The gov gets at least full legal check of any SNS account.
> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.
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".
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/media-releases/statement...
* 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).
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
Edit: Added link
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...
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.
Once the child is over 16, they can add all their real-world friends again.
(Disclaimer: I'm so old that at 16 I didn't ever had email. Please don't delete all my old stuff.)
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's also true for alcohol and tobacco.
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.
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...)
Question is why hasn't Australia created a Digital ID system that can prove you're >= 16 years old without giving away other info?
* 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
The problem with a badly written law is how can you decide which is which?
Which one do you want banned?
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.
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 …
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
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.
I think parents and schools need to change the role they play.
The solution is more face to face time with other families on a regular basis. Replace Facebook with actual faces.
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.
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.
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;
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless. We should optimize the outcomes for the collective good, and not for the corner cases. Of course it has its cost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm all for directly banning certain practices Meta and others engage in, within scope. I'm completely opposed to ideological oppression.
"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'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)
Irony aside, these platforms are addictive and polarizing by design. I doubt a little test will change anything.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.sportsbet.com.au/betting/cycling/tour-de-france/...
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
(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".)
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.
Only if preserving privacy is the goal and I'm sure we both know it isn't.
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.
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...
Kind of an "airport book"
It's unfortunate that truth is so hard to come by these days.
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.
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?
> 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
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)
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.
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.
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...
If exec's views are science/truth. Then I bet you would have found execs in tobacco companies who thought they were doing good.
I don't understand why people are so against this? Isn't it possible that people do research to determine the validity of what they read online?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't lived in Europe some years, but I was amazed at how smoking was perceived as more acceptable there.
Being honest here because just telling parents to deal with a societal ill seems very shortsighted and comes from an immense place of priviledge.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...
"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.
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.
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
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
Who should be?
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.
But we don't need the government to protect people from Facebook!
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.
God damn boot lickers all over this thread. I’m so glad to not live anywhere near that godforsaken island.
Says who exactly ?
The evidence that Facebook harms people is extremely iffy.
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.
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...
> 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...
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.
Did anyone suggest anything close to that? And why mention OnlyFans? If the number of teen users helped by a social media site with face filters is greater than the number of teen users harmed by the social media site, then the former group might already be avoiding or using the worse features (including but not limited to face filters) in a healthy way. Parents and guardians should be teaching children to use the internet in a healthy way, including by warning that photos on social media can be edited with internal and external tools. Some public schools include the topic of manipulated images on social media in health class. Removing face filters from social media sites that have them might be a good idea, but people with severe body image issues will resort to external tools and post the edited images in their group chats. But I digress.
Of the pressures that teen social media users attribute to social media, "overwhelmed because of all the drama" and "like their friends are leaving them out of things" are more prevalent than "worse about their own life" [2]; even then, most teen social media users report that social media makes them feel "more connected to what's going on in their friends' lives" and "like they have people who can support them through tough times" [3]. The percentage of teen social media users reporting that social media has had a net positive effect on them personally is greater than the percentage that report a net negative effect [3] (and the sample probably includes users of TikTok and Instagram, which have face filters).
> Written by Mike Masnick.....
Wherein he links to [4] the publicized results [5] of Facebook's internal research, provides a major infographic from the results, and follows up with infographics and excerpts from Pew Research, yes.
Also, I have to correct what I wrote in my previous comment. What I originally wrote:
> Facebook's internal documents showed that on 11 of 12 body image issues, Facebook was helpful to more teens than it was harmful to
The evidence I referred to was from public documents about internal research, not internal documents. The infographic was about Instagram, not Facebook. Instagram, which has an app with face filters. The reesearch was about 12 issues, of which one was body image. The corrected version of what I wrote is:
< Facebook's public documents on an internal study showed that on 11 of 12 issues (including problematic use, social comparison, and eating issues), Instagram was helpful to more teen users than it was harmful to.
The 12th issue was body image. Instagram was helpful to more teen boys than it was harmful to, but more harmful to teen girls than it was helpful to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42266581
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-c...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-c...
[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/28/contrary-to-popular-opin...
[5] https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
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...
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.
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.
the addiction is necessary but insufficient.
It is a justified 'moral panic'. The social media companies have way too much power over peoples' conception of reality.
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.
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, I guess it will lead to kids getting a bit better at asking older folks for help.
They have to also offer an alternative, which is not specified...
Agreed, the execution is bad.
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.
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.
If you are selling more ads than there are minutes in a day * population some large enough group is getting mind fucked.
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
Time for drastic measures.
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.
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 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.
And that's the key point. The crucial one.
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.
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.
https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-se...
It's called the news media bargaining code. Technically speaking, the law isn't enforced since Google/Meta chose to voluntarily pay the link tax, rather than be put on the list that would force them to pay. But, at the end of the day it's the same effect.
Brilliant!! The incorruptible free market of Australia in all its glory.
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.
From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952
Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their friends who have kids?
People still talk to other people.
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.
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.
Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.
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
And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
What you don't want is to say "I can't control every part of my kid's life, so I need to government to come in and control the remainder."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How would you implement age verification?
Then when they can't achieve it they can say, "well we tried the non-authoritarian way and the nerds didn't oblige, now we're forced to bring out the brownshirts. Papers please!"
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.
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.
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.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/consultation-cooperation...
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.
That's exactly why there's a suggestion legacy media are driving this.
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?
“Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”
And honestly with the government's track record when it comes to privacy and technology, I don't think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
(a) the provider provides alternative means (not involving the material and services mentioned in paragraphs (1)(a) and (b)) for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances.
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... - page 8
So it doesn't actually provide an alternative, just says the nerds need to magic one up.
- 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.
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.
They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.
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.)
Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...
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...
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.
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.
How long until this happens and there's a big paedophilia scare so I can point and laugh at everyone involved?
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.
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.
Children's access to info is limited in all societies.
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.
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 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.
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.
My bigger concern than the creation of a free-thinking hacker - is the creation of a free-thinking society.
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
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.
My guess: You can’t outwit a digital native generation. Websites with less concern for the rules in general will become digital hangouts.
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?
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'?
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.
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.
Let's not swap the violators and the victims.
Sigh. Good luck with that. Not at all vague.
“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.”
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