to mention that 4chan and youtube are unaffected, so I doubt those kids with the broken backs or whatever are going to be "free".
This will enhance surveillance and state control of content, but not address the problems you’ve mentioned
We already have reports of disabled kids experiencing suicidal ideation as they are cut off from their only non familial social experience.
Most kids don't really have such a choice when it comes to school or their family.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Not to mention that Australias youth are quite politically engaged, we have a news network entirely run by teenagers that just had their service gutted.
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.
The average Australian punter is getting absolutely screwed by our current government and all involved parties.
-> 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.
Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?
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.
but my concern is that will lead to a less educated population. there is positive, life changing learning that can happen on social media. kids finding their tribe by connecting with people like them in other parts of the country / world. kids discovering skills / crafts they become passionate about. heck, even learning how to communicate effectively with others. i think social media is a treasure when it is used correctly.
ofc, i agree with the concerns and ofc the right "solution" is one that enables the positives and minimizes (and ideally eliminates) the negatives. and having social media as a closed, proprietary, centralized product that can't be tweaked (e.g, choose your own custom algorithm, or filter out a "type" of content that you don't want to see, etc.) is the core problem here. a decentralized social media would allow even regulators to apply much more fine-grained controls so that they don't have to remove access entirely.
but sadly bec. we don't have a good way to apply fine grained controls to how we use social media, it seems blanket banning entirely for an entire group of people is the best approach. like, i get why it may be necessary (it seems like most / many australians are currently on board), but i really hope this inspires people to build better social platforms that give more control to users.
Just about all arguments against this are the same arguments that would stop governments limiting booze or tabaco
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/clyd1dvrll1o
I feel like there's definitely a problem here with social media and its effect on society, but our first approach should be to increase transparency and accountability, rather than to start banning things by force of law.
Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
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.
Inflation adjusted wages and purchasing power is flat for, at least, the past 50 years... and even if it wasn't it wouldn't mean anything regarding new workers capabilities/attention span/&c.
https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/upl...
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/Xkzpnpz_lnI-0WbTH1LJVUdu3J...
The propaganda is so good people who have it worse than their parents and grand parents think they're living in the greatest times ever.
https://i0.wp.com/www.edwardconard.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/has-intergenerat...
the “propaganda is so good” and yet anyone on the internet has seen the charts you’re linking dozens of times. fwiw, your chart makes a lot of assumptions by subsetting to hourly, excluding benefits, and using a different inflation adjustment for income vs. productivity (the last one is 100% a chart crime). every time they make the choice that will make the gap most striking, https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/realtime/files/2015...
Notably the central theme presented by these same "Australians" was that there should be no changes, limits or restrictions to the types of information collected by social media companies, or how they handle such personal information, rather that everything should be exactly as it was... how very convenient.
Some were even so incensed about their personal privacy that they wrote how much they disagree with having to share their SSN with online platforms.
As many of you would already know, mentioning a "SSN" is a give away that the "Australians" are not genuine people. These accounts are perpetuating the lie that Australians must provide a government identity to access these services. While an ID can be used, it's not mandatory and is actually one of the less convenient options, in comparison to 3rd party verification or a face photo.
Seems a bit of a disingenuous argument to complain about taking a photo of one's face for verification, but having no qualms about using the social media network to post photos of oneself for public viewing.
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.
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.
Can't say I mourn it, quite the opposite.
So, good move by our Aussie friends.
A lot of my family growing up lived in different cities. We kept in touch via social media. PSTN was expensive and impractical. Postal mail was obviously less practical.
Does this new ban move kids to using email to keep in touch with friends and family? Are they now completely isolated from the rest of the world?
You had social media but no ability to send DMs?
In an attempt to not deliberately misinterpret you, next to zero of my current ability to keep in touch with anyone in my life via the internet, distant or otherwise, depends on social media, so forgive me if this seems like a strange take. Kids need access to YouTube in order to talk to their family?
> Are they now completely isolated from the rest of the world?
It's only in extremely recent history that anyone, especially kids, had access to the rest of the world in any meaningful way, or at the resolution available now. I don't think it's remotely healthy for adults to concern themselves with the hourly regional issues wherever they're occuring in the world; it costs society a great deal more than it earns imo (but it's very profitable for the companies on this list)
Your attempt has failed; obviously I’m not taking about YouTube, but about things like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Instagram, and other social media which families actually use to talk to each other on a dialy basis.
Perhaps you don’t use these, but most of the world population uses some of these (or something similar) to keep in touch with family and friends.
Heck, even when I was a teen (before smartphones) I kept in touch with friends over social media. We’d even organise meeting up through it.
You seem to be confusing messaging software and social media ?
Do (the others than Instagram) have an algorithmic feed, or (effectively) do not work without making an account ?
I guess that there's also Discord (that isn't on the list but has still complied) that is in an awkward in-between ?
(IMHO both Instagram and Discord ought to be banned anyway, for everyone, because they're deep web platforms that are owned by Meta/Tencent, and are therefore a threat to the open web and liberal democracy.)
Anyone arguing against this ban is delusional what social media does to undeveloped brains. There are plenty of studies to support this as well.
Social media is harmful to children. We are talking about 10 yo having access to non-stop stream of inappropriate content for their age. You can blame the parents but social media is now fact of life that cannot be so easily escaped.
Like buying alcohol, gambling, driving, voting and other similar things which are restricted under particular age, the discussion should be about at what age is safe for children to participate in the public discourse.
I really hope similar controls are implemented across EU.
https://www.wionews.com/trending/australian-teens-defy-under...
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.
Surely Discord harbours more bullying than Twitch (where image sharing isn’t even a feature).
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
GitHub is not included, nor is Discord.
The "social" part is severely decaying.
Then Facebook convinced people social media was supposed to be about your "real" identity, which made us sitting ducks for scammers and propaganda. Now we have governments demanding we provide our identity papers before we are allowed to participate.
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.
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
But North America, for the curious.
Just say canada. I don't understand why canadians always do this.
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.
I cannot possibly muster up enough energy to care about this anywhere near as much as you do.
Good luck, fellow North American.
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.
AUS: we agree, and like smoking, won't be letting our kids do it
NH: but freeze peach!
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.
These communities already had active mods that would remove anyone underage that they found, so it doesn't really make sense in this case that Discord is now requiring them to prove their ages.
Meanwhile kids are finding ways around the ban. Kids are asking their older looking friends to pass facial scans for them.
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
(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...
not to exert absolute control, just enough to give the clear message: not for kids.
And so we move forward, like Gordon Freeman in unforeseen consequences.
Nobody said nothing as social media and the attention economy took over the world.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” — Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
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.
Great, another Oprah's book club book that assures parents that there's just one easy trick to saving your children.
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 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.
The government has been working tirelessly for more than a decade to prevent growing dissent from sweeping the major parties from power.
The government has wrapped itself in the dual flags of nationalism and protecting kids to shield themselves from an enormous volume of rational criticism on this topic.
Changing a law, in and of itself, isnt worrying. Its that minor parties these kids could have supported are facing a triple whammy, kids will be less likely to engage with them online, they have a steeper threshold to pass when accessing the senate, and they have had a large funding changes that disadvantage them.
Godwinning is perfectly appropriate imho.
But, I suppose you don't care because you don't have something to hide, don't you :)
Good for you Australia. I hope EU follows suit soon.
It's understandable, to some extend, that people will protest government interference, but it's also an industry that have repeatedly show itself to be incapable of regulation itself. I don't really see the big surprise, most government are relatively hands of, until you prove that you're incapable of regulating yourself. Most regulation happens after the damage is done.
I do think that 16 is a bit low, I'd like to have seen it be 18, or a complete ban on algorithmically generated feeds (I believe the latter would be the better option).
Because they are deeply involved.
It is not about protecting. It never was.
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.
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 heavily against any form of mandatory form of identification for using non-government online-services.
Is it even possible to do the former without doing the later?
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
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
the law of unintended consequences looms large.
The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.
The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.
Kids not being able to do particular things until they're of age? That's much of an egregious violation of their civil rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
I think the discussion of political issues in a sensible way on platforms like instagram, tiktok, X, Reddit etc for those ages is perhaps a lower priority than the mental health impacts that those platforms in general provide.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-australian-state...
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 :)
Think for a moment instead of just accepting whatever the media is telling you to think.
How many social networks are there?
Are some of those decentralised?
Will kids move to unmoderated underground ones in response to this?
Will the government expand these laws now that it achieved a foothold?
Parenting and teaching your kids to think and understand how the world works is how you really solve the problems. Not building weak fences and encouraging government over-reach. Raising and guiding your kids is YOUR responsibility, not the governments.
All this came about because some absolute slog of a parent had their kid kill themselves and blamed social media. Where the hell was he while their kid struggled?!
Banning social media in principle is like banning the sales of alcohol and other drugs to underage people. Those bans are good for society irrespective of your parenting ability. It helps that those negative things are less accessible to the vulnerable.
Now, how the social media ban is effected in practice is a different point. And people here are rightfully skeptical of ID verification and such things, since that opens the door for way more surveillance outside social media.
....
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.
The Aussies passed strict gun control laws in 1996 .. suicides and homicides decreased significantly. Another field where we Leaders of the Free world (or not) can learn from the "World down under"!
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."
At least as much mental and societal damage is done by elderly falling for bigoted, scammy, manipulative nonsense online than by teenagers having their self-esteem lowered.
As recent holiday gatherings have shown us, the young handle social media far better then the elderly.
/s
The amount of human hours spent watching others play video games / gamble / creating parasocial relationships: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/watch-time
Libertarianism really does hit a wall when it comes to kids, in so many ways, doesn't it?