Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age).
Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
Reminds of the 'chilling effect' of measures of bygone decades.
My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening.
Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use?
Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.
But it's the internet; for every one site that implements this, there will be a thousand that don't, and for every one that the government takes down, another thousand will pop up. And that's just the actual porn sites, there's millions of other ways to get access, be it websites, privacy-conscious apps, file sharing, etc. If people want porn they'll find it.
Of course, it being more difficult, technically involved, or otherwise shady will probably reinforce a message that it's not normal, because another issue is the normalization of porn to the point where people watch it in public. I'm also very aware I am just echoing the same thing an older generation has said about things like raunchy video clips on MTV, magazines like Playboy, movies with Marilyn Monroe, and painters painting a hint of ankle.
The parent comment suggested of the sort. There is obviously more porn on porn sites than on moderated social media platforms. Pointing out that some porn occasionally evades filters on Facebook for a couple days doesn’t mean social media sites and porn sites are fully equivalent.
> For me, social media is the worst thing we ever created.
Calling social media the “worst thing we ever created” as a comment on a social media site is deeply ironic.
I can’t believe how many commenters are assuming these laws will only apply to sites they don’t personally use. The amount of “good riddance” commenting from people inviting heavy handed internet ID checking regulation because they can’t imagine it would ever affect them personally is really scary.
So your argument is that hackernews is similar to TikTok and instagram?
I completely disagree.
The core of HN is not self promotion, narration, or comparison - the very things driving teen suicides up from social media use.
I further suggest most of the replies to my original comment are willfully ignoring the data the Australian govt is citing for these bans, and what psychologists worldwide are citing.
None of the discussion here so far even touches on a possible solution to a problem that is driving measurable deaths.
Instead we have a collection of false equivalence and abdication of social responsibility by big tech, which is fairly on brand for hn and frankly intellectually lazy from my perspective.
> Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media?
If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites, not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn.
Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want to socialise online. The effects will be similar to banning alcohol, it doesn't decrease demand, just pushes it elsewhere creating worse problems along the way.
The internet was wild before social media but somehow the weird stuff remained fringe before recommendation algorithms and the perverse incentives that emerged from recommendation algorithms and content creation meant that feeds became an on ramp to all kinds of nasty things
I'm not exactly a greybeard but I remember when happy slapping was a viral phenomenon but that seems pretty tame by comparison these days
4chan is a synecdoche representing all those fringe ~'social media' substitute sites; they'll soon be common knowledge in Aus, at least among the U16s..
Eh, not really. I'd consider myself a greybeard (not literally, but I am online since 90s) and everything is so much tamer now. It wasn't unusual to find open, unprotected and unencrypted sites with really, really weird stuff - that kind you only see on darknet today. Over the decades, everything became mild, normal, mainstream - which is IMHO bad and I blame the algorithms.
> How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
Adults do, and the OP's argument is that everyone (not just U16's) will be driven away by the changes. Being asked to provide ID may result in some just noping out or not signing up to newer services when they otherwise might have.
If 16 year olds do indeed access pornography with such an amount of naiveté, there might really be a problem. But there is no indication of a problem, is there?
It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age).
>
> Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup.
As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example).
Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).
This comes up on every single HN thread about the topic, but I don’t understand how people aren’t seeing the obvious abuse angle:
Create a market for anonymous age verification tokens. People pay $5 to someone to create an age authorization for them. 17 year old kid (who is old enough under this law) spends all day creating anonymous age auth tokens to sell to people who want them.
Entire system subverted with profit motive.
The next phase of the argument is to argue for rate limiting or extra logging, but the more you force that the more you degrade privacy or introduce unreasonable restrictions. “Sorry, I can’t sign up for the wiki today because I already used my quota of 2 government age checks today”. Still leaves plenty of room for 17 year old kids to earn $10 a day farming out their age checks.
The entire argument that anonymous crypto primitive will solve this problem is tiresome.
The same applies to effectively all possible solutions for age verification, no?
Even if you have a perfect mechanism, 17 years old can create real age-verified accounts and then sell the username and password afterwards. Selling age-verification tokens directly would likely be harder than just swapping those login details, since it's very easy to make the tokens time-limited (in practice normal use would probably be some kind of oauth-style redirect flow, so they'd really only have to be valid for a few seconds).
This same argument applies to adults buying alcohol for teenagers too. The determined teenager with money can definitely find a way to get alcohol, but it doesn't mean the age restrictions on purchases are pointless.
Imo it's a bit pointless to worry about high-speed black markets trading in signed tokens when the current most common alternative is a popup with an "I promise I am over 18" button. If society agrees some things should be difficult to access if you're underage, then we can definitely do better than that as a solution.
Germany has a system in their ID cards that allows anonymous age verification. No one uses it but it’s a technical marvel in my opinion.
The site asks for specific read permissions and the user can decide if he wants to grant them.
One of these permissions is age verification.
You put the phone on the ID card and there is a cryptographic proof that the user connecting to the site is in possession of an ID of a person above 16 (which he of course could have stolen).
So it is technically totally feasible to have good data privacy AND age verification.
It's hardly an age verification if it just requires the bearer to have an adult's ID card.
You borrow your friend's card, or you "borrow" your parent's card, or you pay someone who sees this market opportunity.
I think it's ridiculous how the lawgivers are telling the companies to just nerd harder, but they're definitely going to have to nerd harder than that.
yeah, “technical” is not the right adjective, rather the marvel (to me) is the fact that a government managed to deploy a privacy friendly electronic ID system based on sound cryptographic principles.
it’s a marvel because, well, as you put it, there’s all this bureaucracy and when I first discovered it was implemented and every single new electronic ID has this capability since a couple of years, my jaw dropped.
But fully agree the process and the backend itself are not very usable at the moment.
Maybe my expectations around government digitization are too loo though.
this is the same argument as "why have government id cards, someone could just use a fake beard and use their older classmates id". Any system allows for some gaps, similar to how creditcard transactions make transactions safer but on either side of that transaction there some "insurance" and some leeway if someone really wanted to.
in person? sure, that's harder, but we're talking about online services, right?
many times verification is simply uploading a photo, GenAI can make a nice fake ID.
are these id verification sites linked to government databases? for usual KYC it's enough to save the photo and do the minimal sanity check, no need to phone home an ask Big Brother.
...for the internet is a perfectly sane question. There are good reason we don't have those as well and these reason vastly outclass ineffective user protections.
Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.
Lies every parents tell themselves. Either they will watch porn at age 11 at school or at a friend, or you isolate them from society and they resent you forever.
You can't control every aspect of your child's real life or online activities, that's naive and I don't believe you actually have children, let alone teenagers.
Whether GP can control their kids or not it's besides the point, which I think lies with:
> Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form.
And in fact it's not a "disgrace", it's outright dangerous, a ready half-step to totalitarian control. Regardless whether one trusts their current government or not, it is a threat to democracy and freedom that can be activated by any later regime.
Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.
At that point, what if parents just let their kids borrow their driver's licenses to use social media? There's no technical solution to bad parenting.
The only reasonable solution that doesn't infringe on privacy is to give parents the tools to limit their children's internet use, and presume, outside those bounds, that people are adults.
of course there's no perfectly privacy preserving solution for this, but ... zero-knowledge proofs have come a pretty long way.
if I understand correctly it's possible to give 16+ people tokens and then they can make the signups (transactions with these tokens) and then check that the transaction is valid (that it came from some valid token without knowing which token), while also making sure that folks can't just fake spend someone's tokens -- this is how the new Monero version is going to work after all.
Of course as others mentioned trading identities (tokens) is trivial. (As I expect not-yet-16 olds will start stealing identities/logins of older people.)
Yeah, as you mentioned, token-sharing breaks this. I think any solution ultimately has to put the onus on the parents. And if the parents aren't responsible enough to pay attention to what their kid is doing online, then it's probably for the best that the kid have access to an online peer group over social media
You’re right that it’s possible, absolutely. The problem is the government would first have to want to do that. If they’re planning to hoover up social media usage data then they probably won’t.
> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts
This isn't necessarily true.
It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3].
I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5].
With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license.
Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age.
And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app.
Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be.
EDIT:
I see now from the article the following:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be.
Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it
Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school
every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
This seems like a different and fraudulent category of problem.
The point is that it's possible to create third-party authentication systems that require proving your age and the only extra thing the third-party learns is a verifiable age and the government does not get any information at all.
All this being said, I took a look at the article in question and saw this:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
So what could have been achieved with no invasion or privacy now seems like it must be achieved with an invasion of privacy.
aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name.
There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business.
I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this.
EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.
I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation.
That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere.
Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law:
- Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt
- Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal
- Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch)
BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously.
It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.
That but also privacy too. The damage is real, yes, but the negative effect on privacy will also be. (And the Aus gov is extremely far from any kind of principled actor in this to trust them with this experiment. Though I'm very curious of the results now that the experiment is underway anyway...)
Also, of course, quite ironic how everyone is worried about kids' mental health, while brain rot of the voting age population of "the West" had been ongoing for decades. And now the eggs of neopopulism have hatched. (One more unfortunate but quite interesting experiment.)
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat
For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them).
Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch.
I used to think that Zuckerberg was going to do the same with Facebook. But it seems like he was too focussed on the ad revenue and making the metaverse happen.
And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.
Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease
And in microstates too
A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities
A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time
So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends?
Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.
I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this
The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this?
Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.
Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians.
Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia).
Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
> voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids.
But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?
Australian news is fairly concentrated and is mostly owned by one family. A family that got a law passed forcing only Google and Facebook to pay pretty much only them.
> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned?
From real life? I know parents of middle school and up kids and they have first hand experience of the effects of social media and I’ve heard very little that’s positive.
I’m not saying the media aren’t trying to influence people but again, Occam’s razor: I really don’t think these parents need Rupert Murdoch whispering in their ear to be concerned about social media and kids.
This feels equivalent to “if you don’t like smoking, just don’t smoke”.
Like I said in my original post I don’t think this stuff is specific to kids. I think social media has an equivalent to “second hand smoke” that poisons society whether or not we individually engage with it. And yes, classrooms are full of it.
You'd presumably advocate for banning it for everyone, then? If so, might I ask how you'd define 'social media'? Presumably Facebook counts. Does HN, or Discord?
I'm assuming you don't have kids? It's impossible to stop them, both on a technical and social level. You'd guarantee a destroyed relationship with your kids if trying to do so without their consent.
This describes the exact purpose of the law: to stop letting kids use those sites.
My very strict uncle was adamant that my cousins stay off Facebook when they were kids. They got on anyway. When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation. If he couldn't stop his kids from getting on, only the websites themselves can.
> My very strict uncle was adamant ... When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation.
These might be related. Of course kids will respond that way to severe strictness - it tends to happen with anything a parent acts that way about, whether it's social media, smoking, or simply hanging out with a particular group of people.
What is a definition of social media? If there will be another platform, that is not listed on banned platforms, will they add it to regulation later... And later again, another...?
Passing legislation to “protect the kids” is politically easy. Bans are simple. Much more effective, IMO, would be to legislate the way social networks behave. Stop their most addictive patterns. Adults are just as susceptible as kids in my experience. If there needs to be anything kid specific, perhaps a block on using the service during school hours, or only for X hours a day.
>Much more effective, IMO, would be to legislate the way social networks behave. Stop their most addictive patterns.
We are less likely to change behavioral pattern after that period though, like we probably won’t see someone start to smoke at 45. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible of course, but past that age it looks like brains are already on track to become old reactionaries and generate complaints about how things used to be better before.
Which are? While it's easy to say things like "oh, infinite scroll is addictive" or "autoplaying videos are addictive", those are only the most obvious ones; (social) media addiction comes in many forms. Old Reddit didn't have infinite scroll and you had to click to open items, but would you argue it wasn't addictive anyways? IRC style chat, news groups and forums didn't have any of the obvious dark addictive patterns we associate with harmful social media nowadays, but we still whiled away the hours on them regardless.
I don't think it'd be as straightforward as banning certain practices. Besides, it'd be a game of whack-a-mole since for every legislation they'll find a way around it, or make it so that the users clamor to bring it back - take the EU privacy directive, it told companies they needed user permissions first. But they - the companies, not the EU or the laws - implemented it in the most obnoxious and harmful way possible to spite their own users and hopefully annoy them so much that they would either just hit accept, or vote the lawmakers out in favor of more economically liberal people.
i find it unfortunate that just because the ‘masses’ are on the internet now, everyone wants to play nanny and govern exactly how you design your website
In my experience, the ads are the _least_ harmful parts of social media. It's the regular accounts that are causing FOMO and mental health issues by displaying unrealistic lifestyles that the majority of people won't ever achieve.
That's only one fragment of social media though, it's not helpful to focus on this part of social media alone; another big one is the rhetoric hidden in otherwise normal / legitimate content that seems to be a nontrivial factor in a hard shift to the right, politically.
Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software.
Honest observers will look back on the anti-social-media movement as a moral panic. It isn't so much that social media is good, it's that the proper attitude toward new, scary things is to integrate them into your life in a healthy way rather than banning them.
And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok
> Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software.
This sounds a lot like "Governments should not be in the business of telling tobacco companies how to design cigarettes." Social media use is a problem for developing brains. I'm not saying I like Australia's plan, but, like the person you're replying to, I like the spirit of it.
> And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok
You realise children can legally do neither, right?
Government should be in the business of improving citizens lives. As another commenter said, left to their own devices companies would still be using leaded paint everywhere if it was 1c cheaper per gallon. I’ve grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
I would say that it depends on the exact details of regulation being discussed, not just the target.
For instance, you could propose a regulation that says that any type of gambling with any wager, whether using real currency or fictional, for any age range, should be illegal. I think most people would consider that to be unreasonable.
You could also propose a regulation that says that companies cannot collect personal data on individuals for advertising purposes unless that individual is directly engaged with that company as a customer. This would hopefully render illegal Facebook's "shadow profiles"[1] that collect data on non-customers. While more controversial, I'd say that this would still be supported by most people you'd meet, while still falling into the category of "the government protecting people from Facebook".
Do you not see the difference between “my teenager is moody” and “depression”? Using minimizing language here helps no one.
I agree that there should be more formal research into the effects of social media but as a parent I see concern about the effects of social media in conversation with other parents and teachers all the time. It is something we all witness in our own lives to some extent or another.
“We should let this run rampant while we investigate it fully” and “we should block this while we investigate it fully” are both valid viewpoints. And if voters want the latter it only makes sense for the government to be responsive to that.
It's very hard, maybe impossible, to answer the question of whether social media harms people. It's like asking if TV, video games, etc harm people. Maybe -- but I don't trust the studies and at any rate, these are things people should decide for themselves and their families.
Facebook's internal documents showed that on 11 of 12 body image issues, Facebook was helpful to more teens than it was harmful to [1]:
> For example, lots of people rely on the reporting around the Frances Haugen leaks from inside Facebook to argue that “Facebook knew” that Instagram causes “body image issues” for children (and then most people leapt to the belief that the company then ignored and downplayed that finding). But, as we noted, the actual study told a very, very different story. As we pointed out at the time, the study was an attempt to do the right thing and understand if social media like Facebook was actually causing negative self-images among teenagers, and the study found that for the most part, the answer was absolutely not.
> It looked at 12 different potential issues, and surveyed teenaged boys and girls, and found that in 23 out of 24 categories, social media had little to no negative impact, and quite frequently a mostly positive impact. The only issue where the “negative impact” outweighed the “positive impact” was on “body image issues” for teenaged girls, and even then it was less than one-third of the teen girls who said that it made it worse for them. And the whole point of the study was to find out what areas were problematic, and which areas could be improved upon. But, again, in every other area, “made it better” far outranked “made it worse.”
Next, face filters are actually good for teenage self-esteem, just don't put mirrors in your house, or onlyfans... where women find the real mental glowup.
Among other things, there is solid evidence that the move toward gambling in the US has been a disaster. This is a topic that's fairly easy to study in objective terms.
The evidence for social media harming people is highly disputed and, I would say, largely unconvincing. For one thing, it relies on self-reported subjective well-being.
Sports gambling is nothing compared to Dave and busters or Chuck E. Cheese’s tickets. We hook our kids of disgusting gambling behavior (legally?). No one cares about this and wants to go after sports betters instead.
God damn boot lickers all over this thread. I’m so glad to not live anywhere near that godforsaken island.
> I've grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
This is sneering, where you don't respond to a particular poster's point, but instead attack an unrelated (and even fictional) group of people based on something you don't like, or an attitude that you subjectively perceive to be common. Precisely zero people in this thread have made the claim that "any regulation is bad regulation", and in fact the person you responded to specifically called out drugs and gambling as things that they would be open to regulating.
Sneering is against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), boring, unenlightening, not intellectually gratifying, and degrades the quality of the site. Please don't do it.
Ctrl-F for "sneer" - or just read the guidelines, as you should have before posting, and clearly did not:
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> I for one find dismissing a thought by pointing to the big board of rules to be boring, unenlightening and not intellectually gratifying. But that’s just me.
You did not read the rest of my comment, then, which pointed out why sneering is bad. Or maybe you did, because you quoted it, but then chose to forget what you quoted?
Separate from the enumerated rules, it's pretty obvious why this kind of behavior - both in your original comment, and your reply - is generally anti-intellectual, and better suited for Reddit than HN.
If you're not going to follow the guidelines, and going to act in such a hostile and shallow manner, then perhaps you should go somewhere else.
> [EDIT: removed a snarky reply, need to remind myself not to engage with off topic trolling]
Reminding you of the HN guidelines that you repeatedly and blatantly violate, and calling out your hostile, dishonest, emotionally manipulative, and anti-intellectual behavior, is not trolling.
The only one engaging in off-topic trolling, by bringing up fictional positions that nobody adopted, is you.
You realize that video slots, financial software, HR software, legal software, educational software and MANY more all have some amount of regulatory compliance, right? Do you think social media is special somehow and should just get a free pass when aspects of it have been shown to be potentially dangerous?
I do. Social media is how we communicate with each other - governments should tread extremely carefully.
It is not governments job to ensure that certain viewpoints are not expressed or that people stay ideologically influenced by the views of other people.
I agree with you that changing the behaviour of the networks would be better, but what actions does a state like Australia really have here?
If they just say, "change", it must be backed up by a threat -- "we will fine you" or "we will ban you" are, I think, the most obvious threats available to a state.
But fines can be tricky to exact across borders, especially with bigger states, and if Australia says "change or we'll ban you later", the networks may play chicken and deal with it later, when the threat is real.
Starting with "you're banned" means it's painful now, and it's on the networks to prove they've changed and win a way back in, if they care. They might suddenly be willing to listen to how they need to change to get back in, and get that work done.
I'm not really in favour of bans on access to information or networks of people communicating, but a(n effective) ban does seem like a potentially effective tool to motivate action, even if it lacks nuance and doesn't solve the real problems.
I say "an effective" ban there because, come on, if it's just an age verifier then teenagers will figure it out and the whole thing is toothless, not ruthless.
Are they going to use some kind of video verification (which is just some AI/ML guessing the age based on the video?) and usual signals (ie. if the user likes too many stuff that kids like they will be flagged, and their account suspended)?
Well, I guess it will lead to kids getting a bit better at asking older folks for help.
Good luck with that, these companies weight more than most countries. Meta &co won't disclose their secret sauce and/or change their algorithms because a small country asked politely.
Social medias are like petrol, we're addicted and they provide way too much power to the people controlling them, we all know what the right moves are but nobody will pull the trigger.
What is their responsibility and what are they doing that is so insidiously addictive exactly? Endless shitposts by your friends for you to scroll-through is that the fentanyl of the internet?
To me this just seems like they're trying to get some control over what people are exposed to and to find out who's doing what.
If you’re tempted to think “this isn’t worth it, too hard to enforce without affecting something else”… read “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. There is very real, irreparable harm being done to young people, and it merits trying to make it right, not just surrendering to it.
Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal. If a government wants to make this possible, given they know everyone’s birthdate, they could.
I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
Reports that I read on conventional media sites often summarize government reports, but they do so incorrectly. And when I go and read the government reports, they present a much more balanced picture than the summaries would suggest. In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
I know it's popular now to say that social media is the root of all evil, but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16. Just a few years ago, this was a concern presented as 'screen time', but I had similar problems there. There's no real evidence to suggest that looking at a screen is the problem...the much more difficult and interesting problem is what you're doing when you're looking at the screen. There's a similar dynamic in play with social media, I think.
For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
> In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
Thank you for bringing this up. I was one of those 'marginalised' kids who didn't relate to my real life surroundings so much. The internet was like an escape for me, where I was able to meet many close friends with similar interests on social medias like Twitter and Discord. Not to mention, free internet access in general taught so much about the world, developed my passions and helped determine what I'm now studying and planning to pursue as a career.
If social media was banned when I was younger, it would have made me worse off for sure. And if there were internet/device restrictions more broadly, like I'm often seeing suggested, it would have been absolutely devastating for me. My life would have turned out completely different, in a bad way.
On a site like HN, I would have expected there to be much more people who also had the same experience as younger me with the internet and social media. But for some reason, most of the dominant sentiment here seems to consider social media as a cancer, with no nuance. I'm not sure why they do, but I wish that these people would consider the experiences of people like me.
>On a site like HN, I would have expected there to be much more people who also had the same experience as younger me with the internet and social media.
The majority of people who actively engage in discussions here are from generations older than ours (I assume we are similar in age) and hence are mostly unable to relate to our experiences.
It seems plausible that social media is part-cause, part-symptom of a larger shift away from "real" socialisation. I don't have any scientific evidence for it, so feel free to debate. In general in doesn't seem like a controversial opinion to notice that how we are, socially, has changed over time, probably not for the better. It might be that it's hard to pin down one major cause, because the whole system is moving in tandem.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
The author mentioned by GP is currently working on a similar questions collecting, reviewing and categorizing known literature in these open access documents [1][2]. I suggest you take a look if you are interested in the topic.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
Well, I would say no. But to have a meaningful discussion we need to first agree on what is meant here with "social media". Clearly, this law has been passed with the intent to affect Meta / ByteDance / Reddit and similar companies with a business model that hinges on capturing as much attention of their users as possible, which is very different from HackerNews. Most accusations to social media begin bad are towards of the former type.
> but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16.
From [1], it seems to me that there is a non-negligible amount of literature that has been accumulating, that could be used to justify the ban. Though, Australia is not a technocracy (I hope), so I would say that there is also a certain degree of "purely social" reasons why they might want to curb the access of social media companies to their youth.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use
Try spending an hour a day on tiktok (average tiktok user screen time) and 30 min a day on instagram (average ig user screen time) for a year and report back. This shit is crack cocaine for kids
I'm getting a 502 error trying to access the original content. It doesn't appear to be a scientific study, but rather a testimony from a Facebook executive talking about how they disregarded user safety in the development of algorithms that increased engagement. That's not quite what I'm looking for, though. I'd like to see something examining the effects of those behaviors on the population.
I will say that the lengths the executive goes to to compare social media with tobacco degrade the quality of the argument in my opinion; science tends to ask the question and then seek the answer. Arguments like this seem to start with the answer (it's like Big Tobacco) and then construct the argument accordingly.
> I'd like to see something examining the effects of those behaviors on the population.
In the testimony, they explain it:
We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.
Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco’s bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs.
Parents should be more responsible. That's it. This measure is, potentially, deeply ingraining the (terrible) idea that the State is responsible instead, so when all these young kids have children, they, just as their parents, will lack the ability to take responsibility and make their children more responsible by proxy, and so on, and so forth. It's a never ending cycle that is perpetuated by not tackling the problem at its real source. And let's not forget how measures taken in the name of security are oftentimes actually made to deprive us of our privacy.
The difficulty is co-ordination. My job as a "responsible parent" is much more difficult if I have to fight prevailing social norms and my kids perceive they are being excluded from conversations and arbitrarily cut off from their peers.
The social media ban is similar to the logic behind gaming limits in China. The idea is that while the controls themselves are easily circumvented, it gives everyone an excuse to do the right thing.
Parents don't have infinite "control tokens". I only have time & energy to put my foot down about a limited number of things. It is much easier to establish conventions around responsible behaviour if the whole community is behind it.
I am OK with this ban for the same reason I'm OK with tobacco sellers being not allowed to sell to under 18s.
This, I would go so far as keeping kids from social media is in conflict with (arguably) one of the most important jobs parents have which is getting kids into social interactions.
(E.g. by teaching them good manners so others will play with them)
>I am OK with this ban for the same reason I'm OK with tobacco sellers being not allowed to sell to under 18s.
And yet almost anywhere in Europe this ban is completely ineffective as the kids who start smoking get their hands on the cigarettes regardless. It only is a VERY minor inconvenience until they grow 18.
How does a parent compete with trillion dollar corporations that hire psychologist, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to make their apps highly addictive?
Being honest here because just telling parents to deal with a societal ill seems very shortsighted and comes from an immense place of priviledge.
I’m sure the same argument was made about tobacco? If you want your children to not smoke tobacco, just be a better parent. How dare the state prevent children from purchasing tobacco? The state is not your parent!
For network effect products (social media, drugs, and alcohol), the easiest solution is in fact to use the government to ban the sale of said products to minors. It’s a coordination problem that’s bigger than the family unit.
On the surface it seems very similar to a book he previously worked on, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is also full of poorly researched pop science that confirms biases people already had.
Yes! That blend of information and humour is the only podcast format worth my time, to be honest.
There's another podcast with Michael Hobbes called Maintenance Phase that I also enjoy when I have time to listen to it. Fen-phen in particular was something I hadn't really heard of before and reading about it after their episode on it was just fascinating.
> Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal.
Only if preserving privacy is the goal and I'm sure we both know it isn't.
I guess it will become self-fulfilling if everyone denies that there are privacy friendly options. Legislatures globally are starting to take this seriously so chances are it's happening one way or another.
The information theory problem is how to do so without creating a government ledger of every platform that every person uses, and a government kill switch to disable any platform the government doesn’t like.
Indeed, the challenge is already resolved in Europe by eID/EIDAS in a privacy respecting way, so the technology exists and it's already proven on a large scale.
My issue with this idealistic and understandable perspective is that it completely ignores all historical precedent in the modern age. That is to say: if you think the government is going to use this as anything other than an opportunity to turn all those little dots on the GPS tracker into fully-authenticated names and profiles they can keep tabs on 24/7, I have a bridge to sell you.
And if you think the third parties they contract out the tracking to won’t sell that info/access for profit, I have some magic beans as well.
I support keeping kids protected. I’m just not naive enough to think the current governments of the world have any interest in achieving that goal while maintaining any semblance of privacy for their citizens.
> is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal
I'm genuinely curious, is it? I don't know enough to be sure one way or the other, how you'd do it with some kind of private/public key thing or whatever. Can anyone here provide a quick example?
And I'm assuming it would involve some kind of code generated on the spot just for you, so somebody couldn't just post a code on the internet for all teens to use.
Frankly I want Australia to go ahead with this law so the rest of us can have a test case for it. If it works well we can copy it with tweaks. If not, then we know to seek other options.
What do you even mean by "work". You live in a fantasy land if you think the government will say we expect outcomes A, B and C from this law and will repeal or adjust it if all outcomes aren't met in 3 years. It's either a power grab or lobbying as others have suggested.
SERIOUSLY! Is anyone claiming that childhood depression and suicide will go down to some range after this law is put in effect? Of course not. Will grades go up? "Government says I can't use social media, guess I'll study, go to sleep on time, and become a productive worker." - Average Australian kid? Will the number of sextortion caused suicides (in the <16 bracket) go back to 0 from 1 to the glory days of 2021 when social media didn't exist (nope, because he was 17 when he died and that was last year). Will the number of girls being sextorted for cash decrease? (reading this [1] you can just ask and they'll tell you, that's great, also it's the general sentiment between students that social media should be banned, another big win! Isn't it convenient when reality bends to ideology.) How exactly can you measure this? Is there a counter of the number of <16s who have seen porn/gore on social media and became too misogynistic or too autistic (or too much of a gay, trans, pedophile, brainrotted, degenerate, debauched, profligate, libertine, licentious, effeminate, wanton, vicious, perverse, recreant, lascivious, unrīht sodomite) for the government's taste? Anything more than a vague sense that cyberbulling will go down and irlbullying will go up a bit? probably Who knows, who cares! We allegedly have vague public sentiment! So grab away!
It's blindingly obvious that this ban can't and won't change <16s habits past switching from their favorite app to whatever their friends are using now.
During COVID times the Australian government pressured all local media to censor criticism of the government's COVID measures. Regardless of how valid or invalid you consider the dissent, it was still dissent being suppressed.
"Ban social media for everyone because it might be bad for some kids" is as fragile as an argument as "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one."
Well, "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one" has always been the law in my country, and it has worked out extremely well. There has never been a mass shooting here, ever.
This is a trend in lawmaking in Australia, and it's seriously damaging. It's basically written so the Government's Minister of Communications gets to decide who to directly target (or not target) with the law.
Basically allows them to arbitarily apply the law to some parties and not others, with no right of appeal. That does lead to potential constitutionality concerns, but it would take years for it to be struck down if so, if a service is affected and eventually gets it before the High Court.
By electing personable but mediocore, sometimes even incompetent, MPs over the intelligent but aloof candidates.
Someone or some committee, somewhere, still has to actually work out all the details, and if it’s not done in Parliament, because the average MP literally can’t grasp even half the agenda items, it has to be done elsewhere.
Edit: And even that is probably being too optimistic, I’ve heard of MPs who can’t even remember the key facts and figures from the last 100 executive summaries they’ve read. Let alone any detail within the reports whatsoever.
I started losing faith in democracy since Brexit. It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar.
People making “protest” votes without bothering to understand the consequences, single issue voters, young people who don’t even bother to vote, dumb/racist/misogynist voters…
Democracy only works if voters take it seriously, only if media is at least reasonably honest/competent etc. Across the world, this is not the case today. Britain, U.S, India, Australia …
Representatives democracy also only works if representatives take it seriously too. Much (if not most) elected ones serves their personal agenda before the voters interests, let alone those of who can’t/don’t vote.
There’s also no universal _Truth_ that someone can grab entirely and as you noted information is essential but humans can’t be omniscient and you always miss something.
- "If others players cheat, I would loose by following the rules"
- "all i know is I know nothing".
Those two reasons explain why abstention or white/protest/defence votes can be fact based with a logical reasoning IMO.
> Democracy only works if voters take it seriously
Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible?
Im afraid you seem to have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to democracy. The whole point of it is that everyone, including people you disagree with, get to have a say. Calling people names like dumb and racist is just a crass result of disagreeing with somebody, and then extrapolating their entire personality based on an opinion.
Democracy works when everyone has the choice to vote, and excercises that choice. If 70% of the population suddenly voted to extradite all people with dark skin to Africa, under the rules of democracy you would need to accept that choice as correct and support it. If you decided to say the result was racist and that it shouldnt be carried out, then you are diagreeing with democracy full stop. In that situation you may as well just have a dictatorship, as what it boils down to is one person thinks everyone else should do what that person thinks is right.
If you feel that people should support and agree with what you think is right you need to do the same to everyone else in the world, including people whose opinion is drastically different from your own. Even if you feel it is wrong.
Calling people names and belittling their peronal opinions and judgements is only further sowing seeds of division and hate.
I was working in Mississippi during 2016 election. I met many people who point blank told me they will not vote for Clinton, just because she is a woman (there are a million reasons not to vote for Clinton, her gender is not one of them). What should we call such people?
Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible?
How did you deduce that from my comment? Just one day after Brexit, tons of people regretted voting to leave - lots of them admitted they didn't take the vote seriously, they thought others would vote to stay, so their vote wouldn't matter. A serious voter would have voted on the merits of staying or leaving the EU, not because they were angry at some politician or some other policy <-- This is what I meant when I said "Democracy only works if voters take it seriously", I don't know how you deduced that I want everyone to vote the way I want them to.
> It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar.
It's definitely a problem when you have a huge segment of the population that is ignorant and easily misled. Just look at the last US election.
There are definitely better systems, but people are far too attached to the status quo and find it far easier to dismiss proposed solutions rather than work to improve them.
> He says the legislation is just an under defined word salad
This might be on purpose. I've heard many say online that this law is sold as "save the children" but is designed to be used to get everyone to provide ID when they go/public/message online.
> He can’t even advise if some video game developers he represents’ multiplayer games are exempt from the ban
Bad for video game dev's business, and great for lawyers! The interpretation of the law will get clarified by many lawsuits (costing businesses a lot).
>I've heard many say online that this law is sold as "save the children" but is designed to be used to get everyone to provide ID when they go/public/message online.
Because this was attempted already, for example with the UK "porn ban" law. And Australia is one of the few countries that are even more batshit insane when it comes to policing and controlling its own population, and possibly the only country where such a law could pass now.
I haven't read it, but if it follows their previous efforts it will say what they want to happen (which is: get kids off social media), without saying how it will be done. Until the discussion this bill generated the "get kids off social media" meme had fairly broad support. In the currency of the pollies, this translates to "vote winner". Australia has already banned mobile phones at schools, and that looks to be a achieved roughly what everyone though it would. Maybe they expected this to go the same way.
It hasn't. Now the idea has been floated (and the bill passed!) discussion has inevitably turned to "how do we do this". It was the mental heath professionals (of all people) that first voiced objections. Apparently, social media is the main way kids connect with them. Which is kinda obvious if you think about it, because either the family or school seeks help on their behalf, or it's the family / school that's the problem in which case they need to seek help without them knowing.
Next, when it became obvious they were going ahead, where the discussions on how it would be implemented. To give you an idea of how that's panning out, the minister has said kids won't be prosecuted for using social media and just recently said the federal government ID schemes won't be used. Instead the minister said "the platforms will use their existing mechanisms".
If that happens it could end up being a nothing burger. The big platforms already have checkboxes asking "are you over 16" or whatever.
Regardless, they have passed the legalisation now, and the election is coming up soon. It's effects, if any, won't become evident for a year or two. That means they will be able proudly point to it during the election and say "look what we have done for the kids". As one prime minister explained show particularly bad decisions he made at the time "it was just retail politics".
"He can’t even advise if some video game developers he represents’ multiplayer games are exempt from the ban"
There are a lot of issues with this legislation, but I'm not sure this is one of them. Games like Roblox are so exploitative, they're probably worse for children than most social media.
Roblox already filters out a lot of words, including links (to social media and whatnot especially). They filter so many words they may just shut down the chats entirely.
The OP article didn't link to the law text and the above poster didn't hint at what's ambiguous, so it's not clear that that's bad. It's also possible that the game companies are doing something wrong and engaging in wishful thinking/trying to find a technicality through which they can argue the law doesn't apply to them. c.f. premium loot boxes i.e. gambling.
This website has long ago lost whatever “techno libretarianism” it ever had. It’s so full of bootlickers. I have no idea why HNs userbase is mostly excited about this.
I think it grew up and had kids. The angsty-teen “I won’t do what you tell me” mentality starts to seem pretty counterproductive after a certain level of maturity is reached.
I picked street fighter because you don't interact with your opponent other than fight him (I haven't played the last game though, maybe that's changed).
I have to strongly agree here. Video games are not free from the social media problems that we are trying to free ourselves from. We also have parents and close family that have been caught in outrage nets, and who knows when, if they will ever be free? We know the pipeline for right-wing grifters.
Who doesn't have any taters in the family these days? A literal human trafficker and pimp who has been in prison is giving advice to our youth in droves. More than you will ever know. My family members stopped talking about it, and started complaining about how we can't talk about things anymore once they discovered that outside of their bubble people know what these monsters/grifters actually do.
Here in Austria in fourth grade kids take a little test for their bicycling skill. Not that it matters much in a car-centric country, but people forget that cycling, even in company with a parent, give kids the chance to learn the necessary traffic rules. Why not have something similar for social media or as the problem seems to be general conduct in social media, educate the kids and give them better ways to raise the alarm when things to bad. Just banning kids won't help them much.
Here in Australia we teach kids real bicycling skills like how to socially share bets with their friends on the Sportsbet app for Tour de France 2025.[1][2] Thankfully this bill doesn't restrict Australian kids from learning these important life lessons every few minutes within a 10 hour long loop of Baby Shark.
You're being facetious but I genuinely think it's a good idea to normalise drugs. I believe that part of the problem with drugs is that they're considered forbidden, so if you share my viewpoint then it's not too dissimilar to the problems with social media or other addictive-but-bad-for-you products.
We socialize here, just last month I read someone's comment about life in the Canadian country-side and realized he's the brother of a Youtuber I'm watching for years. The same happens on any other social platform be it in the internet or real life.
The problem I see, are networks that are financed mainly by ads - so they have the incentive to keep engagement artifically high and spy as much as possible.
But "banning social media" does not ask that question.
It's a bit difficult to tell from your comment what you meant by "Not that it matters much in a car-centric country". Do you mean that Austria is "car-centric"? Or that it isn't?
I grew up in America, Colorado to be more specific, and rode a bicycle all over my neighborhood (where there wasn't that much traffic) as a 7-12 year-old. Later, I biked to work in Chia-yi, Taiwan, where there was a bit more car traffic and then still later I did so from Mountain View to Palo Alto, when there was still more. In all cases, I found it very useful to be familiar with traffic rules!
> as the problem seems to be general conduct in social media
is that the problem? I'd have thought the problem is more about the ill effects of social media on children, not the children's behavior on said social media.
Hen or egg? To make it worse, for some it's simple in their nature to show some degree of anti-social behaviour. We all have to learn how to interact with others in a social manner, be it on the playground, school or internet.
'"Messaging apps," "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.'
So they tell us which social media is excluded, but not the definition of "social media" for what is included? Does anyone know how "social media" is being defined in this law?
'Under the laws, which won't come into force for another 12 months, social media companies could be fined up to $50 million for failing to take "reasonable steps" to keep under 16s off their platforms.'
So how is "reasonable steps" defined? The article claims 'Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.' So is a checkbox that asks "are you over 16?" 'reasonable'?
This is a genuinely relevant question given that HN could be easily argued to be social media. For the record, I too am concerned about social media impact and so on ( for good and valid reasons ), but this law does not seem that great at first glance.
I generally think that children's access to the internet needs to be more closely monitored. You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there, why do we allow it online? I have on a few occasions had to protect a child from an adult in an online group.
What concerns me here is how this will be enforced. The only way to implement this is with IDs to check birth dates, and some method to confirm you are the person on the ID. You could imagine this being consolidated into a government ID system to 'protect your data', and to mean you only have to validate once. These accounts will be permanently attached to real people, and I think it will have a chilling effect on free speech. It's all fun and games until the government of the day considers your speech as a threat.
One can see this being expanded too, so that you would need to provide ID to use the internet more generally. ISPs could be told to selectively deliver web pages from DNS based on your ID, which would be most effective on mobile devices and less so on wired networks. My ISP already blocks websites.
I think a more fundamental question is whether the nanny state should be telling you how to raise your children, what content they can consume and who they can interact with. Suddenly you find your children consuming content only from a Z-wing bias because the government of the day hates Y-wing politics.
> You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there
This applies to under 16 year olds though, not little children but adolescents. I would hope that every parent of teenagers allows them to talk to random people on the street.
Instead of binary it should be tiered, complete monitoring of online activity of child till say age 8, to gradually opening the circle till age 14-16. We do it for movies/games.
Good point. There was a technology shift in portability and cost which meant each individual got a personal computer. They went from the common areas to personal spaces like bedrooms.
Maybe a lot of issue could be resolved by just having a phone that has to be in a common space, using a technology like LiFi [1].
This is the most horrifying thing in all of this. People with a prison guard mentality are already thinking how to enforce the rules in an even stricter way. Rules that are violating freedom of information, one of the most basics Western freedoms. Yes, there are no repreciations for the violating them at first, the frog is getting boiled slowly, but give it a few years and people who let their child use social media will be treated as criminals and put in prisons. Everything "for the sake of children."
No it isn't; children have always been able to borrow the same books from libraries as adults, read the same newspapers. Just now much of the information doesn't live in books or newspapers.
Movies have ratings and entry to hall is restricted. Games have rating and ability to buy them is restricted. books allowed in school libraries is heavily curated and sometimes restricted by law or vested groups. It is illegal to sell R18 magazines to a minor.
Movie ratings are voluntary in the US. Restrictions on selling porn to minors are orthogonal to movie ratings. It's generally legal for a theatre to sell a ticket for a PG-13 movie intended for 15-year-olds to a 12-year-old who hasn't received parental permission. Most theatres would refuse to sell the ticket, and most parents wouldn't let their 12-year-old child go to a movie theatre alone, but the bulk of the responsibility of preventing children from watching inappropriate movies falls on parents and guardians.
Banning children from social media is like banning children from movie theatres. A ban should consider that (1) different restrictions are appropriate for different ages of children (e.g. 12 vs 15), (2) depending on the country (e.g. the US with the First Amendment to the Constitution), children may have information access rights that parents can take away but governments can't, and (3) children in unhealthy relationships with parents or guardians (e.g. transphobic/homophobic parents of LGBTQ+ kids) should be able to access some kinds of social media without letting their parents/guardians know.
The benefit of allowing one nerdy kid unrestricted access to the internet is often larger than literally hundreds of people “harmed” by that very same access.
Trying to kill the pipeline for creating the “hacker” mentality that folks here are supposed to have is supreme level bootlicking. I hope you eventually find it disgusting.
>immediately concerned with the leftist recruiting ring that social media had become, being compromised.
I've already trawled your internet presence enough to know you're an activist. you're revolting.
Experience deprivation is a very real thing. I grew up in a desolate rural area, circa the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.
Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.
The idea that social media is like a Meta commercial, all making new friends and video calls to smiling Grandparents, etc. is a fabrication, presumably one that a lot of HN folks have a vested interest in maintaining. Kids are lonelier now than they have ever been.
This has been one of the hard things to deal with working in tech. Tech has advanced so much but am I happier or more connected to people than my parents were at my age? Not really. I've had an existential crisis recently about what all this work I've been doing is for. Outside of work I've been using less and less tech and I think I've been happier (like today I have a physical cookbook and a couple handwritten recipes instead of using recipes on my phone).
I'd say human rights violation is a bit of a stretch - the negative impact of social media use on an adolescent's psychological well-being is well documented - so possibly even the exact opposite.
The internet today is a very different place from the 90's. I really hope your children don't have access to the sickest, shallowest, most addictive and most dangerous place on the net.
> Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.
Is that more or less of a human rights violation than preventing children from buying alcohol, preventing them from buying cigarettes, preventing them from buying pornography, preventing them from voting, preventing them from working full time, preventing them from entering into contracts, or preventing them from driving an automobile?
> The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.
I grew up in a wealthy very tech-savvy area, and most kids except the really geeky like me didn't get internet until the mid or late 1990s, so you weren't as "backwards" as you think. You would have still been on the bleeding edge to have internet in the early 1990s.
My guess is that BSDobelix was downvoted and flagged for implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles.
> implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles.
Please don't put words in my mouth, but I'm sorry if anyone "accidentally" misunderstood. What I meant was that 99.9% of teenagers have had one or more contacts with a paedophile via "established" social networks.
I apologize for making multiple incorrect assumptions and for falsely accusing you of saying things you didn't say.
I misinterpreted your original message as <queer kids will be cut off from non-queer kids> and <non-queer kids will encounter fewer groomers/MAPs>. Now I understand that your message was <almost all kids will benefit from being cut off from strangers on social media> in reply to <queer kids will benefit less or be harmed>.
> My thoughts immediately go to all the queer kids in rural areas who stand to be cut off from the only support networks they have
I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff), but if the article is correct then I find myself strongly in support (so-far...): my impression is that this is targeting the kinds of vacuous mass-market "engagement"-driven social-media services that us HN denizens aren't exactly fans of: Facebook, Instagram, the like. The article says that sites like YouTube and IM services are exempt.
> Messaging apps, "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.
-----
For an anecdote: when I was middle-school-aged and unsupervised on the net, the "mainstream" platforms of the day (AOL Groups, I guess?) were just as unappealing then as Facebook is today (fortunately I wasn't on AOL anyway) - instead I found my home in places you get to via IRC - or extremely niche phpNuke-then-phpBB sites: these places aren't run by companies, just basement-dwelling sysadmins so they'd be exempt I imagine, so it doesn't look like any harm will come to those kinds of places.
For those youngsters-that-dont-fit-in starting their journey of self-discovery, I think getting banned from Facebook is a good start. Who wants their parents (and let's be honest: it's only our parents on Facebook now anyway) to get notified about your joining a cybergoth meetup group.
...now if only we could ban everyone else off Facebook too.
> I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff)
The catch is, unfortunately, that our social media data trails make it all to feasible to detect which of us is on the spectrum using machine learning.
And which if our kids have what is vulgarly called "daddy issues."
And which of us are beginning to succumb to schizophrenia.
We've only begun to see the creepy dystopian consequences of centrally archived social media.
I'm torn here because I think there is very real harm being done with social media not just to kids but to adults as well but you should look at anything being "to protect the children" with extreme prejudice as it is likely just a power grab and way to reduce privacy. The saying "never let a good tragedy go to waste" comes to mind here.
Reminder that, often, that which is intended to be passed as a measure to enforce moral rules or increase security is actually a way to deprive you of your privacy.
I wonder if we should even call this social media at this point. More like interactive TV 3.0. All the feeds are heavily ad infested and “promoted” content appears from “infliences” .. some people shadow banned while others artificially boosted up your feed.
All designed to maximize your attention but also sway your opinion.
The social part of social media seems to have gone mostly by the wayside.
“Did you see the new dance this one kid did in Texas” like like, hashtag, loved it , repost, etc … not really building much of a social relationship, or perhaps it is and just seems a bit off to us older folks,
I've recently been teaching kids to code (in Aus) - 7 year olds already know about VPNs, and use them to circumvent various roadblocks to playing roblox!
You don't need any of those things to figure out how to install a VPN. My son had installed a VPN before he knew those concepts because a VPN mattered to him to circumvent region locks while knowing what folders are didn't.
If I think back to my own time in school I foresee kids teaching each other the latest circumvention technique.
It might be as simple as using VPN vouchers. Or sharing VPN accounts, or using someone's public VPN server. This is why it'll be so fun to see what they come up with, the kids that is. They're the true innovators, the hackers. ;)
It might be as simple as use of a certain service exploding, a service that has flown under the government radar. Discord for example might not be considered social media but you can turn it into social media using bots.
Which will probably work as well as most apps implemented by the Australian Govt; myNDIS, myGov, myMedicare etc etc etc. They are all trash. We do not have a good track record in this area.
Yes, because kids love when parents are all up in their social media accounts watching their interactions. What about parents who just buy their kids booze?
Yes, this is flawed legislation, and yes kids will find ways to bypass these protections.
But I think this is a step in the right direction. There is clear evidence of the harms caused by social media, especially for adolescents. We have to start trying things - albeit imperfectly - to get to a better place. We can learn a lot from the outcomes of this experiment.
The key feedback that was unaniamous from all the experts that managed to reply to the Government's 24-hour consultation period was that they all agreed a blanket ban is the worst way to approach the platform (they were all ignored by all but a few Senators).
An interesting part of the ban is that kids will be banned from Instagram, but sites like 4chan (and ovbiously anything on the dark web, which teens might now be more motivated to access) will be out of the reach of it...
World is divided by people who grew up with social media and people who didn't. I'd imagine there's already ample longitudinal metrics to extrapolate differences and draw conclusions between the two groups. The experiment's not really whether social media is bad for adolescents, but whether one can successfully legislate to reduce social media use among them. Not holding my breath.
We have taken such steps in many areas now, and it simply does not work. We can keep trying this old, tired method, but it does not work. I do not want ID verification for the Internet either, to be honest.
Interesting. My kids aren't allowed on social media, and they're happier and less moody than their friends who are addicted to it. They see it, and don't even want social media anymore because their friends spend so much time on their phones rather than being present and having real experiences.
I don't think I would wish social media on any child, though I believe it's a problem that can be solved not by more laws, but by better parenting.
Lol, guys.
Even in Russia, which is said to have a low level of freedom, the government has not yet decided to introduce identification in social networks by passport.
By the way, some restrictive laws in Russia, for example, blocking websites law, began with the need to protect children from "illegal content".
I was wondering how "social media" was defined. Anyone got a link to the actual bill?
From the article:
> "Messaging apps," "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.
Almost every "social" apps are basically messaging apps these days. What's the differentiating factor between banned and not banned? Having an algorithmic feed? So YouTube is not banned because its doesn't require users to log in to access the plaform? Can Instagram enable browsing without logging in (and disable some features except DM) to avoid the ban then?
Also, now kids can create YouTube accounts to use shorts as Instagram reels, community posts as Instagram Posts and subscribe to each other. But hey, that's not a "Social media" right?
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
(ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
(iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
And that is the entire point. You will only use the X state-mandated websites. You will only express positive opinions on there. You will not criticize the government under any circumstances. Glory to Arstozka.
What about Legacy idea? Can they still watch TV and read news papers? Isn't this a form of giving control to legacy media and traditionally powerful especially when in US their influence is decreasing?
I'm excited to see the outcomes. Hats off to Australia for engaging in this experiment.
One unique aspect of social media, as opposed to, say, porn, is it's reliance on network effects. Sure, maybe 25% of kids will use a VPN and log on, but if most of your friends don't care enough to spend their allowance on a VPN, then what's the point?
Ya that’s true. I guess I’m imagining the “25%” being pushed towards 4chan type environments, and perhaps then a subset of that towards more dangerous environments.
This was rushed through with a public comment period of 24 hours.
It's going to be a mess, while the spirit is well intentioned it has edge cases up the wazoo, foot guns galore, and stinks of back door government ID for adults.
Pretty much the only media outlet in Australia that stood up with questions and non fawning commentary was Crikey:
This was deeply rooted in traditional media ( Murdoch News et al ) in AU putting pressure on the Government in AU to take action against Facebook & Co. after the ceasation of payments for linking to news media.
for-profit media unapologetically uses what little influence they have left to smear their competitors, hence all the drivel: "think of the children / fear the evil russians!" about social media and "think of the copyright holders / fear the evil terminators!" about AI.
God wills it, ten years from now they will all be out of job. The publications will still be there, of course, but the shilling will be delegated to LLMs prompted by Bangladeshi youths for $5 a day, with a few meatsack editors to set the tone.
In the spirit of "Falsehoods programmers believe in"[1] for human ages:
* Not all people know their age.[2]
* Even if people do know their age they may not have any means to prove their age.[2]
* Even if people know their age, they may know their age only in a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, the documentation may provide an approximate age or use a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, they may know it to be incorrect.
* People may have multiple documents each nominating a different age.
* People may be reissued with new documents changing their recognised age.
* Even if the government tries to guess someone's unknown age, it's an inexact science and could be revised later.
It's vibes based - the definitions could cover almost any online service, but the Minister of Communications gets to decide who will be targeted.
They have zero detail on how to verify anybody's age. But massive fines if the tech companies fail. Basically the only reliable way to do it would be to ID everyone, but then they had to sort of mostly rule that out in a rushed amendment yesterday to get it past the Conservatives (Liberal/National Party) because they neeed their votes in the Senate.
So basically they're asking tech companies to come up with magical technology to perfectly know how old someone is without any identification.
I'm definitely not going to ID myself to go on social media. Then I'll just quit (in fact I've quit most social media already anyway due to the enshittification). Even a parameter linked to my real ID is not acceptable to me. And also, after social media, I'm sure other sites will start demanding more checks as well. It's a slippery slope.
Luckily I don't live in Australia but I find this a troubling development. Anonymity on the internet is necessary. Because it is much more permanent than the real world. Every little misstep can be dissected decades later.
I can’t get behind a ban because we’re fighting an unstoppable force: the connected future. This is the world we live in and kids will have to “evolve” to their new environment.
I think parents and schools need to change the role they play.
> I think parents and schools need to change the role they play.
It's not that I directly disagree, but honestly I don't think parents and schools have much of a fighting chance against companies like TikTok, SnapChat YouTube or Facebook. We need to create rules that prevent companies from employing addictive algorithms which locks users in cycles of endless mind numbing doom scrolling. Once the social media companies have changed their "algorithms" and recommendation engines or removed them entirely, then we can start talking about what parents and schools can do.
Kids are looking for community. Connections with other people who they share experiences with (and can make more experiences together). They're looking for others who see the world the way they do.
The solution is more face to face time with other families on a regular basis. Replace Facebook with actual faces.
This is not true. We have a technological tool to block all of that connected future if we want to. It's called "government" and it can even choose to destroy all landlines, jam all satellite signals en fire Rockets at satellites that want to fly over their land while connecting to people on the ground. This IS an option. Maybe not the best or simplest...
Or marijuana or cocaine. It’s super easy for the government to deny access to things people want by fiat, as evidenced by the fact that nobody does cocaine anymore.
What if the platform is not registered as a business in Australia? You can't fine it if it's not a legal entity there. Simply setup a php Facebook clone and host it in another country.
Just by blocking the network traffic. Plenty of countries do this with sites they don’t like for various reasons.
Yes VPNs blah blah. But it will be pretty hard to operate some rogue social site when you can’t sell any respectable ads besides maybe porn sites and malware, and are only accessible via VPN. Pretty high barrier to adoption for a brand new site.
By freezing bank transfers/disallowing any Australian companies (read: advertisers) from doing business with them? Depending on treaties, possibly by seizing assets in the company's home country?
The actual law doesn't fully rule it out (there was an amendment to kind-of add that but it's fuzzy so ID could still be part of it).
But it's basically unenforcable without doing ID, it's going to fall in a heap eventually. The Australian Governement talks big game in tech regulation but almost every single thing they do (like the 'eSafety Comissioner' with their truly extradorinary powers) fails because they are very, very incompetent when it comes to technology.
I think former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull accidentally summed it up (talking about encryption) when he literally claimed that "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia".
Make absolutely no mistake. The real reason why politicians push through these anti-social media laws is to prevent children from networking and discussing and sharing revolutionary ideas.
These laws are designed to prevent generations from establishing a baseline sociopolitical coherency and unity.
I was subject to a home firewall and computer use surveillance as a child for the exact same reason, because my cult guardians did not want me encountering unapproved ideas or networking with like-minded individuals who might weaken their ability to control and brainwash me.
I was treated as a criminal, and so my response was to educate myself deeply in how to succeed as a criminal. I learned to hack my imposed surveillance systems, and then hack websites on the web. I learned how to lie and manipulate authority in order to survive without compromising my internal compass. I collectivized with other hackers.
Is that the path we want every child subject to these bans to take? I fortunately have a moral and ethical foundation which led to me using my skills for good, but I am certainly capable of quite a lot of things that wouldn't be a net good for society, and I know how to get away with it. Perhaps we shouldn't teach a generation of repressed children these skills, and institutionalize them from a young age in opposition to society.
This is the exact same mechanism used to criminalize cannabis smokers. Smoking cannabis in my late teens and early twenties in a state where it was illegal led me to learning quite a lot about how to navigate the criminal underbelly of the world. The "gateway drug" rhetoric becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, enacted by the very people who lie through their teeth about their intentions.
Oppose these laws. Violently, if necessary. If you are a child, learn how to protect yourself online, familiarize yourself with security culture, and continue to safely and covertly network with other children online.
Form strong bonds. Collectivize. Create art, study politics and science. Make lasting, useful connections. Broadcast and distribute your opinions and demands of your governing bodies.
This is what being a child growing up on the internet is about. I owe everything in my life to my formative years on the internet. It was an escape hatch from my abusive home. I learned a lot, and formed precious memories joining and starting forums and chat rooms in my youth. I would probably be dead today without the web.
Attack the real problem. The techniques which certain social media sites use to manipulate and hook children and others are well-documented. Ban them. Make an example of their practitioners. The web that I grew up on did not have these problems.
Fuck Australia, and fuck every other person who dares to suggest that children should not be allowed to congregate safely online and be allowed to navigate society and culture according to their own compass.
I think it's safe to say that, in under-16s, cyberbullying and susceptibility to intentionally addictive social media algorithms are a bit more of a common problem than revolutionary activities. Any would-be Che Guevaras can put in the time arousing the working class in person until such time as they can grow facial hair.
Then we attack the systemic issues, instead of pushing through intentionally vague legislation. Some of the similar legislation being explored by multiple US states is frightening.
I personally lived in a very backwater state, surrounded by racist conservatives, and was raised hardcore Catholic by extremely abusive guardians. I owe every single ounce of my rationality to the web and the ideas and people I encountered there.
Facebook, etc are definitely terrible for kids. But the wording of these laws is intentionally vague, in order for these kinds of laws to be used according to the whim of the incumbent, as a tool of oppression.
The entire point is that I got to grow up with a wide variety of opinions and ideas from people across the world.
I have good friends all over the world today thanks to the web. We have influenced and helped each other over the years. We depend on each other. That's not a corner case.
> I got to grow up with a wide variety of opinions and ideas from people across the world.
You got to grow up with the vocal minority on the internet, in otherwords the 4% of the worlds population which is most extreme in their views and most arrogant in how they express them.
That is entirely an assumption on your part, one which reveals your inherent biases. My experience was not at all as you describe.
You have no idea how I spent my time on the web overall just because I gave you a glimpse into a single aspect of my intersectional experience on the web.
> You got to grow up with the vocal minority on the internet, in otherwords the 4% of the worlds population which is most extreme in their views and most arrogant in how they express them.
This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality.
> 4% of the worlds population are vocal on the internet.
Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete understanding of the internet.
> Anyone thinking they are being exposed to a wide range of people and personalities on the internet is very mistaken
I don't think you understand just how many people are on the internet. I get exposed to a wealth of different cultures and ideas, even moreso today.
Also, please refrain from devolving into insults and accusations of narcissism. Not only is that a textbook identity fallacy, but there is nothing narcissistic about simply pushing back against biased judgement.
> This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality.
Nope, no assumptions there.
> Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete understanding of the internet.
I'll give you this one, my percentage was out of date. The current percentage is estimated to be 10%.
> I don't think you understand just how many people are on the internet.
I dont think you understand how little are. 67.5% of the world currently have access to the internet, and the majority of that is intermittant and shareddevices in Africa and Asia. Thats many billions of people that do not even own a device with a web browser, let alone indulge in conversations with strangers on social media and forums.
> Also, please refrain from devolving into insults and accusations of narcissism.
There were no insults or accusations. I said your reply was Narcissistic, I did not say you were.
You keep reading what you want to in my posts to support your extremism and outrage. Please dont, nobody is accusing you of anything. You can calm down now!
> There were no insults or accusations. I said your reply was Narcissistic, I did not say you were.
Now you're just hiding behind pedantry.
> You can calm down now!
And now you're trying to act like I'm being emotional.
You're arguing disingenuously, more interested in trolling and escalating the negativity than finding common ground. When pressed to articulate your position, you turn to insults and deflection.
There is absolutely no reason to continue engaging with you.
Indeed, the US legal system has many assumptions that may not be applicable to other countries. Violating the US First Amendment right to access information is unconstitutional even if the only people having their rights violated are in the corner cases.
>The real reason why politicians push through these anti-social media laws is to prevent children from networking and discussing and sharing revolutionary ideas.
Thats a pretty extreme view to any normal person who didnt grow up on the internet.
EDIT: please stop editing your posts after posting, it makes them most difficult to respond to properly.
You're doing a lot of projection, engaging in such negativity after willingly replying to one of my comments, and then acting like I'm the one trolling you.
Rising up violently to protect my child's right to scroll mindless on TikTok for hours? No. Social media today is unrecognisable to the internet that you, or I grew up with.
Children will always network, and share ideas and form community. They don't need to do it on a platform designed to exploit as much of their attention as possible as a way to sell advertisements.
I think children should be able to congregate safely online. If you think a meta-owned platform is a good place to do that, I've got bad news for you.
I think a lot of my generation owes a lot to the internet during our formative years too, but the idea that Meta offers anything other than a curated stream of addictive ragebait nowadays is for the birds. Maybe this ban will encourage teenagers to hang out in less corporately owned spaces online. I can hope.
An outright ban probably won't work, but it sends a signal that perhaps society needs to use the internet better to be a benefit.
The problem is that the wording of these laws carry a common thread of intentional vagueness, such that the laws can be abused for ideological persecution and maintaining the status quo.
I'm all for directly banning certain practices Meta and others engage in, within scope. I'm completely opposed to ideological oppression.
I think there was a ton of bullying depending on what part of the internet you spent your time in, but importantly it was very easy to find inclusive, safe spaces.
Today, it is not as easy. This is probably part of why so many have moved to group chats and direct messages for online interaction in recent years.
Opposing a social media law “violently” is not an appropriate call to action. That said, the web of yesteryear and the way kids use social media today could not be any more different. Kids mindlessly scrolling through oceans of vanity, teen girls with more and more suicidal, being stuck in the high-school bullying social environment 24/7. The laws are a response to a real issue — especially as parents themselves get addicted / stuck in the same ways. They have kids and are rightfully fearful. I grew up in the same awesome web, but it sucks now, commercialized and tapped for every last cent it can produce.
> Opposing a social media law “violently” is not an appropriate call to action.
Every single ounce of freedom you enjoy today was won with bloodshed. There is nothing extreme about reminding your local legalized mafia who is actually in charge: the People. Your compromised governments work hard to condition you to think otherwise.
Direct political violence should always an absolute last resort, when every other realistic option has been exhausted. However, every freedom is ultimately backed by threat of violence, even when it isn't said aloud.
> The laws are a response to a real issue
They use a real issue as a vehicle for tightening the authoritarian ratchet. All good antidemocratic legislation is wrapped in legitimate issues. But what authoritarian governments such as Australia fear is the power of unification which the internet offers new generations.
It wasn't that long ago that Americans were calling TikTok a "Chinese weapon of war and mass indoctrination" and wanting it banned.
To say nothing of everyone wanting Section 230 repealed and the government to regulate social media, requiring a court order for moderation, banning "algorithms" or making social media entirely illegal. The attitude behind this is absolutely endemic across the "free world." Australia is simply a bit further ahead of the curve as far as turning the moral panic over pedos and groomers and Chinese mind control into authoritarian action. As soon as the new regime gets settled in the US I'm sure we'll see something similar. Musk has already made vague threats along those lines.
I know this is targeting social media but just pointing out that there is no evidence screen time is affecting kids development and pretty solid evidence that it doesn't have much effect at all.
"One also suggested we take a look at social media on its own because it’s a source of worry for many and we did not find anything special about this form of online engagement.”
It's a subset of what they studied. Surely a lot of screen time is spent on social media. They did not observe anything special about time spent on social media. A more in-depth study may yield more insight but there is no thread to pull on from this study. Only parents' misgivings.
(1) For the purposes of this Act, social media service means:
(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
(i) the sole or primary purpose of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‑users;
(ii) the service allows end‑users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‑users;
(iii) the service allows end‑users to post material on the service;
(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
(b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;
but does not include an exempt service (as defined by subsection (4)).
Note: Online social interaction does not include (for example) online business interaction.
Since "business interaction" is mentioned as an example of something that is not "social interaction" one might plausibly claim that "social interaction" should be interpreted quite narrowly, and then one could claim both that the primary purpose of HN is not interaction at all (it's a new aggregator) and that any interaction that does happen to take place in the comments is not "social" interaction but some other kind of interaction.
(It really does say "2 or more" rather than "two or more".)
Don't worry, this is performative law making. There's going ot be an election in March, probably called in January. So the government will probably return, then fix and alter this when they work out just how impossible it will be to enforce.
OR, everyone in Australia is going to have to prove their age to use social media, and TBH, social media ain't that great. It just may be the cold shower we all need.
Predictably, I see a lot of concern being expressed here about how this will be implemented and enforced. There is an underlying assumption, which seems fairly reasonable, that the government is going to use this opportunity (à la Louisiana) to overreach and require people to provide their identity to access these services.
One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this way? Political realities aside, is there a way for the government to set up an age verification service in a way that preserves privacy?
If so, the time is ripe for this community to put forward such a solution and advocate for it loudly. If current sentiment is any indication, social media age restrictions are going to go global and Australia is going to set the precedent for the rest of the world.
It is not possible aside from getting everyone an internet ID, which most will probably reject for good reason.
Governments should not get this power. This is the basic tenet that separation of powers is based on. The only measure that helps is to just take away the means.
I am uncertain it will go global at all or go very far even in Australia as there are at least some companies that try to benefit their customers. And there still is the private web anyway that isn't affected.
Australia should be made fun off for their attempts, it isn't their first rodeo.
With every passing year I can’t help but think Jonathan Haidt was right all along. I think this will be a very successful law in terms of positive societal impact. But I do worry about the negative repercussions of being able to ban means of practicing free speech. Australia already has a bad track record for that.
* It is illegal for a platform to provide children with a social media account, not for the child to create an account. Circumvention of this by the child is not illegal.
* No grandfathering - all accounts under 16 once this takes effect (which won't be until this time next year at earliest) must be deactivated.
* Maximum fine (per instance?) is 50 million AUD (about 32 million USD)
* The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).
I don't have a horse in this race but in my opinion a more graceful way to deal with this is to freeze the account until the under-16 is over-16 so they don't lose their friend connections, history, etc... The under 16 should have time to add a comment saying how to contact them otherwise. Discord group, etc... There must be a reason to remove the account that I can not see.
Could a possible solution there be to use the same language detection platforms used for detecting terrorist activity to also flag possible grooming for human moderator review? Or might that be too subjective for current language models leading to many false positives?
This is far too pat a dismissal of something which happens regularly. You can argue that it’s not frequent enough to justify this action or would happen anyway through other means but it’s a real problem which isn’t so freakishly rare that we can dismiss it.
I am not sure I meant to reply to you, to be honest. It is an issue but so far the solutions are terrible. Outsourcing parenting to the Government or companies is also meh. I am sure there are parents who know of ways to reduce screen time for their children, it ranges from installing a program that does not let you on a website or start another program until and unless this and that, or take the phone from the kid's hand and go for a walk or study, whatever.
Less good, more fun. To 'prove' that you were over 18 you had answer a series of multiple choice questions [1] about pop culture that most kids almost certainly wouldn't know. Pre internet, finding the answer was surprisingly hard without asking an adult. The main result was that 10 year old me knew a surprisingly large number of obscure facts of about US culture, like who Spiro Agnew was and that Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a monkey.
Eventually we found out that you could press some magic key combination to skip the question all together.
> The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).
That's unexpectedly sane from a law like this. Hopefully they can figure out some zero-knowledge proof of age. (But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids.)
That wasn't in the original bill and it was only amended to add that yesterday, because it wouldn't get past the Conservative (Liberal/National Party) whose votes they needed to ram it through Parliament with almost no scrutiny otherwise (the hastily drafted bill only having been introduced the Friday before the final sitting week of the year).
That's more of the sort of behavior one expects from legislators making broad surveillance apparatuses under guise of protecting children on the internet.
Questions about how this is going to be implemented and enforced from a technical and legal perspective are missing the point/benefit: this is about empowering parents and collectively changing behaviours.
"It's against the law so no you can't" isn't going to work with EVERY 14 year old. But it will work for many and hopefully that's enough.
I actually see this as potentially damaging to society. "It's against the law for you to use any website that lets you look at cat pictures and make any contact with anybody else" is so silly that kids are going to see right through that, and rightly not care about following it. So they're going to have less respect for the rule of law generally...
I'm very big on compentent laws, but also on just not having silly laws. It devalues the whole system...
(I would also wonder how many 14-year olds you know if you think this would work for many, but also I suppose that could be a cultural difference)
Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age).
Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
Reminds of the 'chilling effect' of measures of bygone decades.
My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening.
Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use?
Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.
> stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content.
Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.
They are planning to enforce access to these sites with the same mechanism.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/consultation-cooperation...
But it's the internet; for every one site that implements this, there will be a thousand that don't, and for every one that the government takes down, another thousand will pop up. And that's just the actual porn sites, there's millions of other ways to get access, be it websites, privacy-conscious apps, file sharing, etc. If people want porn they'll find it.
Of course, it being more difficult, technically involved, or otherwise shady will probably reinforce a message that it's not normal, because another issue is the normalization of porn to the point where people watch it in public. I'm also very aware I am just echoing the same thing an older generation has said about things like raunchy video clips on MTV, magazines like Playboy, movies with Marilyn Monroe, and painters painting a hint of ankle.
Well but that content is also distributed over this social media sites.
[flagged]
The parent comment suggested of the sort. There is obviously more porn on porn sites than on moderated social media platforms. Pointing out that some porn occasionally evades filters on Facebook for a couple days doesn’t mean social media sites and porn sites are fully equivalent.
> For me, social media is the worst thing we ever created.
Calling social media the “worst thing we ever created” as a comment on a social media site is deeply ironic.
I can’t believe how many commenters are assuming these laws will only apply to sites they don’t personally use. The amount of “good riddance” commenting from people inviting heavy handed internet ID checking regulation because they can’t imagine it would ever affect them personally is really scary.
So your argument is that hackernews is similar to TikTok and instagram?
I completely disagree.
The core of HN is not self promotion, narration, or comparison - the very things driving teen suicides up from social media use.
I further suggest most of the replies to my original comment are willfully ignoring the data the Australian govt is citing for these bans, and what psychologists worldwide are citing.
None of the discussion here so far even touches on a possible solution to a problem that is driving measurable deaths.
Instead we have a collection of false equivalence and abdication of social responsibility by big tech, which is fairly on brand for hn and frankly intellectually lazy from my perspective.
> Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media?
If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites, not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn.
Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want to socialise online. The effects will be similar to banning alcohol, it doesn't decrease demand, just pushes it elsewhere creating worse problems along the way.
See: perverse incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of...
Why is it 4chan and not WhatsApp groups?
The internet was wild before social media but somehow the weird stuff remained fringe before recommendation algorithms and the perverse incentives that emerged from recommendation algorithms and content creation meant that feeds became an on ramp to all kinds of nasty things
I'm not exactly a greybeard but I remember when happy slapping was a viral phenomenon but that seems pretty tame by comparison these days
4chan is a synecdoche representing all those fringe ~'social media' substitute sites; they'll soon be common knowledge in Aus, at least among the U16s..
Eh, not really. I'd consider myself a greybeard (not literally, but I am online since 90s) and everything is so much tamer now. It wasn't unusual to find open, unprotected and unencrypted sites with really, really weird stuff - that kind you only see on darknet today. Over the decades, everything became mild, normal, mainstream - which is IMHO bad and I blame the algorithms.
> How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
Adults do, and the OP's argument is that everyone (not just U16's) will be driven away by the changes. Being asked to provide ID may result in some just noping out or not signing up to newer services when they otherwise might have.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/03/hours-after-aussie-govt-...
If 16 year olds do indeed access pornography with such an amount of naiveté, there might really be a problem. But there is no indication of a problem, is there?
How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?
That's exactly why there's a suggestion legacy media are driving this.
It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
No, the argument is, the under 16 of today will be hooked on social media and will never read “classic” medias when they are older.
Absolutely nothing you describe will be affected by an internet ID. And it doesn't even "Help a little", it just makes many things much worse.
I think that’s the cover story (because I agree it’s extremely valid).
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).
This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup.
As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example).
Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).
This comes up on every single HN thread about the topic, but I don’t understand how people aren’t seeing the obvious abuse angle:
Create a market for anonymous age verification tokens. People pay $5 to someone to create an age authorization for them. 17 year old kid (who is old enough under this law) spends all day creating anonymous age auth tokens to sell to people who want them.
Entire system subverted with profit motive.
The next phase of the argument is to argue for rate limiting or extra logging, but the more you force that the more you degrade privacy or introduce unreasonable restrictions. “Sorry, I can’t sign up for the wiki today because I already used my quota of 2 government age checks today”. Still leaves plenty of room for 17 year old kids to earn $10 a day farming out their age checks.
The entire argument that anonymous crypto primitive will solve this problem is tiresome.
The same applies to effectively all possible solutions for age verification, no?
Even if you have a perfect mechanism, 17 years old can create real age-verified accounts and then sell the username and password afterwards. Selling age-verification tokens directly would likely be harder than just swapping those login details, since it's very easy to make the tokens time-limited (in practice normal use would probably be some kind of oauth-style redirect flow, so they'd really only have to be valid for a few seconds).
This same argument applies to adults buying alcohol for teenagers too. The determined teenager with money can definitely find a way to get alcohol, but it doesn't mean the age restrictions on purchases are pointless.
Imo it's a bit pointless to worry about high-speed black markets trading in signed tokens when the current most common alternative is a popup with an "I promise I am over 18" button. If society agrees some things should be difficult to access if you're underage, then we can definitely do better than that as a solution.
I can buy booze without an ID or token. You have to match that. And yes, I look perfectly youthful...
Germany has a system in their ID cards that allows anonymous age verification. No one uses it but it’s a technical marvel in my opinion.
The site asks for specific read permissions and the user can decide if he wants to grant them.
One of these permissions is age verification.
You put the phone on the ID card and there is a cryptographic proof that the user connecting to the site is in possession of an ID of a person above 16 (which he of course could have stolen).
So it is technically totally feasible to have good data privacy AND age verification.
It's hardly an age verification if it just requires the bearer to have an adult's ID card.
You borrow your friend's card, or you "borrow" your parent's card, or you pay someone who sees this market opportunity.
I think it's ridiculous how the lawgivers are telling the companies to just nerd harder, but they're definitely going to have to nerd harder than that.
It isn't a technical marvel, it is technical bureaucracy. There is a reason people don't want to use it.
Also once implemented and widely adopted, the state would obviously increase demands on usage. This isn't rocket science.
I understand the cryptographic principle. That isn't the problem here.
yeah, “technical” is not the right adjective, rather the marvel (to me) is the fact that a government managed to deploy a privacy friendly electronic ID system based on sound cryptographic principles.
it’s a marvel because, well, as you put it, there’s all this bureaucracy and when I first discovered it was implemented and every single new electronic ID has this capability since a couple of years, my jaw dropped.
But fully agree the process and the backend itself are not very usable at the moment.
Maybe my expectations around government digitization are too loo though.
this is the same argument as "why have government id cards, someone could just use a fake beard and use their older classmates id". Any system allows for some gaps, similar to how creditcard transactions make transactions safer but on either side of that transaction there some "insurance" and some leeway if someone really wanted to.
The difference is that I can’t mint infinite ID cards, and it is much harder to get a skeptical person to accept a photo ID of the wrong person.
in person? sure, that's harder, but we're talking about online services, right?
many times verification is simply uploading a photo, GenAI can make a nice fake ID.
are these id verification sites linked to government databases? for usual KYC it's enough to save the photo and do the minimal sanity check, no need to phone home an ask Big Brother.
> why have government id cards...
...for the internet is a perfectly sane question. There are good reason we don't have those as well and these reason vastly outclass ineffective user protections.
Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.
I'd never accept this disgrace.
Sorry, what's the implication here, what is the disgrace? Why parental controls are bad? (Or what was implied was a /s tag? :))
Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form. I can control my child without the government.
> I can control my child
Lies every parents tell themselves. Either they will watch porn at age 11 at school or at a friend, or you isolate them from society and they resent you forever.
You can't control every aspect of your child's real life or online activities, that's naive and I don't believe you actually have children, let alone teenagers.
Whether GP can control their kids or not it's besides the point, which I think lies with:
> Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form.
And in fact it's not a "disgrace", it's outright dangerous, a ready half-step to totalitarian control. Regardless whether one trusts their current government or not, it is a threat to democracy and freedom that can be activated by any later regime.
Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.
At that point, what if parents just let their kids borrow their driver's licenses to use social media? There's no technical solution to bad parenting.
The only reasonable solution that doesn't infringe on privacy is to give parents the tools to limit their children's internet use, and presume, outside those bounds, that people are adults.
of course there's no perfectly privacy preserving solution for this, but ... zero-knowledge proofs have come a pretty long way.
if I understand correctly it's possible to give 16+ people tokens and then they can make the signups (transactions with these tokens) and then check that the transaction is valid (that it came from some valid token without knowing which token), while also making sure that folks can't just fake spend someone's tokens -- this is how the new Monero version is going to work after all.
https://www.getmonero.org/2024/04/27/fcmps.html
Of course as others mentioned trading identities (tokens) is trivial. (As I expect not-yet-16 olds will start stealing identities/logins of older people.)
Yeah, as you mentioned, token-sharing breaks this. I think any solution ultimately has to put the onus on the parents. And if the parents aren't responsible enough to pay attention to what their kid is doing online, then it's probably for the best that the kid have access to an online peer group over social media
This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.
Too complicated and no benefit.
Theoretically these double blind systems could be secure, practically I would never trust any of their systems and will opt out of signing up.
Also this fail to account for obviously visible political motivation and further development. Nope, bad idea.
You’re right that it’s possible, absolutely. The problem is the government would first have to want to do that. If they’re planning to hoover up social media usage data then they probably won’t.
So what's the most likely outcome here? Savvy 15 year olds "buying" accounts of older people? IRC and email making a comeback?
> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts
This isn't necessarily true.
It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3].
I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5].
With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license.
Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age.
And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app.
Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be.
EDIT:
I see now from the article the following:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [4] https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/... [5] https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile
Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it
Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school
every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?
This seems like a different and fraudulent category of problem.
The point is that it's possible to create third-party authentication systems that require proving your age and the only extra thing the third-party learns is a verifiable age and the government does not get any information at all.
All this being said, I took a look at the article in question and saw this:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
So what could have been achieved with no invasion or privacy now seems like it must be achieved with an invasion of privacy.
aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name.
There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.
I don’t get it so you’re gonna do what to a 15-year-old who is an ‘identity thief’ so that he can go on TikTok? What’s the punishment please?
Cancel all his accounts and delete all his postings... _without_ a backup.
Put them in chains and onto a stinky sail vessel enroute to Australia... oh wait
The modern equivalent would be to repost all their last year tictocs, again.
It will never be privacy preserving. Once established and users a hooked up to the service, they mandate further data sharing. Poof.
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.
I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business.
I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this.
EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.
Rupert Murdock probably literally thinks the Internet is a fad and that the ad money will come back Any Day Now (TM).
They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media
I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation.
That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...
It doesn’t say that?
“Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”
Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law:
- Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt
- Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal
- Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch)
BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously.
It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.
This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group.
This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.
That but also privacy too. The damage is real, yes, but the negative effect on privacy will also be. (And the Aus gov is extremely far from any kind of principled actor in this to trust them with this experiment. Though I'm very curious of the results now that the experiment is underway anyway...)
Also, of course, quite ironic how everyone is worried about kids' mental health, while brain rot of the voting age population of "the West" had been ongoing for decades. And now the eggs of neopopulism have hatched. (One more unfortunate but quite interesting experiment.)
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat
For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them).
Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch.
Utterly lost the plot.
Goals
Seriously though. While I don't like him even slightly, Murdoch is legit a business genius.
Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.
I used to think that Zuckerberg was going to do the same with Facebook. But it seems like he was too focussed on the ad revenue and making the metaverse happen.
And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.
Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease
And in microstates too
A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities
A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time
> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified
Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...
Australia was already fucked more than the U.S. before that regarding Police state status... But all world states are walking toward this
Australians with dual citizenship have an out at least.
I very much doubt this.
So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends?
Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.
I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this
So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc
To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”.
They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.
I would be happy to see any links to evidence of this
Legacy media are indeed lazy and stupid, but all that's stopping them is the Australian parliament, who are lazier and stupider.
[dead]
> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this
The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this?
Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.
Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians.
From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952
Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia).
Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
> voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids.
But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?
Australian news is fairly concentrated and is mostly owned by one family. A family that got a law passed forcing only Google and Facebook to pay pretty much only them.
The conspiracy isn't that far fetched.
> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned?
From real life? I know parents of middle school and up kids and they have first hand experience of the effects of social media and I’ve heard very little that’s positive.
I’m not saying the media aren’t trying to influence people but again, Occam’s razor: I really don’t think these parents need Rupert Murdoch whispering in their ear to be concerned about social media and kids.
> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?
Their friends who have kids?
People still talk to other people.
One thing I don't understand: if you and other parents are so concerned about this... why let your children use those sites?
This feels equivalent to “if you don’t like smoking, just don’t smoke”.
Like I said in my original post I don’t think this stuff is specific to kids. I think social media has an equivalent to “second hand smoke” that poisons society whether or not we individually engage with it. And yes, classrooms are full of it.
You'd presumably advocate for banning it for everyone, then? If so, might I ask how you'd define 'social media'? Presumably Facebook counts. Does HN, or Discord?
No, I wouldn’t:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42266169
Oh good. I fully agree with that comment.
I'm assuming you don't have kids? It's impossible to stop them, both on a technical and social level. You'd guarantee a destroyed relationship with your kids if trying to do so without their consent.
I'd think forcing the kids to turn off the light at 11pm or eat fish or whatever is worse than dns blocking Facebook, from the kids perspective.
Peer pressure will cause many children banned from using social media to work around the ban.
This describes the exact purpose of the law: to stop letting kids use those sites.
My very strict uncle was adamant that my cousins stay off Facebook when they were kids. They got on anyway. When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation. If he couldn't stop his kids from getting on, only the websites themselves can.
> My very strict uncle was adamant ... When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation.
These might be related. Of course kids will respond that way to severe strictness - it tends to happen with anything a parent acts that way about, whether it's social media, smoking, or simply hanging out with a particular group of people.
This is, still, the fault of the parent.
[dead]
Bad for business, and arguably, the world.
What is a definition of social media? If there will be another platform, that is not listed on banned platforms, will they add it to regulation later... And later again, another...?
Like the spirit, dislike the execution.
Passing legislation to “protect the kids” is politically easy. Bans are simple. Much more effective, IMO, would be to legislate the way social networks behave. Stop their most addictive patterns. Adults are just as susceptible as kids in my experience. If there needs to be anything kid specific, perhaps a block on using the service during school hours, or only for X hours a day.
>Much more effective, IMO, would be to legislate the way social networks behave. Stop their most addictive patterns.
We are less likely to change behavioral pattern after that period though, like we probably won’t see someone start to smoke at 45. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible of course, but past that age it looks like brains are already on track to become old reactionaries and generate complaints about how things used to be better before.
I was already generating complaints about how things used to be better before by the age of, like, 10. Nowadays I have a huge list.
> Stop their most addictive patterns.
Which are? While it's easy to say things like "oh, infinite scroll is addictive" or "autoplaying videos are addictive", those are only the most obvious ones; (social) media addiction comes in many forms. Old Reddit didn't have infinite scroll and you had to click to open items, but would you argue it wasn't addictive anyways? IRC style chat, news groups and forums didn't have any of the obvious dark addictive patterns we associate with harmful social media nowadays, but we still whiled away the hours on them regardless.
I don't think it'd be as straightforward as banning certain practices. Besides, it'd be a game of whack-a-mole since for every legislation they'll find a way around it, or make it so that the users clamor to bring it back - take the EU privacy directive, it told companies they needed user permissions first. But they - the companies, not the EU or the laws - implemented it in the most obnoxious and harmful way possible to spite their own users and hopefully annoy them so much that they would either just hit accept, or vote the lawmakers out in favor of more economically liberal people.
i find it unfortunate that just because the ‘masses’ are on the internet now, everyone wants to play nanny and govern exactly how you design your website
Easiest way it to limit Ads.
If you are selling more ads than there are minutes in a day * population some large enough group is getting mind fucked.
In my experience, the ads are the _least_ harmful parts of social media. It's the regular accounts that are causing FOMO and mental health issues by displaying unrealistic lifestyles that the majority of people won't ever achieve.
That's only one fragment of social media though, it's not helpful to focus on this part of social media alone; another big one is the rhetoric hidden in otherwise normal / legitimate content that seems to be a nontrivial factor in a hard shift to the right, politically.
the government should not be in the business of regulating social media to ensure that public opinion stays within [A, B] ideological bounds.
for a long time I didn’t think this needed to be said, but now I realize it needs to be said quite forcefully actually
Much more effective, if it were ever able to actually pass. Which it won’t within reasonable time.
Time for drastic measures.
Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software.
Honest observers will look back on the anti-social-media movement as a moral panic. It isn't so much that social media is good, it's that the proper attitude toward new, scary things is to integrate them into your life in a healthy way rather than banning them.
And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok
> it's that the proper attitude toward new, scary things is to integrate them into your life in a healthy way rather than banning them
Exactly, just like we did with DDT, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon in fridges, uranium in lipsticks, PFAS, food additives, &c.
> Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software.
And tech companies should't be in the business of influencing who will govern you
> Governments should not be in the business of telling tech companies how to design software.
This sounds a lot like "Governments should not be in the business of telling tobacco companies how to design cigarettes." Social media use is a problem for developing brains. I'm not saying I like Australia's plan, but, like the person you're replying to, I like the spirit of it.
Tobacco use is problematic because it causes cancer. I don’t think the analogy is apt.
> And if we should ban anything it's drugs and gambling, not tiktok
You realise children can legally do neither, right?
Government should be in the business of improving citizens lives. As another commenter said, left to their own devices companies would still be using leaded paint everywhere if it was 1c cheaper per gallon. I’ve grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Some regulations are good. Like the ones regulating drugs and gambling (that have been largely dismantled).
But we don't need the government to protect people from Facebook!
I would say that it depends on the exact details of regulation being discussed, not just the target.
For instance, you could propose a regulation that says that any type of gambling with any wager, whether using real currency or fictional, for any age range, should be illegal. I think most people would consider that to be unreasonable.
You could also propose a regulation that says that companies cannot collect personal data on individuals for advertising purposes unless that individual is directly engaged with that company as a customer. This would hopefully render illegal Facebook's "shadow profiles"[1] that collect data on non-customers. While more controversial, I'd say that this would still be supported by most people you'd meet, while still falling into the category of "the government protecting people from Facebook".
Details of regulation matter, a lot.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
Why don’t we? Cigarettes are harmful to people, they get regulated. If Facebook is harmful, why not regulate it?
So you really not see a difference between _lung cancer_ and "my teenager is moody"?
The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.
Do you not see the difference between “my teenager is moody” and “depression”? Using minimizing language here helps no one.
I agree that there should be more formal research into the effects of social media but as a parent I see concern about the effects of social media in conversation with other parents and teachers all the time. It is something we all witness in our own lives to some extent or another.
“We should let this run rampant while we investigate it fully” and “we should block this while we investigate it fully” are both valid viewpoints. And if voters want the latter it only makes sense for the government to be responsive to that.
It's very hard, maybe impossible, to answer the question of whether social media harms people. It's like asking if TV, video games, etc harm people. Maybe -- but I don't trust the studies and at any rate, these are things people should decide for themselves and their families.
>The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.
Funny because internal documents at Facebook said exactly that about teenagers:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...
https://fairplayforkids.org/facebook-research-children/
https://theconversation.com/states-sue-meta-for-knowingly-hu...
Facebook's internal documents showed that on 11 of 12 body image issues, Facebook was helpful to more teens than it was harmful to [1]:
> For example, lots of people rely on the reporting around the Frances Haugen leaks from inside Facebook to argue that “Facebook knew” that Instagram causes “body image issues” for children (and then most people leapt to the belief that the company then ignored and downplayed that finding). But, as we noted, the actual study told a very, very different story. As we pointed out at the time, the study was an attempt to do the right thing and understand if social media like Facebook was actually causing negative self-images among teenagers, and the study found that for the most part, the answer was absolutely not.
> It looked at 12 different potential issues, and surveyed teenaged boys and girls, and found that in 23 out of 24 categories, social media had little to no negative impact, and quite frequently a mostly positive impact. The only issue where the “negative impact” outweighed the “positive impact” was on “body image issues” for teenaged girls, and even then it was less than one-third of the teen girls who said that it made it worse for them. And the whole point of the study was to find out what areas were problematic, and which areas could be improved upon. But, again, in every other area, “made it better” far outranked “made it worse.”
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/28/contrary-to-popular-opin...
Written by Mike Masnick.....
Next, face filters are actually good for teenage self-esteem, just don't put mirrors in your house, or onlyfans... where women find the real mental glowup.
> But we don't need the government to protect people from Facebook!
Says who exactly ?
Why gambling but not Facebook?
Among other things, there is solid evidence that the move toward gambling in the US has been a disaster. This is a topic that's fairly easy to study in objective terms.
The evidence for social media harming people is highly disputed and, I would say, largely unconvincing. For one thing, it relies on self-reported subjective well-being.
I'm not sure how you define "harm", but I think a reduction in "self-reported subjective well-being" is one of the more robust definitions.
Sports gambling is nothing compared to Dave and busters or Chuck E. Cheese’s tickets. We hook our kids of disgusting gambling behavior (legally?). No one cares about this and wants to go after sports betters instead.
God damn boot lickers all over this thread. I’m so glad to not live anywhere near that godforsaken island.
Isn't gambling usually illegal for minors?
We definitely do. Just enforcing the laws would do, as drugs and gambling is a good amount of social media ads revenue
> I've grown very tired of this “any regulation is bad regulation” viewpoint, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
This is sneering, where you don't respond to a particular poster's point, but instead attack an unrelated (and even fictional) group of people based on something you don't like, or an attitude that you subjectively perceive to be common. Precisely zero people in this thread have made the claim that "any regulation is bad regulation", and in fact the person you responded to specifically called out drugs and gambling as things that they would be open to regulating.
Sneering is against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), boring, unenlightening, not intellectually gratifying, and degrades the quality of the site. Please don't do it.
[EDIT: removed a snarky reply, need to remind myself not to engage with off topic trolling]
Sneering is one of the things posters are specifically requested not to do: "Please don't sneer".
> Ctrl-F “sneering”, no results
Ctrl-F for "sneer" - or just read the guidelines, as you should have before posting, and clearly did not:
> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> I for one find dismissing a thought by pointing to the big board of rules to be boring, unenlightening and not intellectually gratifying. But that’s just me.
You did not read the rest of my comment, then, which pointed out why sneering is bad. Or maybe you did, because you quoted it, but then chose to forget what you quoted?
Separate from the enumerated rules, it's pretty obvious why this kind of behavior - both in your original comment, and your reply - is generally anti-intellectual, and better suited for Reddit than HN.
If you're not going to follow the guidelines, and going to act in such a hostile and shallow manner, then perhaps you should go somewhere else.
> [EDIT: removed a snarky reply, need to remind myself not to engage with off topic trolling]
Reminding you of the HN guidelines that you repeatedly and blatantly violate, and calling out your hostile, dishonest, emotionally manipulative, and anti-intellectual behavior, is not trolling.
The only one engaging in off-topic trolling, by bringing up fictional positions that nobody adopted, is you.
> Honest observers will look back on the anti-social-media movement as a moral panic.
It is a justified 'moral panic'. The social media companies have way too much power over peoples' conception of reality.
You realize that video slots, financial software, HR software, legal software, educational software and MANY more all have some amount of regulatory compliance, right? Do you think social media is special somehow and should just get a free pass when aspects of it have been shown to be potentially dangerous?
I do. Social media is how we communicate with each other - governments should tread extremely carefully.
It is not governments job to ensure that certain viewpoints are not expressed or that people stay ideologically influenced by the views of other people.
Just like how we look at the anti tobacco movement as a moral panic? I think not.
I agree with you that changing the behaviour of the networks would be better, but what actions does a state like Australia really have here?
If they just say, "change", it must be backed up by a threat -- "we will fine you" or "we will ban you" are, I think, the most obvious threats available to a state.
But fines can be tricky to exact across borders, especially with bigger states, and if Australia says "change or we'll ban you later", the networks may play chicken and deal with it later, when the threat is real.
Starting with "you're banned" means it's painful now, and it's on the networks to prove they've changed and win a way back in, if they care. They might suddenly be willing to listen to how they need to change to get back in, and get that work done.
I'm not really in favour of bans on access to information or networks of people communicating, but a(n effective) ban does seem like a potentially effective tool to motivate action, even if it lacks nuance and doesn't solve the real problems.
I say "an effective" ban there because, come on, if it's just an age verifier then teenagers will figure it out and the whole thing is toothless, not ruthless.
I think the execution is bad because I don’t know how it’s going to be enforced. It explicitly says you can’t use government ID.
Are they going to use some kind of video verification (which is just some AI/ML guessing the age based on the video?) and usual signals (ie. if the user likes too many stuff that kids like they will be flagged, and their account suspended)?
Well, I guess it will lead to kids getting a bit better at asking older folks for help.
Good luck with that, these companies weight more than most countries. Meta &co won't disclose their secret sauce and/or change their algorithms because a small country asked politely.
Social medias are like petrol, we're addicted and they provide way too much power to the people controlling them, we all know what the right moves are but nobody will pull the trigger.
Well when then fuck are social media companies going to take their responsibility seriously?
What is their responsibility and what are they doing that is so insidiously addictive exactly? Endless shitposts by your friends for you to scroll-through is that the fentanyl of the internet? To me this just seems like they're trying to get some control over what people are exposed to and to find out who's doing what.
When it becomes an obligation.
If you’re tempted to think “this isn’t worth it, too hard to enforce without affecting something else”… read “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt. There is very real, irreparable harm being done to young people, and it merits trying to make it right, not just surrendering to it.
Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal. If a government wants to make this possible, given they know everyone’s birthdate, they could.
I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
Reports that I read on conventional media sites often summarize government reports, but they do so incorrectly. And when I go and read the government reports, they present a much more balanced picture than the summaries would suggest. In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
I know it's popular now to say that social media is the root of all evil, but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16. Just a few years ago, this was a concern presented as 'screen time', but I had similar problems there. There's no real evidence to suggest that looking at a screen is the problem...the much more difficult and interesting problem is what you're doing when you're looking at the screen. There's a similar dynamic in play with social media, I think.
For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
> In particular, for marginalized teens, social media represents a unique avenue to connect with teens in similar situations, which provides a significant support network.
Thank you for bringing this up. I was one of those 'marginalised' kids who didn't relate to my real life surroundings so much. The internet was like an escape for me, where I was able to meet many close friends with similar interests on social medias like Twitter and Discord. Not to mention, free internet access in general taught so much about the world, developed my passions and helped determine what I'm now studying and planning to pursue as a career.
If social media was banned when I was younger, it would have made me worse off for sure. And if there were internet/device restrictions more broadly, like I'm often seeing suggested, it would have been absolutely devastating for me. My life would have turned out completely different, in a bad way.
On a site like HN, I would have expected there to be much more people who also had the same experience as younger me with the internet and social media. But for some reason, most of the dominant sentiment here seems to consider social media as a cancer, with no nuance. I'm not sure why they do, but I wish that these people would consider the experiences of people like me.
>On a site like HN, I would have expected there to be much more people who also had the same experience as younger me with the internet and social media.
The majority of people who actively engage in discussions here are from generations older than ours (I assume we are similar in age) and hence are mostly unable to relate to our experiences.
That's true, I didn't think about this. It's a shame people here also have the 'new = bad' mindset.
It seems plausible that social media is part-cause, part-symptom of a larger shift away from "real" socialisation. I don't have any scientific evidence for it, so feel free to debate. In general in doesn't seem like a controversial opinion to notice that how we are, socially, has changed over time, probably not for the better. It might be that it's hard to pin down one major cause, because the whole system is moving in tandem.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
The author mentioned by GP is currently working on a similar questions collecting, reviewing and categorizing known literature in these open access documents [1][2]. I suggest you take a look if you are interested in the topic.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
Well, I would say no. But to have a meaningful discussion we need to first agree on what is meant here with "social media". Clearly, this law has been passed with the intent to affect Meta / ByteDance / Reddit and similar companies with a business model that hinges on capturing as much attention of their users as possible, which is very different from HackerNews. Most accusations to social media begin bad are towards of the former type.
> but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16.
From [1], it seems to me that there is a non-negligible amount of literature that has been accumulating, that could be used to justify the ban. Though, Australia is not a technocracy (I hope), so I would say that there is also a certain degree of "purely social" reasons why they might want to curb the access of social media companies to their youth.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
[2] : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cG...
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use
Try spending an hour a day on tiktok (average tiktok user screen time) and 30 min a day on instagram (average ig user screen time) for a year and report back. This shit is crack cocaine for kids
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show (wsj.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688
Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health (tau.ac.il)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938622
Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall (house.gov)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
See this is just thing the commenter you are replying to is saying.
Just read the comments in your second link tearing apart the study.
Given the replication crisis in psychology, the authors make bad choices in the experiment design that are not justifiable in 2022.
How about my third link?
I'm getting a 502 error trying to access the original content. It doesn't appear to be a scientific study, but rather a testimony from a Facebook executive talking about how they disregarded user safety in the development of algorithms that increased engagement. That's not quite what I'm looking for, though. I'd like to see something examining the effects of those behaviors on the population.
I will say that the lengths the executive goes to to compare social media with tobacco degrade the quality of the argument in my opinion; science tends to ask the question and then seek the answer. Arguments like this seem to start with the answer (it's like Big Tobacco) and then construct the argument accordingly.
> I'd like to see something examining the effects of those behaviors on the population.
In the testimony, they explain it:
We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.
Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco’s bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210318063530/https://energycom...
Still no science though. One exec's views in a large company doesn't equal science.
If exec's views are science/truth. Then I bet you would have found execs in tobacco companies who thought they were doing good.
True, it's not science. It is however the intention.
Parents should be more responsible. That's it. This measure is, potentially, deeply ingraining the (terrible) idea that the State is responsible instead, so when all these young kids have children, they, just as their parents, will lack the ability to take responsibility and make their children more responsible by proxy, and so on, and so forth. It's a never ending cycle that is perpetuated by not tackling the problem at its real source. And let's not forget how measures taken in the name of security are oftentimes actually made to deprive us of our privacy.
The difficulty is co-ordination. My job as a "responsible parent" is much more difficult if I have to fight prevailing social norms and my kids perceive they are being excluded from conversations and arbitrarily cut off from their peers.
The social media ban is similar to the logic behind gaming limits in China. The idea is that while the controls themselves are easily circumvented, it gives everyone an excuse to do the right thing.
Parents don't have infinite "control tokens". I only have time & energy to put my foot down about a limited number of things. It is much easier to establish conventions around responsible behaviour if the whole community is behind it.
I am OK with this ban for the same reason I'm OK with tobacco sellers being not allowed to sell to under 18s.
This, I would go so far as keeping kids from social media is in conflict with (arguably) one of the most important jobs parents have which is getting kids into social interactions. (E.g. by teaching them good manners so others will play with them)
>I am OK with this ban for the same reason I'm OK with tobacco sellers being not allowed to sell to under 18s.
And yet almost anywhere in Europe this ban is completely ineffective as the kids who start smoking get their hands on the cigarettes regardless. It only is a VERY minor inconvenience until they grow 18.
How does a parent compete with trillion dollar corporations that hire psychologist, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to make their apps highly addictive?
Being honest here because just telling parents to deal with a societal ill seems very shortsighted and comes from an immense place of priviledge.
I’m sure the same argument was made about tobacco? If you want your children to not smoke tobacco, just be a better parent. How dare the state prevent children from purchasing tobacco? The state is not your parent!
For network effect products (social media, drugs, and alcohol), the easiest solution is in fact to use the government to ban the sale of said products to minors. It’s a coordination problem that’s bigger than the family unit.
The Anxious Generation is poorly researched pop science book that people believe to be true because it feels intuitively right to them.
Just like "the science" about brain development ages.
On the surface it seems very similar to a book he previously worked on, The Coddling of the American Mind, which is also full of poorly researched pop science that confirms biases people already had.
Kind of an "airport book"
Oh, a fellow If Books Could Kill podcast listener?
It's unfortunate that truth is so hard to come by these days.
Yes! That blend of information and humour is the only podcast format worth my time, to be honest.
There's another podcast with Michael Hobbes called Maintenance Phase that I also enjoy when I have time to listen to it. Fen-phen in particular was something I hadn't really heard of before and reading about it after their episode on it was just fascinating.
Is this just your opinion, or is there a scientific retort I can read?
Is Nature "scientific" enough?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
> Surely the problem of verifying a property of someone (the Boolean of “is over X age”) without sharing further details, is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal.
Only if preserving privacy is the goal and I'm sure we both know it isn't.
I guess it will become self-fulfilling if everyone denies that there are privacy friendly options. Legislatures globally are starting to take this seriously so chances are it's happening one way or another.
"Everyone" isn't denying there are privacy friendly options. The government does not want to implement privacy friendly options.
The information theory problem is how to do so without creating a government ledger of every platform that every person uses, and a government kill switch to disable any platform the government doesn’t like.
Indeed, the challenge is already resolved in Europe by eID/EIDAS in a privacy respecting way, so the technology exists and it's already proven on a large scale.
My issue with this idealistic and understandable perspective is that it completely ignores all historical precedent in the modern age. That is to say: if you think the government is going to use this as anything other than an opportunity to turn all those little dots on the GPS tracker into fully-authenticated names and profiles they can keep tabs on 24/7, I have a bridge to sell you.
And if you think the third parties they contract out the tracking to won’t sell that info/access for profit, I have some magic beans as well.
I support keeping kids protected. I’m just not naive enough to think the current governments of the world have any interest in achieving that goal while maintaining any semblance of privacy for their citizens.
i would prefer if we didn’t decide policy based on pop-sci books.
> is a surmountable problem given all the cryptographic technologies at our disposal
I'm genuinely curious, is it? I don't know enough to be sure one way or the other, how you'd do it with some kind of private/public key thing or whatever. Can anyone here provide a quick example?
And I'm assuming it would involve some kind of code generated on the spot just for you, so somebody couldn't just post a code on the internet for all teens to use.
Frankly I want Australia to go ahead with this law so the rest of us can have a test case for it. If it works well we can copy it with tweaks. If not, then we know to seek other options.
What do you even mean by "work". You live in a fantasy land if you think the government will say we expect outcomes A, B and C from this law and will repeal or adjust it if all outcomes aren't met in 3 years. It's either a power grab or lobbying as others have suggested.
SERIOUSLY! Is anyone claiming that childhood depression and suicide will go down to some range after this law is put in effect? Of course not. Will grades go up? "Government says I can't use social media, guess I'll study, go to sleep on time, and become a productive worker." - Average Australian kid? Will the number of sextortion caused suicides (in the <16 bracket) go back to 0 from 1 to the glory days of 2021 when social media didn't exist (nope, because he was 17 when he died and that was last year). Will the number of girls being sextorted for cash decrease? (reading this [1] you can just ask and they'll tell you, that's great, also it's the general sentiment between students that social media should be banned, another big win! Isn't it convenient when reality bends to ideology.) How exactly can you measure this? Is there a counter of the number of <16s who have seen porn/gore on social media and became too misogynistic or too autistic (or too much of a gay, trans, pedophile, brainrotted, degenerate, debauched, profligate, libertine, licentious, effeminate, wanton, vicious, perverse, recreant, lascivious, unrīht sodomite) for the government's taste? Anything more than a vague sense that cyberbulling will go down and irlbullying will go up a bit? probably Who knows, who cares! We allegedly have vague public sentiment! So grab away!
It's blindingly obvious that this ban can't and won't change <16s habits past switching from their favorite app to whatever their friends are using now.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/australian-father-of-te...
The key indicator is a simple question: how many of Australia's teenagers continue to use social networks now.
Nothing will change - other than perhaps the app they use.
What is the acceptance criteria for this test case?
Government dissent is successfully abolished from social media (the real reason for wanting to abolish anonymity via gov't ID requirements)
Bold claims need proof. Does Australia have a history of that?
During COVID times the Australian government pressured all local media to censor criticism of the government's COVID measures. Regardless of how valid or invalid you consider the dissent, it was still dissent being suppressed.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's a fantastic example.
It will not work and this is exactly why it will be copied.
That book is nice example of a case "if you have a hammer you want to push, everything looks like a nail".
"Ban social media for everyone because it might be bad for some kids" is as fragile as an argument as "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one."
Most countries ban guns for everyone, with that being the primary reason. It is not a fragile argument, it is simply a different weighting of values.
When I say “ban”, I mean “heavily restrict and track”, which is how I gather we are using the term “ban” in this context as well.
Well, "ban guns for everyone because some bad guy might get his hands on one" has always been the law in my country, and it has worked out extremely well. There has never been a mass shooting here, ever.
My friend is a media lawyer in Australia
He can’t even advise if some video game developers he represents’ multiplayer games are exempt from the ban
He says the legislation is just an under defined word salad
Note this was several days ago and it may have been amended in the mean time
This is a trend in lawmaking in Australia, and it's seriously damaging. It's basically written so the Government's Minister of Communications gets to decide who to directly target (or not target) with the law.
Basically allows them to arbitarily apply the law to some parties and not others, with no right of appeal. That does lead to potential constitutionality concerns, but it would take years for it to be struck down if so, if a service is affected and eventually gets it before the High Court.
Its been going on for so long that its hard to cal it a trend still.
Isn’t that what the electorate desires?
By electing personable but mediocore, sometimes even incompetent, MPs over the intelligent but aloof candidates.
Someone or some committee, somewhere, still has to actually work out all the details, and if it’s not done in Parliament, because the average MP literally can’t grasp even half the agenda items, it has to be done elsewhere.
Edit: And even that is probably being too optimistic, I’ve heard of MPs who can’t even remember the key facts and figures from the last 100 executive summaries they’ve read. Let alone any detail within the reports whatsoever.
I started losing faith in democracy since Brexit. It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar.
People making “protest” votes without bothering to understand the consequences, single issue voters, young people who don’t even bother to vote, dumb/racist/misogynist voters…
Democracy only works if voters take it seriously, only if media is at least reasonably honest/competent etc. Across the world, this is not the case today. Britain, U.S, India, Australia …
Representatives democracy also only works if representatives take it seriously too. Much (if not most) elected ones serves their personal agenda before the voters interests, let alone those of who can’t/don’t vote.
There’s also no universal _Truth_ that someone can grab entirely and as you noted information is essential but humans can’t be omniscient and you always miss something.
- "If others players cheat, I would loose by following the rules"
- "all i know is I know nothing".
Those two reasons explain why abstention or white/protest/defence votes can be fact based with a logical reasoning IMO.
Maybe we've gone full circle here, since internet discourse drives much of that angry shallow populism.
> dumb/racist/misogynist voters…
> Democracy only works if voters take it seriously
Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible?
Im afraid you seem to have the wrong end of the stick when it comes to democracy. The whole point of it is that everyone, including people you disagree with, get to have a say. Calling people names like dumb and racist is just a crass result of disagreeing with somebody, and then extrapolating their entire personality based on an opinion.
Democracy works when everyone has the choice to vote, and excercises that choice. If 70% of the population suddenly voted to extradite all people with dark skin to Africa, under the rules of democracy you would need to accept that choice as correct and support it. If you decided to say the result was racist and that it shouldnt be carried out, then you are diagreeing with democracy full stop. In that situation you may as well just have a dictatorship, as what it boils down to is one person thinks everyone else should do what that person thinks is right.
If you feel that people should support and agree with what you think is right you need to do the same to everyone else in the world, including people whose opinion is drastically different from your own. Even if you feel it is wrong.
Calling people names and belittling their peronal opinions and judgements is only further sowing seeds of division and hate.
I was working in Mississippi during 2016 election. I met many people who point blank told me they will not vote for Clinton, just because she is a woman (there are a million reasons not to vote for Clinton, her gender is not one of them). What should we call such people?
Do you mean democracy only works when all people vote for options that you think are sensible?
How did you deduce that from my comment? Just one day after Brexit, tons of people regretted voting to leave - lots of them admitted they didn't take the vote seriously, they thought others would vote to stay, so their vote wouldn't matter. A serious voter would have voted on the merits of staying or leaving the EU, not because they were angry at some politician or some other policy <-- This is what I meant when I said "Democracy only works if voters take it seriously", I don't know how you deduced that I want everyone to vote the way I want them to.
> there are a million reasons not to vote for Clinton, her gender is not one of them
You said yourself, many people did have this reason to not vote for her. It is as alt227 said, you just don't like it.
It’s by design and being exploited
> It is still better than other forms of governance, that seems like a low bar.
It's definitely a problem when you have a huge segment of the population that is ignorant and easily misled. Just look at the last US election.
There are definitely better systems, but people are far too attached to the status quo and find it far easier to dismiss proposed solutions rather than work to improve them.
What about spirit of the law vs letter of the law?
Runs smack into the Rule of Lenity.
> He says the legislation is just an under defined word salad
This might be on purpose. I've heard many say online that this law is sold as "save the children" but is designed to be used to get everyone to provide ID when they go/public/message online.
> He can’t even advise if some video game developers he represents’ multiplayer games are exempt from the ban
Bad for video game dev's business, and great for lawyers! The interpretation of the law will get clarified by many lawsuits (costing businesses a lot).
>I've heard many say online that this law is sold as "save the children" but is designed to be used to get everyone to provide ID when they go/public/message online.
Because this was attempted already, for example with the UK "porn ban" law. And Australia is one of the few countries that are even more batshit insane when it comes to policing and controlling its own population, and possibly the only country where such a law could pass now.
I haven't read it, but if it follows their previous efforts it will say what they want to happen (which is: get kids off social media), without saying how it will be done. Until the discussion this bill generated the "get kids off social media" meme had fairly broad support. In the currency of the pollies, this translates to "vote winner". Australia has already banned mobile phones at schools, and that looks to be a achieved roughly what everyone though it would. Maybe they expected this to go the same way.
It hasn't. Now the idea has been floated (and the bill passed!) discussion has inevitably turned to "how do we do this". It was the mental heath professionals (of all people) that first voiced objections. Apparently, social media is the main way kids connect with them. Which is kinda obvious if you think about it, because either the family or school seeks help on their behalf, or it's the family / school that's the problem in which case they need to seek help without them knowing.
Next, when it became obvious they were going ahead, where the discussions on how it would be implemented. To give you an idea of how that's panning out, the minister has said kids won't be prosecuted for using social media and just recently said the federal government ID schemes won't be used. Instead the minister said "the platforms will use their existing mechanisms".
If that happens it could end up being a nothing burger. The big platforms already have checkboxes asking "are you over 16" or whatever.
Regardless, they have passed the legalisation now, and the election is coming up soon. It's effects, if any, won't become evident for a year or two. That means they will be able proudly point to it during the election and say "look what we have done for the kids". As one prime minister explained show particularly bad decisions he made at the time "it was just retail politics".
"He can’t even advise if some video game developers he represents’ multiplayer games are exempt from the ban"
There are a lot of issues with this legislation, but I'm not sure this is one of them. Games like Roblox are so exploitative, they're probably worse for children than most social media.
See, for example: https://www.eurogamer.net/roblox-exploiting-young-game-devel...
Roblox already filters out a lot of words, including links (to social media and whatnot especially). They filter so many words they may just shut down the chats entirely.
The point is not about whether video games should be exempt, it's about being able to tell whether they are covered by this law or not
The OP article didn't link to the law text and the above poster didn't hint at what's ambiguous, so it's not clear that that's bad. It's also possible that the game companies are doing something wrong and engaging in wishful thinking/trying to find a technicality through which they can argue the law doesn't apply to them. c.f. premium loot boxes i.e. gambling.
I'd guess that some games should be banned too but not everything. Something like Street Fighter is widely different from Roblox for example.
The problem with a badly written law is how can you decide which is which?
> I'd guess that some games should be banned too but not everything. Something like Street Fighter is widely different from Roblox for example.
Which one do you want banned?
The rapidly creeping authoritarianism is extraordinary.
This website has long ago lost whatever “techno libretarianism” it ever had. It’s so full of bootlickers. I have no idea why HNs userbase is mostly excited about this.
I think it grew up and had kids. The angsty-teen “I won’t do what you tell me” mentality starts to seem pretty counterproductive after a certain level of maturity is reached.
I picked street fighter because you don't interact with your opponent other than fight him (I haven't played the last game though, maybe that's changed).
I have to strongly agree here. Video games are not free from the social media problems that we are trying to free ourselves from. We also have parents and close family that have been caught in outrage nets, and who knows when, if they will ever be free? We know the pipeline for right-wing grifters.
Who doesn't have any taters in the family these days? A literal human trafficker and pimp who has been in prison is giving advice to our youth in droves. More than you will ever know. My family members stopped talking about it, and started complaining about how we can't talk about things anymore once they discovered that outside of their bubble people know what these monsters/grifters actually do.
I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to sleep tonight knowing the child exploitation industry is experiencing an existential crisis.
Here in Austria in fourth grade kids take a little test for their bicycling skill. Not that it matters much in a car-centric country, but people forget that cycling, even in company with a parent, give kids the chance to learn the necessary traffic rules. Why not have something similar for social media or as the problem seems to be general conduct in social media, educate the kids and give them better ways to raise the alarm when things to bad. Just banning kids won't help them much.
Here in Australia we teach kids real bicycling skills like how to socially share bets with their friends on the Sportsbet app for Tour de France 2025.[1][2] Thankfully this bill doesn't restrict Australian kids from learning these important life lessons every few minutes within a 10 hour long loop of Baby Shark.
[1] https://www.sportsbet.com.au/betting/cycling/tour-de-france/...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrTFl1gKEuk
Right. Let's do the same for drugs.
Irony aside, these platforms are addictive and polarizing by design. I doubt a little test will change anything.
You're being facetious but I genuinely think it's a good idea to normalise drugs. I believe that part of the problem with drugs is that they're considered forbidden, so if you share my viewpoint then it's not too dissimilar to the problems with social media or other addictive-but-bad-for-you products.
Opioids weren't forbidden for those with prescriptions and we all know how that turned out.
You realize HN here is social media, too?
I would argue that "social media" requires the social aspect, namely, contacts and direct messaging.
We socialize here, just last month I read someone's comment about life in the Canadian country-side and realized he's the brother of a Youtuber I'm watching for years. The same happens on any other social platform be it in the internet or real life.
Yes and I would not demonize it.
The problem I see, are networks that are financed mainly by ads - so they have the incentive to keep engagement artifically high and spy as much as possible.
But "banning social media" does not ask that question.
Everyone has a profil and everyone who wants to, leaves contact inside the profil.
And HN even recognizes it can be addictive to some. See the "noprocrast" setting on your user settings page.
Yes? So ban it all, just like drugs?
It's a bit difficult to tell from your comment what you meant by "Not that it matters much in a car-centric country". Do you mean that Austria is "car-centric"? Or that it isn't?
I grew up in America, Colorado to be more specific, and rode a bicycle all over my neighborhood (where there wasn't that much traffic) as a 7-12 year-old. Later, I biked to work in Chia-yi, Taiwan, where there was a bit more car traffic and then still later I did so from Mountain View to Palo Alto, when there was still more. In all cases, I found it very useful to be familiar with traffic rules!
> as the problem seems to be general conduct in social media
is that the problem? I'd have thought the problem is more about the ill effects of social media on children, not the children's behavior on said social media.
Hen or egg? To make it worse, for some it's simple in their nature to show some degree of anti-social behaviour. We all have to learn how to interact with others in a social manner, be it on the playground, school or internet.
This sounds like a good idea, at least actively educate them about the psychological game they may choose to play
It’s not trivial to teach someone about a subject we don’t understand ourselves.
So let's not even try?
if we made some basic modules we could improve as time goes on and more research and data comes out.
Early sex education surely wasn't perfect and the science understood when they started teaching it in our schools.
'"Messaging apps," "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.'
So they tell us which social media is excluded, but not the definition of "social media" for what is included? Does anyone know how "social media" is being defined in this law?
'Under the laws, which won't come into force for another 12 months, social media companies could be fined up to $50 million for failing to take "reasonable steps" to keep under 16s off their platforms.'
So how is "reasonable steps" defined? The article claims 'Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.' So is a checkbox that asks "are you over 16?" 'reasonable'?
This is a genuinely relevant question given that HN could be easily argued to be social media. For the record, I too am concerned about social media impact and so on ( for good and valid reasons ), but this law does not seem that great at first glance.
Hacker News doesn't require a login to view content, so I guess it is exempt, from this specific law.
I generally think that children's access to the internet needs to be more closely monitored. You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there, why do we allow it online? I have on a few occasions had to protect a child from an adult in an online group.
What concerns me here is how this will be enforced. The only way to implement this is with IDs to check birth dates, and some method to confirm you are the person on the ID. You could imagine this being consolidated into a government ID system to 'protect your data', and to mean you only have to validate once. These accounts will be permanently attached to real people, and I think it will have a chilling effect on free speech. It's all fun and games until the government of the day considers your speech as a threat.
One can see this being expanded too, so that you would need to provide ID to use the internet more generally. ISPs could be told to selectively deliver web pages from DNS based on your ID, which would be most effective on mobile devices and less so on wired networks. My ISP already blocks websites.
I think a more fundamental question is whether the nanny state should be telling you how to raise your children, what content they can consume and who they can interact with. Suddenly you find your children consuming content only from a Z-wing bias because the government of the day hates Y-wing politics.
> You wouldn't allow your child to walk up to random strangers in the street without you there
This applies to under 16 year olds though, not little children but adolescents. I would hope that every parent of teenagers allows them to talk to random people on the street.
Instead of binary it should be tiered, complete monitoring of online activity of child till say age 8, to gradually opening the circle till age 14-16. We do it for movies/games.
Back in the 90's we were somewhat supervised when using the internet on the family PC. We were also somewhat supervised while watching the family TV.
Good point. There was a technology shift in portability and cost which meant each individual got a personal computer. They went from the common areas to personal spaces like bedrooms.
Maybe a lot of issue could be resolved by just having a phone that has to be in a common space, using a technology like LiFi [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi
This is the most horrifying thing in all of this. People with a prison guard mentality are already thinking how to enforce the rules in an even stricter way. Rules that are violating freedom of information, one of the most basics Western freedoms. Yes, there are no repreciations for the violating them at first, the frog is getting boiled slowly, but give it a few years and people who let their child use social media will be treated as criminals and put in prisons. Everything "for the sake of children."
> freedom of information, one of the most basics Western freedoms.
Children's access to info is limited in all societies.
No it isn't; children have always been able to borrow the same books from libraries as adults, read the same newspapers. Just now much of the information doesn't live in books or newspapers.
Movies have ratings and entry to hall is restricted. Games have rating and ability to buy them is restricted. books allowed in school libraries is heavily curated and sometimes restricted by law or vested groups. It is illegal to sell R18 magazines to a minor.
Movie ratings are voluntary in the US. Restrictions on selling porn to minors are orthogonal to movie ratings. It's generally legal for a theatre to sell a ticket for a PG-13 movie intended for 15-year-olds to a 12-year-old who hasn't received parental permission. Most theatres would refuse to sell the ticket, and most parents wouldn't let their 12-year-old child go to a movie theatre alone, but the bulk of the responsibility of preventing children from watching inappropriate movies falls on parents and guardians.
Banning children from social media is like banning children from movie theatres. A ban should consider that (1) different restrictions are appropriate for different ages of children (e.g. 12 vs 15), (2) depending on the country (e.g. the US with the First Amendment to the Constitution), children may have information access rights that parents can take away but governments can't, and (3) children in unhealthy relationships with parents or guardians (e.g. transphobic/homophobic parents of LGBTQ+ kids) should be able to access some kinds of social media without letting their parents/guardians know.
The benefit of allowing one nerdy kid unrestricted access to the internet is often larger than literally hundreds of people “harmed” by that very same access.
Trying to kill the pipeline for creating the “hacker” mentality that folks here are supposed to have is supreme level bootlicking. I hope you eventually find it disgusting.
I'm not entirely sure where you're going with this. I'm expressing my concerns with these restrictions.
My bigger concern than the creation of a free-thinking hacker - is the creation of a free-thinking society.
My thoughts immediately go to all the queer kids in rural areas who stand to be cut off from the only support networks they have.
I think messaging apps are exempted so hopefully online communities in places like Discord will be perfectly fine
if Discord is fine then I really don’t understand this legislation at all…
>immediately concerned with the leftist recruiting ring that social media had become, being compromised. I've already trawled your internet presence enough to know you're an activist. you're revolting.
Any and all kids in rural areas.
Experience deprivation is a very real thing. I grew up in a desolate rural area, circa the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.
Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.
The idea that social media is like a Meta commercial, all making new friends and video calls to smiling Grandparents, etc. is a fabrication, presumably one that a lot of HN folks have a vested interest in maintaining. Kids are lonelier now than they have ever been.
This has been one of the hard things to deal with working in tech. Tech has advanced so much but am I happier or more connected to people than my parents were at my age? Not really. I've had an existential crisis recently about what all this work I've been doing is for. Outside of work I've been using less and less tech and I think I've been happier (like today I have a physical cookbook and a couple handwritten recipes instead of using recipes on my phone).
Not everyone who disagrees with you is lying.
1. How granular does that data get for urban/rural/suburbs? 2. What effect does social media have on the floor of loneliness?
I'd say human rights violation is a bit of a stretch - the negative impact of social media use on an adolescent's psychological well-being is well documented - so possibly even the exact opposite.
The internet today is a very different place from the 90's. I really hope your children don't have access to the sickest, shallowest, most addictive and most dangerous place on the net.
That very reason was raised in parliament, during question time by one senator, but neither side (LNP/Labor) gives a shit.
> Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.
Is that more or less of a human rights violation than preventing children from buying alcohol, preventing them from buying cigarettes, preventing them from buying pornography, preventing them from voting, preventing them from working full time, preventing them from entering into contracts, or preventing them from driving an automobile?
> The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.
I grew up in a wealthy very tech-savvy area, and most kids except the really geeky like me didn't get internet until the mid or late 1990s, so you weren't as "backwards" as you think. You would have still been on the bleeding edge to have internet in the early 1990s.
[flagged]
[flagged]
"Recruiting Apparatus"? What do you mean by that?
Probably more bullying and hushed up suicides.
[flagged]
[flagged]
What do you mean with MAPs? Sorry, haven't seen the acronym before.
Pedophiles. I had no idea "MAP" had a foothold anywhere but their own communities.
Minor Attracted Person
[flagged]
Pretty sure you're being downvoted for implying that 99.9% of adults are "MAPs".
My guess is that BSDobelix was downvoted and flagged for implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles.
> implying that people supportive of LGBTQ rights are (in comparison to the rest of the population) significantly more likely to be pedophiles.
Please don't put words in my mouth, but I'm sorry if anyone "accidentally" misunderstood. What I meant was that 99.9% of teenagers have had one or more contacts with a paedophile via "established" social networks.
I apologize for making multiple incorrect assumptions and for falsely accusing you of saying things you didn't say.
I misinterpreted your original message as <queer kids will be cut off from non-queer kids> and <non-queer kids will encounter fewer groomers/MAPs>. Now I understand that your message was <almost all kids will benefit from being cut off from strangers on social media> in reply to <queer kids will benefit less or be harmed>.
Ironic considering how many conservative anti-LGBTQ pastors and bishops sexually assault children.
[flagged]
oooh fun, 99.9% of parents are pedophiles, ergo antinatalism is the only moral stance.
> My thoughts immediately go to all the queer kids in rural areas who stand to be cut off from the only support networks they have
I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff), but if the article is correct then I find myself strongly in support (so-far...): my impression is that this is targeting the kinds of vacuous mass-market "engagement"-driven social-media services that us HN denizens aren't exactly fans of: Facebook, Instagram, the like. The article says that sites like YouTube and IM services are exempt.
> Messaging apps, "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.
-----
For an anecdote: when I was middle-school-aged and unsupervised on the net, the "mainstream" platforms of the day (AOL Groups, I guess?) were just as unappealing then as Facebook is today (fortunately I wasn't on AOL anyway) - instead I found my home in places you get to via IRC - or extremely niche phpNuke-then-phpBB sites: these places aren't run by companies, just basement-dwelling sysadmins so they'd be exempt I imagine, so it doesn't look like any harm will come to those kinds of places.
For those youngsters-that-dont-fit-in starting their journey of self-discovery, I think getting banned from Facebook is a good start. Who wants their parents (and let's be honest: it's only our parents on Facebook now anyway) to get notified about your joining a cybergoth meetup group.
...now if only we could ban everyone else off Facebook too.
> I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff)
The catch is, unfortunately, that our social media data trails make it all to feasible to detect which of us is on the spectrum using machine learning.
And which if our kids have what is vulgarly called "daddy issues."
And which of us are beginning to succumb to schizophrenia.
We've only begun to see the creepy dystopian consequences of centrally archived social media.
I'm torn here because I think there is very real harm being done with social media not just to kids but to adults as well but you should look at anything being "to protect the children" with extreme prejudice as it is likely just a power grab and way to reduce privacy. The saying "never let a good tragedy go to waste" comes to mind here.
[flagged]
"Nothing" is often preferable to enabling abuses of power.
When it comes to my privacy I want the government to accomplish nothing because otherwise they only take.
Reminder that, often, that which is intended to be passed as a measure to enforce moral rules or increase security is actually a way to deprive you of your privacy.
I wonder if we should even call this social media at this point. More like interactive TV 3.0. All the feeds are heavily ad infested and “promoted” content appears from “infliences” .. some people shadow banned while others artificially boosted up your feed.
All designed to maximize your attention but also sway your opinion.
The social part of social media seems to have gone mostly by the wayside.
“Did you see the new dance this one kid did in Texas” like like, hashtag, loved it , repost, etc … not really building much of a social relationship, or perhaps it is and just seems a bit off to us older folks,
Guess Australia will get a lot of kids well-versed in VPN use.
I've recently been teaching kids to code (in Aus) - 7 year olds already know about VPNs, and use them to circumvent various roadblocks to playing roblox!
Few things in this world can stop kids from finding a way to play their favorite video games.
According to recent studies kids don't know what a file or a folder is and can't even copy/paste anymore, I think we have a good margin.
You don't need any of those things to figure out how to install a VPN. My son had installed a VPN before he knew those concepts because a VPN mattered to him to circumvent region locks while knowing what folders are didn't.
file/folder abstractions are irrelevant for most mobile users. VPN is a different axis
"Hey guys, it's time to talk about our sponsor, Surf shark VPN"
Until they ban VPNs. Moral panics acknowledge no bounds of sanity.
Banning VPNs requires significant investment in filtering traffic, because the VPNs these kids will be using won't be hosted in Australia.
Even China does not have a blanket VPN ban
The extent to which China "does not have a blanket VPN ban" is of no help to people who want to bypass the Great Firewall.
What we'll learn first is how schools use the new law as a tool for limiting device access in general and kids spend 8 hours a day reliving Gen-X.
This is going to be an interesting experiment to watch.
Because if I know kids, they will find any creative way they can to circumvent the ban.
And even worse is if some actor out there starts catering to kids by publishing "proxy services".
My opinion on this is that it's the same as banning drugs. People want to use them, and will find any way to use them.
> And even worse is if some actor out there starts catering to kids by publishing "proxy services".
How long until this happens and there's a big paedophilia scare so I can point and laugh at everyone involved?
This is where kids might flock to decentralized options like Mastadon or something.
Some will but at population scale any barrier will decrease usage.
We'll see.
If I think back to my own time in school I foresee kids teaching each other the latest circumvention technique.
It might be as simple as using VPN vouchers. Or sharing VPN accounts, or using someone's public VPN server. This is why it'll be so fun to see what they come up with, the kids that is. They're the true innovators, the hackers. ;)
It might be as simple as use of a certain service exploding, a service that has flown under the government radar. Discord for example might not be considered social media but you can turn it into social media using bots.
What they're really saying is that all websites will add a 'are you really over 16' checkbox?
Apparently the gov has been setting up their own system for that:
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/statement...
Which will probably work as well as most apps implemented by the Australian Govt; myNDIS, myGov, myMedicare etc etc etc. They are all trash. We do not have a good track record in this area.
What happens if the account belongs to the parent but all the content is by the child?
Careful there, you've potentially just thought about this more deeply than any of the politicians in our Parliament has...
Yes, because kids love when parents are all up in their social media accounts watching their interactions. What about parents who just buy their kids booze?
Yes, this is flawed legislation, and yes kids will find ways to bypass these protections.
But I think this is a step in the right direction. There is clear evidence of the harms caused by social media, especially for adolescents. We have to start trying things - albeit imperfectly - to get to a better place. We can learn a lot from the outcomes of this experiment.
The key feedback that was unaniamous from all the experts that managed to reply to the Government's 24-hour consultation period was that they all agreed a blanket ban is the worst way to approach the platform (they were all ignored by all but a few Senators).
An interesting part of the ban is that kids will be banned from Instagram, but sites like 4chan (and ovbiously anything on the dark web, which teens might now be more motivated to access) will be out of the reach of it...
Nice of you to volunteer others as experimental subjects.
World is divided by people who grew up with social media and people who didn't. I'd imagine there's already ample longitudinal metrics to extrapolate differences and draw conclusions between the two groups. The experiment's not really whether social media is bad for adolescents, but whether one can successfully legislate to reduce social media use among them. Not holding my breath.
We have taken such steps in many areas now, and it simply does not work. We can keep trying this old, tired method, but it does not work. I do not want ID verification for the Internet either, to be honest.
could you share the clear causal evidence?
> kids will find ways to bypass these protections.
But this is a change in law. Yes kids will easily be able to access social media if they want to, but it will be illegal and punishable.
The fact that kids are going to circumvent the rules means that it's going to be a wild back and forth between companies and the courts when they do.
As a father of 4 ranging from 10 to 30+, I certainly hope the law will not practically work and that kids will find a way to use social media.
Interesting. My kids aren't allowed on social media, and they're happier and less moody than their friends who are addicted to it. They see it, and don't even want social media anymore because their friends spend so much time on their phones rather than being present and having real experiences.
I don't think I would wish social media on any child, though I believe it's a problem that can be solved not by more laws, but by better parenting.
> better parenting.
And that's the key point. The crucial one.
Lol, guys. Even in Russia, which is said to have a low level of freedom, the government has not yet decided to introduce identification in social networks by passport.
By the way, some restrictive laws in Russia, for example, blocking websites law, began with the need to protect children from "illegal content".
Australians, don't give up
I was wondering how "social media" was defined. Anyone got a link to the actual bill?
From the article:
> "Messaging apps," "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.
Almost every "social" apps are basically messaging apps these days. What's the differentiating factor between banned and not banned? Having an algorithmic feed? So YouTube is not banned because its doesn't require users to log in to access the plaform? Can Instagram enable browsing without logging in (and disable some features except DM) to avoid the ban then?
Also, now kids can create YouTube accounts to use shorts as Instagram reels, community posts as Instagram Posts and subscribe to each other. But hey, that's not a "Social media" right?
This is so generic, you might as well ban the internet.
And that is the entire point. You will only use the X state-mandated websites. You will only express positive opinions on there. You will not criticize the government under any circumstances. Glory to Arstozka.
This is hilarious. Want to use google maps? Sorry, ID please! Users can post comments and reviews all over the world and see ones from everyone else.
translated, who ever doesnt toe the line
What about Legacy idea? Can they still watch TV and read news papers? Isn't this a form of giving control to legacy media and traditionally powerful especially when in US their influence is decreasing?
My question is: What behaviors will come sideways out of this prohibition?
My guess: You can’t outwit a digital native generation. Websites with less concern for the rules in general will become digital hangouts.
I'm excited to see the outcomes. Hats off to Australia for engaging in this experiment.
One unique aspect of social media, as opposed to, say, porn, is it's reliance on network effects. Sure, maybe 25% of kids will use a VPN and log on, but if most of your friends don't care enough to spend their allowance on a VPN, then what's the point?
Ya that’s true. I guess I’m imagining the “25%” being pushed towards 4chan type environments, and perhaps then a subset of that towards more dangerous environments.
Putting a positive word like "social" in the app genre name was a great mindfuck. Social breathing could be used to describe smoking. What a crock
Another privacy killing feature coming from a government who can't help themselves from knowing every little detail about everyone's private life.
What do they mean by social media? Is HN social media? Is Yelp? Is any site that has comments and discussions?
Is the actual discussed measure available somewhere ? Looking around none of the articles discussing this had references to official documents.
Judging from the info in the article:
- kids will have one year to see which platforms are not categorized as SNS, yet can be used as such.
- kids stuck with brainwashing parents, especially in remote rural areas, will have it a bit more tougher I guess.
This was rushed through with a public comment period of 24 hours.
It's going to be a mess, while the spirit is well intentioned it has edge cases up the wazoo, foot guns galore, and stinks of back door government ID for adults.
Pretty much the only media outlet in Australia that stood up with questions and non fawning commentary was Crikey:
eg: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/11/26/teen-social-media-ban-s...
and: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acrikey.com.au+social+...
This was deeply rooted in traditional media ( Murdoch News et al ) in AU putting pressure on the Government in AU to take action against Facebook & Co. after the ceasation of payments for linking to news media.
for-profit media unapologetically uses what little influence they have left to smear their competitors, hence all the drivel: "think of the children / fear the evil russians!" about social media and "think of the copyright holders / fear the evil terminators!" about AI.
God wills it, ten years from now they will all be out of job. The publications will still be there, of course, but the shilling will be delegated to LLMs prompted by Bangladeshi youths for $5 a day, with a few meatsack editors to set the tone.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... (explanatory memorandum here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/em...)
And the amendment to the first reading which was agreed to today which has the bits about ID verification being disallowed: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/am... (supplementary explanatory memorandum here: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/em...)
Not disallowed, just they also have to offer an alternative.
Question is why hasn't Australia created a Digital ID system that can prove you're >= 16 years old without giving away other info?
In the spirit of "Falsehoods programmers believe in"[1] for human ages:
* Not all people know their age.[2]
* Even if people do know their age they may not have any means to prove their age.[2]
* Even if people know their age, they may know their age only in a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, the documentation may provide an approximate age or use a calendar system which is ambiguous or with a margin of error.[3]
* Even if people have documentation proving their age, they may know it to be incorrect.
* People may have multiple documents each nominating a different age.
* People may be reissued with new documents changing their recognised age.
* Even if the government tries to guess someone's unknown age, it's an inexact science and could be revised later.
[1] https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
[2] https://www.racgp.org.au/getattachment/fe71891a-aafe-453f-a3...
[3] Example calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_calendar
It's vibes based - the definitions could cover almost any online service, but the Minister of Communications gets to decide who will be targeted.
They have zero detail on how to verify anybody's age. But massive fines if the tech companies fail. Basically the only reliable way to do it would be to ID everyone, but then they had to sort of mostly rule that out in a rushed amendment yesterday to get it past the Conservatives (Liberal/National Party) because they neeed their votes in the Senate.
So basically they're asking tech companies to come up with magical technology to perfectly know how old someone is without any identification.
This sounds so useless that it could be an Onion article. What am I missing?
“There are no penalties for young people or parents who flout the rules.
Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”
I'm definitely not going to ID myself to go on social media. Then I'll just quit (in fact I've quit most social media already anyway due to the enshittification). Even a parameter linked to my real ID is not acceptable to me. And also, after social media, I'm sure other sites will start demanding more checks as well. It's a slippery slope.
Luckily I don't live in Australia but I find this a troubling development. Anonymity on the internet is necessary. Because it is much more permanent than the real world. Every little misstep can be dissected decades later.
Why did this disappear from the HN front page so quickly?
I can’t get behind a ban because we’re fighting an unstoppable force: the connected future. This is the world we live in and kids will have to “evolve” to their new environment.
I think parents and schools need to change the role they play.
> I think parents and schools need to change the role they play.
It's not that I directly disagree, but honestly I don't think parents and schools have much of a fighting chance against companies like TikTok, SnapChat YouTube or Facebook. We need to create rules that prevent companies from employing addictive algorithms which locks users in cycles of endless mind numbing doom scrolling. Once the social media companies have changed their "algorithms" and recommendation engines or removed them entirely, then we can start talking about what parents and schools can do.
What changes are you recommending?
Kids are looking for community. Connections with other people who they share experiences with (and can make more experiences together). They're looking for others who see the world the way they do.
The solution is more face to face time with other families on a regular basis. Replace Facebook with actual faces.
This is not true. We have a technological tool to block all of that connected future if we want to. It's called "government" and it can even choose to destroy all landlines, jam all satellite signals en fire Rockets at satellites that want to fly over their land while connecting to people on the ground. This IS an option. Maybe not the best or simplest...
Nothing unstoppable about it. It’s about as straightforward and controlling access to tobacco or alcohol.
Or marijuana or cocaine. It’s super easy for the government to deny access to things people want by fiat, as evidenced by the fact that nobody does cocaine anymore.
Sadly I can confirm that people still do cocaine
But not 96% of people and not 99.5% regularly.
What if the platform is not registered as a business in Australia? You can't fine it if it's not a legal entity there. Simply setup a php Facebook clone and host it in another country.
"Simply" If you're making money from aussie customers, you need to comply to aussie rules
How will the Australian government compel such companies to comply?
Just by blocking the network traffic. Plenty of countries do this with sites they don’t like for various reasons.
Yes VPNs blah blah. But it will be pretty hard to operate some rogue social site when you can’t sell any respectable ads besides maybe porn sites and malware, and are only accessible via VPN. Pretty high barrier to adoption for a brand new site.
By freezing bank transfers/disallowing any Australian companies (read: advertisers) from doing business with them? Depending on treaties, possibly by seizing assets in the company's home country?
Facebook does business in Australia. They sell ads.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42251758
If this is not enforced properly, it's meaningless. Just like the fight against piracy.
The main point here is probably to force ID control and have a constant flux of fully identified users on the networks ?
The gov gets at least full legal check of any SNS account.
From the article:
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
The actual law doesn't fully rule it out (there was an amendment to kind-of add that but it's fuzzy so ID could still be part of it).
But it's basically unenforcable without doing ID, it's going to fall in a heap eventually. The Australian Governement talks big game in tech regulation but almost every single thing they do (like the 'eSafety Comissioner' with their truly extradorinary powers) fails because they are very, very incompetent when it comes to technology.
I think former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull accidentally summed it up (talking about encryption) when he literally claimed that "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia".
"Social media is bad for kids" is the fresh iteration of "video games are bad for kids". Remember the craze?
Does anyone have a link to the actual text of the legislation?
funnelling all the kids to 4chan is maybe not the best idea …
Make absolutely no mistake. The real reason why politicians push through these anti-social media laws is to prevent children from networking and discussing and sharing revolutionary ideas.
These laws are designed to prevent generations from establishing a baseline sociopolitical coherency and unity.
I was subject to a home firewall and computer use surveillance as a child for the exact same reason, because my cult guardians did not want me encountering unapproved ideas or networking with like-minded individuals who might weaken their ability to control and brainwash me.
I was treated as a criminal, and so my response was to educate myself deeply in how to succeed as a criminal. I learned to hack my imposed surveillance systems, and then hack websites on the web. I learned how to lie and manipulate authority in order to survive without compromising my internal compass. I collectivized with other hackers.
Is that the path we want every child subject to these bans to take? I fortunately have a moral and ethical foundation which led to me using my skills for good, but I am certainly capable of quite a lot of things that wouldn't be a net good for society, and I know how to get away with it. Perhaps we shouldn't teach a generation of repressed children these skills, and institutionalize them from a young age in opposition to society.
This is the exact same mechanism used to criminalize cannabis smokers. Smoking cannabis in my late teens and early twenties in a state where it was illegal led me to learning quite a lot about how to navigate the criminal underbelly of the world. The "gateway drug" rhetoric becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, enacted by the very people who lie through their teeth about their intentions.
Oppose these laws. Violently, if necessary. If you are a child, learn how to protect yourself online, familiarize yourself with security culture, and continue to safely and covertly network with other children online.
Form strong bonds. Collectivize. Create art, study politics and science. Make lasting, useful connections. Broadcast and distribute your opinions and demands of your governing bodies.
This is what being a child growing up on the internet is about. I owe everything in my life to my formative years on the internet. It was an escape hatch from my abusive home. I learned a lot, and formed precious memories joining and starting forums and chat rooms in my youth. I would probably be dead today without the web.
Attack the real problem. The techniques which certain social media sites use to manipulate and hook children and others are well-documented. Ban them. Make an example of their practitioners. The web that I grew up on did not have these problems.
Fuck Australia, and fuck every other person who dares to suggest that children should not be allowed to congregate safely online and be allowed to navigate society and culture according to their own compass.
I think it's safe to say that, in under-16s, cyberbullying and susceptibility to intentionally addictive social media algorithms are a bit more of a common problem than revolutionary activities. Any would-be Che Guevaras can put in the time arousing the working class in person until such time as they can grow facial hair.
I don't think you have addressed the criticism and the alleged solution is ineffective as well.
Then we attack the systemic issues, instead of pushing through intentionally vague legislation. Some of the similar legislation being explored by multiple US states is frightening.
Sorry, but it’s rubbish.
Are you saying that all the people who were 16 and grew up without social media had no social connections? Didn’t form strong bonds with their peers?
Social media is absolutely terrible for kids. Social media absolutely destroyed social skills in teens.
I personally lived in a very backwater state, surrounded by racist conservatives, and was raised hardcore Catholic by extremely abusive guardians. I owe every single ounce of my rationality to the web and the ideas and people I encountered there.
Facebook, etc are definitely terrible for kids. But the wording of these laws is intentionally vague, in order for these kinds of laws to be used according to the whim of the incumbent, as a tool of oppression.
I hate to break it to you, but rest of the world is not US and have different socio-cultural dynamics.
Regardless. We should optimize the outcomes for the collective good, and not for the corner cases. Of course it has its cost.
I think that's pretty obvious, no?
The entire point is that I got to grow up with a wide variety of opinions and ideas from people across the world.
I have good friends all over the world today thanks to the web. We have influenced and helped each other over the years. We depend on each other. That's not a corner case.
> I got to grow up with a wide variety of opinions and ideas from people across the world.
You got to grow up with the vocal minority on the internet, in otherwords the 4% of the worlds population which is most extreme in their views and most arrogant in how they express them.
That is entirely an assumption on your part, one which reveals your inherent biases. My experience was not at all as you describe.
You have no idea how I spent my time on the web overall just because I gave you a glimpse into a single aspect of my intersectional experience on the web.
[flagged]
> You got to grow up with the vocal minority on the internet, in otherwords the 4% of the worlds population which is most extreme in their views and most arrogant in how they express them.
This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality.
> 4% of the worlds population are vocal on the internet.
Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete understanding of the internet.
> Anyone thinking they are being exposed to a wide range of people and personalities on the internet is very mistaken
I don't think you understand just how many people are on the internet. I get exposed to a wealth of different cultures and ideas, even moreso today.
Also, please refrain from devolving into insults and accusations of narcissism. Not only is that a textbook identity fallacy, but there is nothing narcissistic about simply pushing back against biased judgement.
> This is a de facto assumption. You assumed a situation which was not reality.
Nope, no assumptions there.
> Conjecture, unsubstantiated percentage. Rooted in your own biased and demonstrably incomplete understanding of the internet.
I'll give you this one, my percentage was out of date. The current percentage is estimated to be 10%.
> I don't think you understand just how many people are on the internet.
I dont think you understand how little are. 67.5% of the world currently have access to the internet, and the majority of that is intermittant and shareddevices in Africa and Asia. Thats many billions of people that do not even own a device with a web browser, let alone indulge in conversations with strangers on social media and forums.
> Also, please refrain from devolving into insults and accusations of narcissism.
There were no insults or accusations. I said your reply was Narcissistic, I did not say you were.
You keep reading what you want to in my posts to support your extremism and outrage. Please dont, nobody is accusing you of anything. You can calm down now!
Are you going to provide any citations?
> There were no insults or accusations. I said your reply was Narcissistic, I did not say you were.
Now you're just hiding behind pedantry.
> You can calm down now!
And now you're trying to act like I'm being emotional.
You're arguing disingenuously, more interested in trolling and escalating the negativity than finding common ground. When pressed to articulate your position, you turn to insults and deflection.
There is absolutely no reason to continue engaging with you.
Indeed, the US legal system has many assumptions that may not be applicable to other countries. Violating the US First Amendment right to access information is unconstitutional even if the only people having their rights violated are in the corner cases.
Even the US is not anything like the childhood environment described by GP, for most children.
Yes, I represent a minority.
Well that goes a long way to explaining your quite extreme views.
You're flirting with an identity fallacy here, but please, explain which part of my views are extreme.
>The real reason why politicians push through these anti-social media laws is to prevent children from networking and discussing and sharing revolutionary ideas.
Thats a pretty extreme view to any normal person who didnt grow up on the internet.
EDIT: please stop editing your posts after posting, it makes them most difficult to respond to properly.
What you label as extreme is quite subjective though.
You also need to make a case for why it's extreme. Simply labeling it as extreme is not enough. Why is it extreme?
No I dont, I am done feeding the trolls. Feel free to retort whatever makes you feel most superior.
You're doing a lot of projection, engaging in such negativity after willingly replying to one of my comments, and then acting like I'm the one trolling you.
Rising up violently to protect my child's right to scroll mindless on TikTok for hours? No. Social media today is unrecognisable to the internet that you, or I grew up with.
Children will always network, and share ideas and form community. They don't need to do it on a platform designed to exploit as much of their attention as possible as a way to sell advertisements.
I think children should be able to congregate safely online. If you think a meta-owned platform is a good place to do that, I've got bad news for you.
I think a lot of my generation owes a lot to the internet during our formative years too, but the idea that Meta offers anything other than a curated stream of addictive ragebait nowadays is for the birds. Maybe this ban will encourage teenagers to hang out in less corporately owned spaces online. I can hope.
An outright ban probably won't work, but it sends a signal that perhaps society needs to use the internet better to be a benefit.
The problem is that the wording of these laws carry a common thread of intentional vagueness, such that the laws can be abused for ideological persecution and maintaining the status quo.
I'm all for directly banning certain practices Meta and others engage in, within scope. I'm completely opposed to ideological oppression.
You may also be just the right age to have had access to an internet less dominated by doomscrolling and bullying.
I think there was a ton of bullying depending on what part of the internet you spent your time in, but importantly it was very easy to find inclusive, safe spaces.
Today, it is not as easy. This is probably part of why so many have moved to group chats and direct messages for online interaction in recent years.
Someone’s never been on 1998 hacker IRC.
Opposing a social media law “violently” is not an appropriate call to action. That said, the web of yesteryear and the way kids use social media today could not be any more different. Kids mindlessly scrolling through oceans of vanity, teen girls with more and more suicidal, being stuck in the high-school bullying social environment 24/7. The laws are a response to a real issue — especially as parents themselves get addicted / stuck in the same ways. They have kids and are rightfully fearful. I grew up in the same awesome web, but it sucks now, commercialized and tapped for every last cent it can produce.
> Opposing a social media law “violently” is not an appropriate call to action.
Every single ounce of freedom you enjoy today was won with bloodshed. There is nothing extreme about reminding your local legalized mafia who is actually in charge: the People. Your compromised governments work hard to condition you to think otherwise.
Direct political violence should always an absolute last resort, when every other realistic option has been exhausted. However, every freedom is ultimately backed by threat of violence, even when it isn't said aloud.
> The laws are a response to a real issue
They use a real issue as a vehicle for tightening the authoritarian ratchet. All good antidemocratic legislation is wrapped in legitimate issues. But what authoritarian governments such as Australia fear is the power of unification which the internet offers new generations.
I wanted to clarify part of your point.
Violence is literally always a last resort. It is the last possible thing you can do to affect change.
People who would nitpick on the mode of protest always conveniently dismiss the thinking and talking that came before.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But talking about "social media":
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
This is pure insanity. This ban is something the Soviet Union or China would do, not the free world.
It wasn't that long ago that Americans were calling TikTok a "Chinese weapon of war and mass indoctrination" and wanting it banned.
To say nothing of everyone wanting Section 230 repealed and the government to regulate social media, requiring a court order for moderation, banning "algorithms" or making social media entirely illegal. The attitude behind this is absolutely endemic across the "free world." Australia is simply a bit further ahead of the curve as far as turning the moral panic over pedos and groomers and Chinese mind control into authoritarian action. As soon as the new regime gets settled in the US I'm sure we'll see something similar. Musk has already made vague threats along those lines.
I know this is targeting social media but just pointing out that there is no evidence screen time is affecting kids development and pretty solid evidence that it doesn't have much effect at all.
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
There’s a difference between screen time and social media usage.
FTA
"One also suggested we take a look at social media on its own because it’s a source of worry for many and we did not find anything special about this form of online engagement.”
It's a subset of what they studied. Surely a lot of screen time is spent on social media. They did not observe anything special about time spent on social media. A more in-depth study may yield more insight but there is no thread to pull on from this study. Only parents' misgivings.
What is social media? Is HN social media? Is a news paper site with a comment section social media? And FB-messenger, is that part of it?
The Online Safety Act 2021 (https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00076/latest/text) says:
(1) For the purposes of this Act, social media service means: (a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions: (i) the sole or primary purpose of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‑users; (ii) the service allows end‑users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‑users; (iii) the service allows end‑users to post material on the service; (iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or (b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include an exempt service (as defined by subsection (4)). Note: Online social interaction does not include (for example) online business interaction.
Since "business interaction" is mentioned as an example of something that is not "social interaction" one might plausibly claim that "social interaction" should be interpreted quite narrowly, and then one could claim both that the primary purpose of HN is not interaction at all (it's a new aggregator) and that any interaction that does happen to take place in the comments is not "social" interaction but some other kind of interaction.
(It really does say "2 or more" rather than "two or more".)
“services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will be excempt.
Sigh. Good luck with that. Not at all vague.
Don't worry, this is performative law making. There's going ot be an election in March, probably called in January. So the government will probably return, then fix and alter this when they work out just how impossible it will be to enforce.
OR, everyone in Australia is going to have to prove their age to use social media, and TBH, social media ain't that great. It just may be the cold shower we all need.
Predictably, I see a lot of concern being expressed here about how this will be implemented and enforced. There is an underlying assumption, which seems fairly reasonable, that the government is going to use this opportunity (à la Louisiana) to overreach and require people to provide their identity to access these services.
One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this way? Political realities aside, is there a way for the government to set up an age verification service in a way that preserves privacy?
If so, the time is ripe for this community to put forward such a solution and advocate for it loudly. If current sentiment is any indication, social media age restrictions are going to go global and Australia is going to set the precedent for the rest of the world.
It is not possible aside from getting everyone an internet ID, which most will probably reject for good reason.
Governments should not get this power. This is the basic tenet that separation of powers is based on. The only measure that helps is to just take away the means.
I am uncertain it will go global at all or go very far even in Australia as there are at least some companies that try to benefit their customers. And there still is the private web anyway that isn't affected.
Australia should be made fun off for their attempts, it isn't their first rodeo.
With every passing year I can’t help but think Jonathan Haidt was right all along. I think this will be a very successful law in terms of positive societal impact. But I do worry about the negative repercussions of being able to ban means of practicing free speech. Australia already has a bad track record for that.
Heh. Good luck with that.
Some notes:
* It is illegal for a platform to provide children with a social media account, not for the child to create an account. Circumvention of this by the child is not illegal.
* No grandfathering - all accounts under 16 once this takes effect (which won't be until this time next year at earliest) must be deactivated.
* Maximum fine (per instance?) is 50 million AUD (about 32 million USD)
* The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).
I don't have a horse in this race but in my opinion a more graceful way to deal with this is to freeze the account until the under-16 is over-16 so they don't lose their friend connections, history, etc... The under 16 should have time to add a comment saying how to contact them otherwise. Discord group, etc... There must be a reason to remove the account that I can not see.
Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.
It may include all my friends from primary school and a photos of my late grandma.
(Disclaimer: I'm so old that at 16 I didn't ever had email. Please don't delete all my old stuff.)
> Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.
Where is the problem with this?
The problem rather is that the user did not create a private backup of the data that he wants to keep.
Possible contact with pedophiles, groomers, etc.
Once the child is over 16, they can add all their real-world friends again.
Could a possible solution there be to use the same language detection platforms used for detecting terrorist activity to also flag possible grooming for human moderator review? Or might that be too subjective for current language models leading to many false positives?
AKA stupid paranoia.
This is far too pat a dismissal of something which happens regularly. You can argue that it’s not frequent enough to justify this action or would happen anyway through other means but it’s a real problem which isn’t so freakishly rare that we can dismiss it.
Discord is for people over 13 years of age in many countries, yet there are many minors there. It is not working.
I’m not saying anything about specific services, only that there is a legitimate concern which can’t simply be dismissed without reason.
I am not sure I meant to reply to you, to be honest. It is an issue but so far the solutions are terrible. Outsourcing parenting to the Government or companies is also meh. I am sure there are parents who know of ways to reduce screen time for their children, it ranges from installing a program that does not let you on a website or start another program until and unless this and that, or take the phone from the kid's hand and go for a walk or study, whatever.
I thought the problem was the addictive nature of the feed
Leisure Suit Larry was ahead of its time with its age verification system.
For those of us who weren’t around at the time, could you d on what made it good? Thanks!
what made it good?
Less good, more fun. To 'prove' that you were over 18 you had answer a series of multiple choice questions [1] about pop culture that most kids almost certainly wouldn't know. Pre internet, finding the answer was surprisingly hard without asking an adult. The main result was that 10 year old me knew a surprisingly large number of obscure facts of about US culture, like who Spiro Agnew was and that Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a monkey.
Eventually we found out that you could press some magic key combination to skip the question all together.
[1] https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
LLM knows, thus the children know. Parents know, thus the children may easily know. It sounds fun but its practical value is questionable.
They asked questions grown ups would know but likely not kids. I remember one questions about The Beatles for example.
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
Edit: Added link
How do they plan on verifying age without using a government id?
They have something called “myID” (a digital ID), which is available to anyone 15 or older.
I believe that myID is also explicitly excluded as part of the bill.
> The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).
That's unexpectedly sane from a law like this. Hopefully they can figure out some zero-knowledge proof of age. (But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids.)
That wasn't in the original bill and it was only amended to add that yesterday, because it wouldn't get past the Conservative (Liberal/National Party) whose votes they needed to ram it through Parliament with almost no scrutiny otherwise (the hastily drafted bill only having been introduced the Friday before the final sitting week of the year).
That's more of the sort of behavior one expects from legislators making broad surveillance apparatuses under guise of protecting children on the internet.
> But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids
That's also true for alcohol and tobacco.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I would rather title it as: Social media companies to be banned from destroying the lives of minors.
Let's not swap the violators and the victims.
Questions about how this is going to be implemented and enforced from a technical and legal perspective are missing the point/benefit: this is about empowering parents and collectively changing behaviours.
"It's against the law so no you can't" isn't going to work with EVERY 14 year old. But it will work for many and hopefully that's enough.
I actually see this as potentially damaging to society. "It's against the law for you to use any website that lets you look at cat pictures and make any contact with anybody else" is so silly that kids are going to see right through that, and rightly not care about following it. So they're going to have less respect for the rule of law generally...
I'm very big on compentent laws, but also on just not having silly laws. It devalues the whole system...
(I would also wonder how many 14-year olds you know if you think this would work for many, but also I suppose that could be a cultural difference)