The problem is not teens accessing social media, they’re just bored or don’t know any better
The problem is what adults post on those social media.
If anything teens should have social media of their own, where no elder boomers are allowed
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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There was a German social network a few years ago that did exactly that (before Facebook was available in German)
They had SchülerVZ for kids/teens, then they had StudiVZ for university students and finally they had MeinVZ for adults. The problem was, that they weren’t interconnected at all apart from the option to move your account to the next platform. So if you were just starting to study but you still had friends that were in school, you could’t keep in touch with them.
It's still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they're actually going to enforce this.
Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.
If they're expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples' government ID's, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.
It's just apparently all anyone can come up with when they've got government-brain.
They've set it up so it's a legal mess. The platforms aren't given any mechanism to actually perform verifications (no double blind id system, for example) but are legally on the hook for each and every under-16 on the platforms. A quote in the article suggests it should be the app stores verifying which is even more fucking stupid.
Well, I know how that would go if I were a globe-spanning social media giant. Given that the entirety of the Australian market is roughly the size of New York state (~26 vs ~20 million people), I would say, "Nah mate, we just won't do business in Oz anymore. Bye."
Vanishingly few business make a "New York only" version of their product because it's simply not worth it. Australia already suffers under this problem for a great deal of physical products. Ask any computer nerd about that, when trying to source parts and often video game titles as well. Shipping things to the Antipodes and/or dealing with Antipodean regulations is expensive, for an objectively low number of potential sales.
It would not surprise me to learn if it follows that Australia generates roughly 1.7% of the revenue for Facebook or whoever as, say, India. So in other words, bupkis.
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The plan is their mygov id system and this has been years in the making.
Australian governments (both lib and labor) are on board with this and have been salivating over the idea of an internet more locked down than South Korea’s.
I recently switched from 1 January 1900 to 1 January 2000. It feels good to be young again.
What will be interesting for sure is the difference of this approach vs. the porn approach in the southern US. In this case in Australia? Social media companies will tip toe any line they can because there is so much money to be made and they want every dollar.
PornHub? They just blocked access in 17 states instead of even trying to worry about age verification. They're still getting their users, but now they're coming over VPN.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/pornhub-florida-vpn-google-searches-skyrocket/
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So where exactly are kids supposed to go? People will go on about "they should just go outside" but kids have literally had the cops called on them for the crime of walking around their own neighborhood "unsupervised". I've seen calls to ban kids from all sorts of places - planes, theme parks, restaurants, libraries. I've seen these "mosquito" things put up to drive kids away from public places. Kids are spending all their time on social media because they have nowhere else to go.
They should go the fuck outside, what you said isnt true at all. Also, kids arent buying their own phones and internet, the parents are.
You can message your friends without all the misinformation and self-harm promoting algorithms
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I think this perspective (that teens have nothing else in their lives other than social media) is harmful. I don't understand why they're not able to do the same things teens did before social media......
Police being called on harmless teenagers by the same busybodies over and over again kind of sorts itself out after awhile.
This is the travel range for kids in the UK by generation. Such a map would be far worse in the US or Australia
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So where exactly are kids supposed to go? People will go on about “they should just go outside” but kids have literally had the cops called on them for the crime of walking around their own neighborhood “unsupervised”. I’ve seen calls to ban kids from all sorts of places - planes, theme parks, restaurants, libraries. I’ve seen these “mosquito” things put up to drive kids away from public places. Kids are spending all their time on social media because they have nowhere else to go.
Outside. It may take society a bit of time to adjust, just like it took a bit of time before kids not being outside became normal, but it will happen. Kids run around my town all the time unsupervised, nobody is calling the cops, and parents are looking out for each others kids. Just because some places have gone off the deep end doesn't mean everywhere has.
Social media is harming them in that case.
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Australia is the first nation to fail to ban social media for under 16s.
Unenforcible Law.
Gotta require ID verifications and ban all VPNs in order to actually be enforcible.
Surely, the website owners would never sell your information, right? Right?
The ID verification is the purpose. Keeping minors off is a smokescreen, tracking every citizen on social media is the real reason for this law.
Introducing friction with massive population groups like this is actually effective at bringing numbers down.
Take the porn ID stuff in the US. Yes VPN usage is up but traffic is down as well. Not everyone is going to take the extra steps.
Gotta require ID verifications
that's exactly what they are "evaluating" now along with "biometric (age and voice) estimation".
government, politicians and media are constructing a parallel reality for themselves.
Put it on the parents. That's enforceable, and the root of the problem..
Banning the Three Letter Word is unenforceable too. If you ban Open*** and Wireguard - too bad, China has done that and people developed obfuscation methods. Even if you try to ban talking about them, they won't go extinct. If there's a supply, there's a demand.
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Oh those poor kids.
I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.
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Now do 16+
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In further news, millions of teenagers have become experts at vpns and bypassing online restrictions
Australia fighting the good fight to produce tech savvy youth
They need them to get indoctrinated in the public education system first.
If only this applied to the parents as well... No more using your children online to make a buck as an influencer.
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Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.
An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.
What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.
Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn't disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn't really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that's a very real issue.
I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.
Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn't going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It's just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.
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Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
Now kids will be forced to hide being a victim of cyber-bullying from their parents. Great work!
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What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?
My instance is in Australia, and the new laws affect social media like Lemmy. The hard part is that there apparently isn't much guidance on how to follow the law. Do you have to use ID? Is a location-specific popup making you state that you're 16+ enough? Nobody knows.
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