Technology

It's still not entirely clear how the Australian government thinks they're actually going to enforce this.

Plenty of web services already require you to state your age to use them and I believe a large majority of users just coincidentally happen to be born on January 1st, 1900 as a result.

If they're expecting these tech companies to be gathering and storing peoples' government ID's, or something, somebody needs to carefully explain to them using small words why this is a monumentally stupid idea. Does something need to be done about social media addiction and the rampant sketchy behavior of the tech giants? Yes, probably. Is a blanket ban ever the actual solution to anything? No, very rarely.

It's just apparently all anyone can come up with when they've got government-brain.

Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.

An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.

What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.

Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn't disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn't really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that's a very real issue.

I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.

Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn't going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It's just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.

Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.

Now do 16+

Absolute stupidity and a waste of taxpayers' money spending so much time on this nonsense.

These incompetent morons are pretty much guaranteeing that they will lose the next election. In the middle of a housing and inflation crisis this is what these fuckheads decided was important.

I loathe the opposition, but it's hard to defend the sheer incompetence the Labor Party has displayed their entire term.

What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?

Are they still allowed on Lemmy?

The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.

this isn't for the safety of kids; it's to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.

Fair dinkem mate. How are they gonna regulate this?

I'm just waiting until they remember why borders are a thing that exists.