Bring on the brown shirts! We must protect family values at all cost!
What really needs to happen is tough regulators digging through the algorithms. Why are boys on YouTube getting served so much manosphere crap? Etc.
We have enough studies about what these algorithms are trying to do to people to keep them engaged. It’s not healthy for society.
Hopefully, this is an issue that will make Australians finally wake up fron their hypnosis...
Fuck google, meta, tiktok, all of them, they are ruining the world.
And fuck amazon too.
In their dreams is to BAN, take ID VERIFICATIONS and FINE private companies for the rest of their days, any Australian should be ashamed of such dull and unsophisticated policies, and BRAVO to Sunita Bose.
I think the way the EU approached this with their "digital gatekeepers" is smart. Recognize that policing the entire internet isn't possible or even desirable. Focus on those few companies with the largest capacity for harm. Different criteria might be appropriate when focusing on potential harm for children (e.g. Roblox rather than Twitter) but besides a few changes you'll probably end up with roughly the same list.
I'm not sure I'd support an outright ban, but rather very strict monitoring and requirements around moderation, in app purchasing, gambling mechanics, and so on.
This is the same country that brought you "the laws of mathematics are very commendable but they don't apply in Australia".
I foresee a two- or three-tier Internet in the future, and Australia will probably be the first "western" country to block Tor.
They sort of naturally do that if you have the appropriate challenges and opportunities around them.
> ancient pyramid aliens or discussions about how veganism will help your body.
There used to be a tabloid called "News of the Weird." This stuff just exists. You'll find it anywhere people gather. We're story tellers. When we don't have a compelling story we just make stuff up. It's identical to the point above.
> even all the adults can't come to a shared understanding of what is "good" or true.
It's not possible. If the children are intended to inherit the future then this is a flawed and reductive strategy. You will not achieve what you seek through parochial means.
Really.. I think your biggest problem should be advertising. It should be nowhere near children. Ban _that_ but keep the social media.
Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter are probably what's intended here, but what about Tumblr, DeviantArt or Discord? What about Reddit or a generic forum? What about VRChat or Webfishing?
If this is about protecting children from harmful depictions of body image or misogynistic content, then why not instead propose a law that states online services that allow children to join need to appropriately moderate the content that is shown to children or could face massive fines. I don't necessarily agree with that approach, but at least it would make sense with what their stated objectives are.
I think the real solution is banning under 18s from having smart phones period.
Last night they took advantage of the population being distracted by the US election by having an extended parliamentary session to push forward with a second reading of the controversial misinformation bill.
The government and state media apparatus are of course both immune from any penalty under the bill.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/acma-crackdown-social...
Methinks they're, again, using "think of the children" as a bulwark against the inevitability of their own waning power. The more things change...
Can we also prevent under 16s from being exposed to religious teachings?
When I have my masters degree finished I would like to live in your beautiful country where a lot of wonderful people live.
Little steps, get them young.
You should see the misinformation bill they are trying to pass.
Thinking things through isn't a quality that Australian governments have ever been blessed with, particularly when it comes to tech policy.
The Australian way would be to "ban" tor without any particular concern for enforceability or technical feasibility. Any actual blocking would be pushed onto industry somehow, which would then proceed to half-ass it, doing the absolute minimum possible to demonstrate they are complying with regulation.
I like Australia a lot, but a lot of the time it feels like political priority is to "make it look like something is being done". No one would actually care if the blocking worked or not unless the media made a big song and dance about it.
I also wonder how much of this ban is about "punishing" X and Meta in particular - Meta for it's refusal to pay for news and X because they didn't jump to immediately remove stuff the government wanted taken down.
> What even counts as social media?
Anything the government needs more leverage over or wants to shake down for money.
Just because it wouldn't be well-implemented doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about, not to mention that such things are almost always just 1 step on a path of many.
Yes they did. X has always capitulated to the whims of governments.
When it's about taking down left wing stuff he just complies.
Because it mentions that an account must be linked to an email address or phone number.
Which would be the standard for almost every online service.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/F2022L00062/latest/text
[2] https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-07/Basic...
They seem to be learning a lot from the Chinese.
Edit: actually never mind it was only active between the years 2007-2012
With my direct and indirect experiences of social media; I strongly support this.
That said; how does a young individual get updates to public transport outages that are only available via twitter/x, or read the menu of the local cafe that is only posted on Facebook?
I do worry about the implementation, especially if government owned. The government has, in the past, said one thing and executed another. (DNS metadata collection for ISP’s, for example) Whilst I have nothing to hide, and am happy to be entirely transparent with them; I can appreciate, respect, and understand the hesitation.
And, if government owned; how long until it’s “privatised”.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I am definitely not alone in submitting a report about a fake profile only for the system to nearly automatically deny it. Even when the real person being impersonated is literally sitting next to me asking me to help them submit the report. Even illegal drug dealers operate in the open on Meta properties with no recourse whatsoever.
The process of eliminating a huge swath of fake and harmful content could be implemented trivially, we have so many ways of muting or limiting the spread of information which is unvetted, dubious origin, has outlier qualities and so on - yet nothing of the type is engaged by these networks to obvious harmful consequences.
On a similar note; a family member was being exposed to intense and violent content over Facebook. There was no block, ignore, or report feature on the content exposed. The only option we could find, after researching it; was a “show less of this content” setting buried deep in the Facebook web app (not even available on the standalone app).
Honestly; if the account owner has little option to manage the content they are exposed to.. ugh!
This is surely an important point. People often make the argument of individual freedom. But at the same time, evidently we are excellent at using those freedoms to screw ourselves over. Globally, we've been speedrunning fucking up society in critical areas for decades now. Could the solution be less freedom? Is there some hidden hook whereby more freedom can solve everything?
Social media has also been enormously beneficial in terms of crippling the propaganda power of centralized, commercial media. It would be very bad to simply return to the authority of editorial boards. What we actually need is to grapple with the social responsibility that comes with this power, which could take decades or even centuries of living with the internet to wrangle.
Especially now that we know how little of the world traditional newsrooms are even willing to cover, let alone fund coverage of.
Besides, the cat is out of the bag.
It does make me want to watch the movie Equilibrium though.
If such regulations come in to effect, I think those business / institutions will adapt (eventually) to cater to communicating via additional channels.
Solutions will appear naturally to fill the gaps. This is not rocket science.
Probably in a similar way to how they did prior to 2010
The government does not own the implementation.
As mentioned in another comment, simply making this illegal would create a significant incentive for soc media companies to implement the solution.
The onus is on them to respect the law.
They've been slapped in the face in EU court enough now that they'd think about it seriously.
I have never needed either of these so maybe those kids will manage too?
And especially in the public transport case that information should really be made available outside of private platforms in any case.
Here's a better solution option that is easier to implement; even adults can benefit, and I think it solves some of the problems:
1. Have an easy option to turn off feeds and enforce for non-adults. This would apply not just to meta, twitter, but also to Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.
2. Disable like display. The like counts are what hooks people and gives the dopamine kick. Add the ability to hide it and not show for under 18 easily.
3. Social and news sites should not be allowed to send notifications, period. Not on phones or browsers, at least not for those under 18.
Something along these lines would improve social media for everyone, not just kids. Parents' mental health affects kids the same. So blocking it just for kids only goes so far.
I think you have valid points, but as noted; the industry has no interest in any form of regulation or responsibility.
I don’t see any alternative.
It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now.
Things like "Find my" and "air tags" are already beloved my millions, people use it to track loved ones and they swear by it. Even very intelligent, educated people.
There is such a cognitive dissonance between people swearing the last election meant a likely dictatorship and the same people setting up a tech rope around their necks in case a dictatorship does happen.
My now-dead Jewish grandfather met my grandmother during the French occupation because she was making fake papers. He would be horrified if he knew what we are doing right now with our data.
My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.
What the hell is going on?
I don't like the outcomes we see with modern social media, but this feels like we're punishing the victim instead of the perpetrator.
Children can not consent. They can't sign contracts. They don't understand the ramifications of what algorithmically delivered content does to you.
Ban this. I am addicted and can't stop. Or put a warning on social media apps like they do on cigarette packets. Using this app maybe harmful for your mental health.
There's this weird belief in certain circles that being gay is contagious and if we could only keep our kids away from seeing them they'll turn out "normal" and its bollocks. They'll just be unhappy and ashamed of themselves, think they're broken and not know why.
It's really not. Discord is very common too.
Those are explicitly within scope for this plan also.
The bills being put forward lately are really concerning and I have no idea how to get a party in that would kill the eSafety Commissioner and put in strong freedom of speech laws.
I'm pretty content seeing the web destroy their website blocking measures. Thank you DoH and ECH!
Kids also find alcohol. Can't supply as an adult or company.
The problem for the social media companies is that their recommendation algorithms and content make it very clear they know exactly what ages are watching and what they are showing them. They are multi-billion dollar multi-national operations and not some kid running an iffy image board. I usually hate the Australian government's dumb takes on anything tech or Internet (cryptography, internet filters) but in this case I think pushing regulatory compliance on large companies is what makes this doable.
my body, my choice.
For instance, it has always been possible for sufficiently motivated kids to acquire hard liquor. If nothing else they can steal it from their parents. To stop this you would need surveillance inside every home and extremely harsh punishments. But we don't actually need that, because an imperfect prohibition works reasonably well.
The whole premise that if a law isn't perfectly enforceable then it's a bad law is a weird thing that techies on the libertarian/autism spectrum come up with a lot, but it's not the way the world actually works.
my body, my choice.
In terms of enforcement, social media platforms already use algorithms and gather huge amounts of data on their users, enough to make a good estimate of age even if a user has signed up with a fake age.
So, when the algorithm detects that a user is likely to be underage, that's when they'd be required to show ID.
Many of the ID verification services that have spun up over recent years like AU10TIX are private companies that don't have their users' interests at heart. It wouldn't surprise me if they become more involved with the so-called data economy (data broker ecosystem)—if they aren't already.
Meta itself causes harm to users of all ages with their algorithms (like suggested content on the feed) which can't really be turned off, and fueled the misinformation crisis which really took off a few years ago. The social media companies have done a good job of convincing the Australian government to overlook these harms.
1: https://roffey.au/static/submission-social-media-2024.pdf
Of course there are lots of caveats here -- e.g. in the US model, what if the executive branch, legislation and the court are controlled by one person (which we'll see very soon), and in the other hand, in China there is actually a parliament and a formal process for many of the legislations (even though that doesn't mean much). Still, at a very high level, there is a distinction.
Let's suppose kids do get forced off the mainstream social networks with Australia legal entities (Meta, Goog, Bytedance, X?). What stops them from joining fringe social networks operated outside of Australia with even less oversight? Surely nothing bad could happen between kids on those networks.
Yes, the Australian government could DNS block them like they do torrent sites. But it really wouldn't be beyond teenagers to inform their friends about how to change DNS servers...
How do you verify the age? Verifying ID? That seems like another route that could go wrong. Just having a checkbox to confirm the age? Do a poll on this website to see how many people have visited an adult website when they were not...
As long as you have internet access, there will be a way.
I don't have a good proposal, but I feel this is more like a cultural issue than something we can simply fix by implementing law.
...Why not make the aspects of these sites that are so harmful illegal in general?
The cost/benefit of social media between 14 and 16 is much more favorable to social media than <14.
Impose an insanely steep tax (say, 10,000%) on all ads revenue tied to underage individuals.
Now it's possible to pursue the Al Capone prosecution: tax fraud.
SocMed cos. will avoid anyone underage like the plauge.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...>, discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354> (17 Feb 2012).
But yes, the Al Capone solution seems like it would work.
Not reliably so, and not people who are deliberately trying to fake the system.
Looking at the ads FB are showing me, they are not well targetted at all. I can see an add about AI in education that seems to be aimed at teachers (not a teacher), one from a charity aimed at people with spare rooms that could be used to accommodate human trafficking survivors (I do not have a spare room), a summer school for kids who might do a history related subject at university (that one is well targetted), one advertising admin jobs at British intelligence agencies (I only just meet security requirements and I do not have relevant experience). I get shown multiple ads aimed at Muslims (I am not a Muslim). In the past I have been shown ads for Judaism GCSE courses (not Jewish either, and my kids did not do any religion GCSEs).
Maybe there’s a reason they want me to rewatch things, but I find it extremely annoying to have the first rows of recommendations be things I watched recently.
It does not require this, and in fact the solution may be almost entirely outside of the technology realm.
Simply making it illegal would be enough to:
1. Deter a lot of people from enabling social media on the smartphone of their kids
2. Enable a lot of parents to tell their kids that what they are doing is illegal
3. Force BigTech to implement whatever solution fits best to control the age of the user before install. The onus to respect the law is on them.
It's a very technical misunderstanding of how law works, or the effects law have on society. Legality isn't technicality. Something being physically possible doesn't "break" the law, and breaking a law doesn't render that law useless.
When it comes through, theres like 10 other interest groups who want to immediately use it for their thing.
If it becomes commonplace, the iPhone could vouch for you about your age, without disclosing your identity.
The problem is, what is "it"? Are applications like WhatsApp and iMessage social media? They seem to be significant sources of teenage angst but they are also incredibly useful tools. What about Hacker News? Is it social media?
How do you prove it?
It's Australia, who often rank very low for a western country on human rights.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...
Secret trials https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no...
Secret laws https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-se...
Secret ministries https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott...
Secret backdoors https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...
Introducing Digital ID system that may be enabler for this https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id
While trying to introduce laws to weaken encryption an ex Australia prime minister famously said:
> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Malcolm Turnbull.
What's crazy the west look at places such as China as dystopian with the great firewall etc, it appears China was just ahead of the game.
Australia is probably the easiest place to introduce a system to block social media, a experimentation ground for five eyes. Easy to push things through, protesting isn't an Australian pass time, not that big of a country, not that small of a country.
Never forget that the Western worlds first, most successful racist genocide occurred in Australia, and the same racist reasoning that allowed it to maintain White Australia policies into the 80's are still being used to justify the slaughter of innocent human beings all over the world.
When the USA wants something dirty done, in yet another illegal war, Australia is ready with hat in hand, willful and subservient, to commit yet more crimes against humanity and get away with it.
Australia is where the apparatus designed, with intent, to massively violate the human rights of over a billion human beings currently operates, at insane scales, every second of the day. Australians are fine with it.
(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)
In the US, children under 13 are usually forbidden from having online accounts. Do some kids lie? For sure, but the sites will try to ban those accounts.
In practice, this legislation would be very positive because it would establish the expectation that young teens _are not on social media_. This only works if it's national legislation: No kid will feel left out because his/her friends are on SnapGramTok. They are all banned. They can be mad at the unfair government/adults together.
What is social media exactly?
This would need to be ban on specific blocklisted companies and services which might be a good thing because alternatives might arise that could try to do their best to not end up on the blocklist.
I don’t understand what is dystopian about knowing where I left my keys, and seeing how my wife’s commute home is doing without phoning her while she is driving, assuming we always both have mobile phones.
EDIT: toned down the term I used.
Why not just (a) make it illegal so the parents and tech companies see it that way and (b) put some fines on the responsible adult parties if violations are found?
Sure enforcement would be spotty and loose, but tickets for parents and fines for tech companies would go a long way to establish the cultural change without the need for "verification"
A company can't work like that - the tech company will need to do it's upmost to avoid the fines, and so will implement verification that is both unsafe, incredibly invasive, discriminatory but crucially has an audit trail, and it's insane to suggest they would do anything else.
If companies are motivated and parents are motivated to prevent it and schools have the cover to also police it, then social media usage probably won't hit critical mass for kids and they won't feel FOMO to get it.
"it's illegal" is usually a decent enough hard stop to most kids for "why can't I have it"
Should just age-restrict smartphones altogether imo lol. Entire generations survived without mobile phones and it would remove entire issues around addictive mobile games, social media abuse, attention/focus issues
nature-nurture x game-theory anxiety/thrill VS. consciousness & planetary/colony-wide awareness; and I'm not talking about some esoteric spirituality or whatever the fuck.
we are always in a natural balance, established by those who do and those who don't. all of us compartmentalise. and good/noble/grand people in law are rare and entirely absent in politics.
TV & the radio made a lot of destructive behaviours look cool (all that finboy shit) and so did feel-good literature like Siddharta.
and then there's the myth of "hard decisions" that can only be made by certain kinds of characters.
young ppl are easy to bend towards hierarchies that reward certain kinds of behaviour and convictions. makes em feel proud.
and in the end we are all just doin our job ^^
Am I correct in this assumption?
The slide to dystopia which is described or implied by countless fictional books is, in fact, really easy to pull off. It's death by a thousand socially convenient compromises.
I remember when a significant portion of people thought carrying phones around was creepy, or that spending your life looking at screens was antisocial, and these things were actively proclaimed. Contrary to popularly repeated historical revisionist tropes, lots of people had to be cajoled and prodded and pressured into the "digital revolution". Surely others remember that?
And now we're at a stage now where if you don't have something like whatsapp or facebook or instagram or whatever, depending on the culture and the age group, there's a real chance that you'll be socially confronted, and even belittled in some circumstances.
8 years old doom scrolling tiktok is a dystopia we are experiencing right now, pick your flavor
It depends on the assumptions you're willing to make.
Imagine if Australia introduces a block that works really well, and preserves privacy, but you can bypass it by using a VPN, or by rooting your phone.
Would that be good enough, because only 1% of kids will figure out those bypasses? Or will the knowledge spread like wildfire until 90% of kids are using VPNs or rooting their phones?
If you assume such bypasses would spread like wildfire, Australia would also need to block all VPNs or make every phone impossible to root. Tough to do that in a way that isn't dystopian.
Huxley's "Brave New World" was published 1932
Although I think it's only for government sites. I believe it could probably be used to verify only age in a privacy-respecting fashion.
But let's be real. We all know this isn't about protecting children, because it never is.
If say an adult is incapable to setup a phone/tablet, then a person at the store would help them set the initial part but skip the login with Google/Apple etc.
No idea why this was not tried and then see if it fails.
"...way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet..."
Nope, it does not require this.
What you can do is to construct a zero-knowledge proof of the age of the smartphone user. You can do this based on the certificate that is provisioned in modern electronic passports. The proof construction can choose to ignore expiry date, so the government can offer to issue expired passports with blank photos for the instances of people who should not have functioning passports.
Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device.
So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps.
Then no parents are going to let the kids use their ID, because of the negative impact to themselves. And you have no more means of tracking than already exists today.
This also offers interesting possibilities for a startup! In the EU today, there are essentially zero legal ways for a 12-year-old to have a group chat with their friends, apart from RCS and iMessage, which then divides the friend group into two halves. Imagine then a chat app aimed specifically at group conversations for teens, where every user has a verified age. This type of app is something parents will pay good money for.
> So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps.
Doesn't this automatically give the "common auth mechanism" perfect knowledge of all the parent's social media accounts, whether under a real name or a pseudonym? That sounds like an additional means of tracking.
Also, what if the parent legitimately has multiple devices that they use for social media (e.g., a phone and a laptop)? You might say, "log them out if it's used simultaneously from multiple devices", but then you're tracking all social-media usage everywhere in realtime.
Location tracking is just another knife.
- You don't have full control over the knife. In fact it's not about your use of the knife.
- The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust.
- Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it.
- Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once.
- Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries.
- Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them.
Not in the hand of a government that has a monopoly on violence. Most governments in the world dont have your best interests in mind and being tracked 24/7 is a bad deal to get.
> What the hell is going on?
Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them?
What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing.
What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones.
Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example:
> My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.
Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere.
A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior.
I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously.
And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today.
So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies.
Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.
Social media now is a very different beast. It's designed to be addictive, and it generates engagement through polarization.
Is banning social media for children a punishment for the child? Some parents would argue the opposite, that it's a good thing that the child isn't developed enough to realise yet.
Wouldn't placing the limits on the social media companies potentially prevent them for operating at a profit? I don't think you're wrong, but I question if you're not removing social media for child and teenagers regardless, the difference is if there will be social media for them to use later in life.
Banning social media for those under 16 (or 18) or killing off social media in general do to restrictions in how they operate doesn't really matter to me, even if the latter seems like a bigger win for society in general.
Social media was an interesting and at times fun experiment, but it might be time accept that it's not working out as we had hoped.
I can't speak for the other big companies of the time, like MySpace and Xanga, because I never used them.
I would have supported a ban when I was in highschool. I think a lot of teenagers would have.
Also I don't understand how a ban is punishing the victim anymore than banning drugs from high-schools is punishing any teenagers.
For example: Comparing the THC levels of the 60s to the THC levels today, and the potency social media of the 90s to the social media today seems appropriate. I mean one can only do so much social media over a slow modem on a home that has a single shared phone line.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396976-is-cannabis-tod...
How many people do that becasue they have thought about what they perhaps look back on posting on MySpace or Bebo or whatever and think "thank god that's disappeared from the internet"?
Not... waves hands whatever the f*%k this is.
People in their early to mid 30s had Facebook come into popularity during high school. I’d wager the majority of that age group would happily ban social media for children having experienced youth both with and without modern social media.
You would login and see what your friends were up to, in chronological order.
Of course many will say this can be abused, but all technology can be abused and the reason we're in this mess in the first place is because OS designers haven't figured out that the relationship between parent and child is an important one which should be strengthened, not made weaker ..
What? Why would parents need permission from their government to forbid their kid from having an Instagram account? They're parents, so they can engage in parenting.
Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.
Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).
In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.
[1] https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-readies-age-verification-...
[2] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202409/australia-launches-te...
They note that existing age verification setups largely either rely on providing ID, or on a combination of manual and automated behavior profiling (face recognition, text classification, reports from other users), both of which have obvious privacy and/or accuracy issues. The "double-blind tokens" point to a summary by LINC explaining how they _could_ be implemented with zero-knowledge proofs, but I could not find an article or a practical implementation (could just be a mistake on my part, admittedly)
At _best_ you end up with a solution in the vein of Privacy Pass - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.pdf - but that requires a browser extension, a functioning digital ID solution you can build on top of, and buy-in from the websites. Personally, I also suspect the strongest sign a company is going to screw up the cryptographic side of it is if they agree to implement it...
This is not like porn which is a solitary activity: on social media you have to be social and let everyone know… at least for traditional actually-social media, not content-consuming apps like TikTok.
It's similar to alcohol usage: you can't stop it completely, but also you don't have 50% of kids bringing it to school.
So like piracy?
> This is not like porn which is a solitary activity: on social media you have to be social and let everyone know… at least for traditional actually-social media, not content-consuming apps like TikTok
You don't? You can stay perfectly anonymous.
Article states that sites must demonstrate they are taking reasonable measures to enforce this though - a lot will come down as to how courts interpret that. If they go to the extremes of the KYC laws in australia I imagine a significant fraction of adults will not want to verify their age.
If the law is to have any teeth at all, it should be the problem of the service provider.
Say for example that a banned feature for minors is having media feeds based on past watching behavior. Lacking a reliable age verification it's simple for social media companies to remove the feature entirely for all users, if it's unreasonable or impossible for them to implement age verification.
> extremes of the KYC laws in australia
It's gonna be cookie banners 2.0.
I bet a lot will just ask for a credit card number, like in those old scam fake-porn websites from the late 90s/early 2000s.
Societal signaling is pretty powerful.
Request the social media platform to implement the restriction. The large social media platform have billions $ cash , so if that "really want to implement it" it should not be a problem.
However, I expect social media companies to "drag out every reason , why they can ot implement it..." - since it does not benefit the social media company. ... and would reduce its user base ...
I'm sure that Facebook, Google and TikTok will be delighted to make it mandatory that Australians send in photos of their face, passport and driving license.
But is it good for Australia to have their citizens hand such mountains of PII to unaccountable foreign megacorporations?
That's exactly what they're aspiring to here, following on from a well-established pedigree of Australian lawmakers and their dysfunctional relationship with the Internet.
Example:
It might not even be the desired outcome to have identification, the better outcome could be to have feature Z stripped for all users (for example video feeds based on past watching behavior).
The real change though comes from parent's perceptions. Right now there's age limits of 14-years-old on most social media platforms, however most parents just see this as a ToS thing, and nobody cares about actually violating it. Once it becomes law, the parents are suddenly responsible (and liable) for ensuring their children are not breaking the law by accessing social media. It's not going to stop everybody, but it'll certainly move the needle on a lot of people who are currently apathetic to the ToS of social media platforms.
Social networks, public media sharing networks, discussion forums, consumer review networks.
[1] https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-12/Phase...
What's far more useful is to propose effective incentives and disincentives, and let the participants work this out for themselves. There are some useful principles and examples which come to mind:
- Business is profit-oriented. Attack the basis of profits, in a readily-identifiable and enforceable way, and activity which pursues those markets will tend to dry up.
- Business is profoundly risk-averse. Raise the risks of an activity, or remove protections or limitations on threads (e.g., Section 230 of the CDA in the US), and incentives to participate in that activity will be greatly reduced. Penetrating corporate and third-party veils would be particularly useful, in this case, of service providers (aiding and abetting in a proscripted commerce) and advertisers (profiting by same). Lifting any limitations on harms which might occur (bullying, induced suicides, addiction, or others) would similarly be crippling.
As to how age might be ascertained:
- Self-reporting. Not terribly reliable, but a decent first cut.
- Profiling. There are exceedingly strong indicia of age which can be made, including based on a particular account's social graph, interests, online activity, location data (is the profile spending ~6h daily at an elementary school, and not lunching in the teacher's lounge?), etc. One strong distinction is between legislation and regulation, where the latter is imposed (usually with rulemaking process) through the executive branch (SCOTUS's Loper v. Raimondo being a phenomenally stupid rejection of that principle). Such regulation could then on a more flexible basis identify specific technical means to be imposed, reviewed, and updated on a regular schedule.
- Access providers. Most people now access the Internet through either fixed-location (home, work, institutional) providers, or their own mobile access provider. Such accounts could well carry age (and other attestation) flags which online service providers could be obliged to respect as regards regulation.
Jumping in before a few obvious objections: no, these mechanisms are not perfect but I'll assert they can be practically effective; and yes, there are risks for authoritarian regimes to abuse such measures, but then, those are already abusing present mechanisms. I'd include extensive AdTech-based surveillance in that, which is itself ripe for abuse and has demonstrated much of this already.
(That said, I'd welcome rational "what could possibly go wrong" discussion.)
I think that introducing people to social media right when they'll be on the hook for all their bad decisions during the exploratory period is going to result in a lot of 18-20 year olds in a ton of debt + them being even more hooked on social media than kids are now because they'll also be away from adult supervision. Imagine the sports betting ads for the newly 18. The influencers puffing up the newly 18 about how adult and mature they are and all adults buy product X, etc. They'll have no way of knowing what's normal to share and will probably overshare, but unlike minors, they'll be legally able to torpedo the rest of their lives. Etc.
Making it 18 puts a target on their back for the ad and social media companies: Fresh meat that aren't entitled to any protection. That seems like a bad combination to me.
If the relationship is valuable to you, it requires maintaining. Following each other on social media isn't the same.
Not to mention social media is filled with someone's best moments which give you a bad view on how you're doing against your peers.
Not to that half of the posts on social media are ads, which aren't good for you at any age.
I’d argue, neither do the majority of adults.
I’m still for this ban because a young brain is so much more malleable and hence much more at risk.
Advertisment is not the problem here.
I think for starters we should have competition, therefore mandate federation between platforms. No big winner-takes-all tech monopolies. But the USA doesn't want to give up the profit, nor the power that comes with it, to own the world.
Perhaps as an example, Google performs an auction in the milliseconds before serving up ads. So it's possible.
In the end platforms will integrate an AI buddy that will come to know us even better, and that represents our ways. Of course we'll want that, but please, federate.
"This is why we can't have nice things".
You can't drive a car without headlights, you can't drive a car without seatbelts, you can't kill your neighbours if he fucks your wife, you can't open a shop selling BBQ dog ribs... life is so unfair =(
the median seventy-five year old’s brain is not in the same condition as the median thirty year old’s
I am joking of course, but there is something to ponder about the growing number of childless people over 40 voting with little concern for the long term.
The problem is that a lot of democracies have a demography skewed towards old people and at the same time a simple majority can dictate over s.th. like a minority of 30% of the voters.
A 60 year old is expected to have the capacity to make informed choices. Whether they do is down to personal responsibility. Many of us will be 60 one day.
What do you think is wrong with people over 60?
https://www.nzz.ch/english/why-are-young-germans-voting-for-...
The most insane left culture warriors who wanted to relive a second spring on the other hand are indeed approaching or over 60. Fake culture warriors like Pelosi and Biden are over 80.
Fake culture warriors in software organizations like Python are approaching or over 60. You know, the exact same people who read Ayn Rand and supported ESR when it was politically expedient for their careers 20 years ago, because they always go with the herd, no matter how stupid it is.
These culture warriors, through their purges and insane statements, have so thoroughly destroyed any trust in the Democrats that there is a landslide victory for Trump now. It will take years to restore that confidence.
> Will this mean I will have to register as my real name on Hacker News?
First of all, age verification shouldn't mean the social media provider gets true identities. They shouldn't be trusted with that info. There needs to be services that allows verifying your age against one service, and the media service just getting the receipt of that verification. Whether such a service exists already or not shouldn't matter. The law should be written so that social media companies are restricted in what they can do when they can be sure someone isn't a minor, and when they are sure. For extra safety, perhaps it should say they can't be allowed to see for example physical ID:s. Because otherwise you'd risk privacy issues.
Second, I think it's better to formulate these laws the way the new york draft did: that specific features are restricted for minors. Such as: enless media feeds based on past behavior (such as any video "shorts" feeds in all the major platforms today).
You're damn right, same as the law enforcing seatbelts, cars head and brake lights, ABS, testing of tap water quality, testing of food quality, &c.
I want absolute freedom to get utterly fucked by the first mega corp or dumbass who want to do it !!!
I've fallen off a bike before and my helmet definitely saved me from a serious head injury. Would I have worn one if it was not compulsory and drilled into me as a child that's what you do when you ride one? Maybe not.
It saved me that day and I expect it saves many people in this country every day too.
Yes. Because this is a false dichotomy. The latter does not depend upon the former. I can say that with certainty because I received the message growing up in a country with a cycling proficiency programme in schools instead of mandatory helmet laws.
Everyone should wear a helmet when riding, but criminalising noncompliance is an inefficient, reductive, expensive, heavy-handed, unnecessarily punitive, and ultimately counter-productive approach to achieving it.
So is controlling what and how much people can eat to prevent or reduce obesity.
From now on, you are only allowed to eat broccoli (I actually love broccoli) to ensure you will not be a burden on the public health system.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/pedestrians-and-bicyclists/bicyc...
You think teens are going to start using darknet social media?
Which would comfortably cover every method of person to person communication from SMS to the telephone app.
There are many knives in your relative proximity all the time. Some of them are used for your benefit, other are used for other's benefit, every one have potential to be abused against you by evil actor.
> The people in control of the knife have a poor track record at caring about you, and belong to a category that history has proven we should not trust.
Scrutiny should be proportional severity of harm times the frequency of harm.
> Every time you use the knife, you sign a blank contract giving full authorization to future non-specified knife usage to people you don't know nor do you know their motive. And you trust none of those people, for an indefinite length of time, will abuse it.
Everytime you enter restaurant or even leave your house you are giving full authorization to people around you who posses knives to use those knives for non-specified purposes. You can only hope they are reasonable and won't cause you harm.
> Cumulative use of the knife can accumulate stabs that may be delt to you and all your love ones one day all at once
Knives don't need to accumulate anything. One misapplication can end your life literally
> Use of knife can be automated and scale at the level of all countries.
There are many machines that are basically bunch of fast moving knives. It's on you to not be where they are. Their operators are bound to take precautions proportional to harm times the frequency of harm.
> Most people are not knowledgeable about the knife, don't know much about it, and it's invisible to them
You usually can't really tell how many knives are around you and most are hidden at most times.
Although reasonable restrictions on all technologies aren't inherently bad.
Restrictions imposed pre-emptively just because nightmare scenarios are easy to imagine and captivating are not great.
No, it really couldn't. If it can't disclose your identity, then there's no mechanism to revoke a compromised or cloned identifier, and no ability to demonstrate in court that you performed the necessary diligence correctly.
Age verification systems must, inherently, either produce a secure proof of age with no genuine anonymity, or a chocolate teapot highly insecure proof of age that's no better than a "I am over 18" tickbox that isn't going to protect websites in court from these clumsy laws.
Surely even a flag locked behind the "parental controls" section of an iPhone is much better than a tickbox.
See, e.g., the GDPR, which as written has strong language against storing data, but as applied is riddled with 'reasonable' exceptions that have never been tested in court. It's like Schrödinger's regulation, it's both incredibly restrictive and trivial to comply with (unless you're Super Evil™) at the same time, somehow.
The loss of privacy was something that was totally foreseeable (by me, at least) but embraced by the general population. The general embrace has meant that we all operate within a panopticon-like system - this itself modifies behaviour. No alternative choices are available - as a collective all have to 'follow the herd', with phones etc being essential to modern existence, despite the privacy reservations felt by many.
I'm taking the opportunity to express the idea that it is possible to find appeal in this or that tech feature and to lose sight of the broader ramifications. Each incremental change can be justified (no batteries makes my phone slimmer, 'finding my' is useful, its good to know my blood pressure, etc) but to imagine that the rollout of these features is a natural unfolding of reality without preordained end goal (technocratic governance) is naive.
Technocratic governance is not a goal that anyone would accept if it was proposed in a straightforward way - hence the duplicity, incrementalism, destruction of existing institutions, etc.
and you'ld learn how to code just like millions have for decades - in school or library computer rooms, or with an age-restricted computer that your family would provide.
The failings of blanket alcohol prohibition in America do not automatically transfer to all forms and instances of prohibition. Thinking otherwise is a trap that techie libertarians often fall for, for some reason. Science should study it.
But it is. Children using social media put active pressure on other children to use social media too. Not using social media today is very difficult for children, since it can make social integration a lot more difficult. Children using social media are actively pushing other children into addiction. Children using social media are actively harming others.
Your body, your choice. But if you regularly run over people, I will take away your drivers license.
Saying that though, it does seem like as soon as I click one advert (either out of curiosity, or to waste obvious scam advertisers budget), I'm suddenly inundated with similar adverts.
Worse I've clicked an ad, bought a product and still seen adverts for the same product from the vendor after the fact. I'm pretty sure there are ways for vendors to preclude such wasteful ad spend.
Also, it's not like the platform is going to give advertisers access to its full capabilities. For one, they don't need to - they only need to sell the minimum it takes to keep the advertisers on board. Two, they wouldn't want some clever advertisers to extract juicy data indirectly and cut out the middleman.
What am I missing here? Don't you still need the platform to actually advertise on? How could I extract data and use that to advertise to someone?
Better capabilities for customers, they reach more customers, more revenue = they may increase ad spending because they see it working
Monopoly on violence is the most significant cultural development that allowed incredible wealth and societal development.
Currently we are in the age of commonality of surveillance. If this turns out to be harmful enough we might as well move towards monopoly on surveillance and it might be an improvement.
Personally I think it won't be necessary.
I'm sure of one thing. Surveillance won't go away because it's a useful technological tool.
Right now if a parent says "You can't have instagram. Because I say so." the kids answer will be "But I will be a looser noob if I can't. All my friend are on it. Jenny has 5k followers!"
Vs after the ban: "You can't have instagram. This is the law." "But mom! Some of my friends are on it. Jenny has 1k followers!" "Is that so? I will ask Jenny's mom if she knows about that."
It is not going to stop absolutely everything. (Same as prohibiting underage alcohol drinking is not stopping teens from drinking any). But it will put a serious damper on it and fracture the social networks into smaller more underground ones.
They probably want to allow their kids to use a computer, so it would be very easy for the kid to go to instagram when they dont look.
Why not? Most parents don't tend to hand their children drugs.
The system wasn’t really designed for the internet era and I think a lot of people would not be happy about handing all the personal info over to TikTok or Facebook
What? you mean asking the parent to enter a date of birth before giftin the child a phone and setting it in child mode is like burning things?
Did you really relied to me? Then explain
Seems to me a better idea then government IDs or sending your ID to Facebook.
I could guess why Google did nlot add this feature to Android , they want the money from ads, and maybe Apple wants Google to bhave money to share with them.
How do you want to enforce it? Everyone who grew up as Internet started knows that everyone is over 18 on the Internet. Or did you, as a kid, ever put your real birth date on a form asking for it for purposes of age-walling you?
And if not voluntary, then... it's either companies asking for government-issued IDs on a case-by-case basis, or a larger system, perhaps legally mandated, that forces you to tie your government-issued ID into it so age information is automatically propagated in the background.
Easy
1 make it illegal for children to buy smarthpones, tablets.
2 make the OS vendors to add a parent mode/child control API, when the phone starts first time the parent enters the details
3 inform the buyer that if he is a parent he is responsible for the child not the government, the parent must set the correct birthdate on the device and set the device in child mode , they can decide to trust the child but then the government is not responsible.
4 the browssers on this locked devices will report to the websites if the user is adult or not, they will not report he brithdate just a true /false
5 if a website fails to read the age from the browser and still offers oillegal content to a browser that is marked as minor then the website is repossible and it is fined.
At no point the child is asked to enter his age so there is not similar to current place where you click I am over 18.
If you have children you might have made an account for them to use a smartphone, Did you lied bout their birthdate ? Did you gave them the new phone in a box and let them set it up because you were to busy ?
No, but the ease of breaking the law does need to be weighed against the costs it imposes on everyone else. Carrying a driver's license is almost a non-cost, and is really only necessary til people hit 28 or so and cashiers largely stop checking.
Needing to verify age online could place very real costs on people. Enabling surveillance is an issue. The chilling effect of knowing that database leaks are going to tie your real identity to your online one is an issue (think the Ashley Madison leaks, but for your old angsty teenager Reddit account). There are a lot of small groups who don't want their membership revealed, like LGBT people in countries with laws against it, domestic abuse victims, support groups for people with trauma, etc, etc.
I don't think I've seen a system that doesn't involve those issues. I'm sure one is hypothetically possible, but that never seems to be a goal of these laws.
So the question is whether restricting social media use by age is worth those drawbacks. My personal values say it's not, but I do recognize that's a value call to some degree and views will differ.
You can make social media illegal for under 16s without requiring online age validation.
After all, a form of this already exists with the US COPPA [1] law, and the presence of that law hasn't forced age validation on everyone.
If the US can make it de-facto illegal for companies to let under 13s use social media, and has been the case for over 20 years, then it shouldn't be a sudden privacy-ending problem for Australia to make it illegal for under 16s to use social media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Furthermore, now I have to navigate the morality of encouraging my own kid to lie, just so she can use an online service that I approve of as a parent. Terrible law.
Piracy would be a good comparison to this law. We all know how that turned out.
Also we have to consider that gov spying programs are developed everywhere in the world, and the fact CP has been used as an excuse to pass questionable bills again and again.
What's even crazier is that we have to even argue this is a problem.
And that intelligent people are arguing that this is all OK. People that read history books, saw PRISM and Snowden, heard about cops abusing their system already, etc.
There aren’t big tech companies running piracy services.
You could put them under the rule of law if they did.
Also, people under 60 still need to test and qualify for a license. So I’m not sure why you went down this comparison route.
Why would any pre-teen / teen care about what government thinks? They care what their friends think about that TikTok they saw during recess, though.
No, because it incentivizes the addictive content.
> YouTubers soliciting donations, selling merchandise etc. are preying on young kids.
That's a different issue, and already happening. It should be banned too.
There's basically no way to ban this (and advertising) without banning social media.
Way to rationalize stalking away.
They do the same in Chris Hansen's show. They are there only to check upon the safety of the minor.
That point is that even the user making positive attempts to moderate their experience on the platform is futile and in my experience largely ignored. (I actually have the experience that it then shows me more of that content.)
Social media platforms are keenly aware that anger and fear drive significantly more engagement and whistleblowers have detailed how Facebook prioritises this content, shovelling it to users specifically to drive usage (and with that ad value and ad impressions).(1)(2)(3)(4)
There is a deep commercial incentive for social media networks to act against their own "community guidelines" and legislation. I applaud Australia's direction for recognising that these networks are not acting in good faith and introducing measures that address the proven harms.(5)
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
2. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...
3. https://time.com/6103645/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haug...
4. https://time.com/6097704/facebook-instagram-wall-street-jour...
5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
I simply don't use it.
I didn't need any government "assistance".
A functioning digital ID solutions seems like table stakes for anything in 2024.
I do not see how following her every step would help her though.
We are usually in a call whenever she is outside, but I feel like even this is futile were anything bad to happen.
do i really have to explain this to you ...
Personally I would like them to regulate what kind of info the algorithms are allowed to use to profile people. No super-focused targeting.
In a society it's not fair for your selfish actions to have a negative effect on everyone else.
Are you planning to ban all snowsports? Horse riding? They produce similar or higher levels of injury and disability even with helmets.
>it's not fair for your selfish actions to have a negative effect on everyone else.
If negative externalities are the metric we're evaluating what is and isn't allowed in our society, you're really going to take a pass at cyclist helmets instead of cars? Do you know what the leading cause of child death in Australia is? It's cars
The history is extremely unlikely to be available to the id validator (beyond the domain at most). VPNs can't see the actual history either.
The average PornHub user's history will be full of weird incest shit at the very least, not because of any specific interest in the genre but because so much generic heterosexual porn is labeled as such. Looks really bad for you if it makes the newspaper.
So even "tame" leakage is 100x more embarrassing than it ought to be, and thus snooping on bf/husband's devices to humiliate them over their porn usage is normalized on relationship subreddits. Same goes for them plugging your email address into the password reset form to try to verify whether you have an account on any given site.
Maybe not to you, but to some people it is incredibly valuable for maintaining relationships. And these are kids about to part with most of their friends for the first time, you can't rely on them having learned your insightful life lessons by this point. I'm guessing you've never been felt the negative effects being left out of a social circle can have? Relationships aren't binary, not everyone is best friends or strangers. Lots of room in between for people to bond or be left out.
I grew up in a pre internet world. We had "negative effects being left out of a social circles" then too. Social circles being hard is not going away regardless of how this decision lands.
The fact that you never grew up in the social media world highlights exactly why you don't understand the problem despite thinking you do. Your good old "social circles being hard" issue is not the problem here.
Please understand that there are plenty of situations where someone gets invited to something if and only they are visible to others and easy to invite. i.e. there exist plenty of situations where being on the platform is the sole determining factor. And that being off the platform that the majority use puts a very significant, ongoing, and asymmetric burden on the host (or invitor, if it's a different person) to keep them posted on all the details that did not exist otherwise, and this fundamentally makes one less likely to be included, in an entirely natural and unavoidable fashion that is no fault of anyone involved, and has nothing to do with "social circles being hard".
You have to recognize when the system is making a problem worse than it naturally is.
Communication is incredibly valuable for maintaining relationships. Whether that's through social media, IM, calling them, hanging out in meatspace. THAT is valuable. Not merely following someone on social media.
I am in my early 20s. My highschool life (and some after) was filled with social media use and borderline addiction. I added people on social media that I kind of knew, or talked to once, or wanted to talk to.
But literally none of that kept me in touch with most if not all of them. More than half of them I never messaged, never interacted with on social media.
What kept me in touch with them was me or them. I deleted all my social media. And the ones who make the effort to contact me out of social media? Those are the real relationships.
Frankly, Stephen King stories are much weirder than any porn. Imagine enjoying watching monsters eating people.
I think the kinetic testing is done all over the middle east. The mind-control stuff is pretty successfully deployed down under, though.
For those who are reading this thread in disbelief at the magnitude of Australia's dark history, this is a compelling read:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/items/02ba5454-5...
oh dear, have we forgotten about The Holocaust so soon?
Or are we just going to let slide mis-information on true historical events that don't need lying to relay the injustice, and support justice?
Btw we are not going to accept that you mistyped, Again.
The White Stolen Generation is a real thing. If you don't know about it, you're not qualified to dismiss it:
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
(EDIT: please look at the URL, which includes the anchor directly to the section on the "White Stolen Generation" - for some reason when following the URL through HN, the jump to the anchor for that section is not followed, giving the impression that there is no "White Stolen Generation" section on the given website, when .. indeed .. there is.)
Those who don't want to confront this painful aspect of Australia's terrible history tend to want to muddy the waters, but those of us who actually suffered under the forced human trafficking regime that was official Australian government policy see things a lot more clearly...
(Which would be hilarious, as it means, allmost no one voted in office would be allowed to vote themself anymore, unless of course that would change, too)
Please expand on this.
Old people without children vote for policies that favor the next generation.
People don't all vote purely on self-interest, some of us vote on how we think human society should be run, and what we think is genuinely best for everyone. Not just for our own immediate bottom line.
This whole ageist line of reasoning is pretty offensive.
We childless folk have had a quiet 25ish years and now the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other direction. I’ve noticed quite an uptick in memes about childless people being selfish monsters and taking away our voting rights is right in line with that.
In case you couldn't quite parse that, I mean: fuck your comment.
I’d argue the problem here is more so quality, and can really only be solved with regulation. I want to read news, not a blog and opinion.
There should be clear and concise standards media outlets need to adhere to, but as per my suggestion in regards to social media; will not self regulate.
Additionally; there is no accountability and responsibility.
I would argue that the only benefit that has been made is making this more apparent and obvious.. and hopefully for the better.
Yea that's be great but it's never going to happen, and if it did happen you wouldn't like it. It's like people wanting unbiased journalism: that only exists in the minds of the people who think there are only two serious opinions to have on any topic.
In response to an article posted in the global news thread on reddit, someone who lives there and actually has local knowledge and context can click 'reply' and explain what's actually going on and contradict/correct what the clickbaity sensationalist mass media article contains.
For example, I live here, the government is passing trying to pass said law that they can't control the implementation of. It's also seen by some as a surveillance state move under the guise of "won't someone think of the children". Under the proposed rules, theoretically people < 16 won't even be allowed to text one another.
More in depth/informative article from a local source, not Reuters:
[1] https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-poli...
I know that some people here on HN want to go full Unabomber and live in the woods but I kind of like the internet.
That's what I was thinking too.
I am not sure what the value is in severely regulating half a dozen or so companies when work arounds are so easily to implement. Maybe as a stop gap solution while we figure out long term solutions (which the government has a horrible track record on).
But for any long term solution we would first have to define what social media even is, and in a way that's testable in court. Don't run away from the hard things, but wow, that's hard.
I think we're stuck with it no matter what so we better develop better ways to deal with its existence regardless.
This is just plain wrong. Social media has moved the propaganda power to foreign hostile nations on a golden platter. That is not an improvement.
I mean it's not like the power of domestic propaganda has waned, it's just in a war for the attention of the ignorant with other interests (most of which aren't foreign powers, by the way, but simply capital). Social media that enabled independent coverage and discussion is still there for the adults in the room and it would be a true loss for any society to sweep the rug out from under the people who care to look beyond the for-profit newsroom (i.e., almost all media that's readily accessible at least to americans).
I'm not actually sure that's true. The only reliable sources on social media (in the sense of 'usually not horribly wrong') are actually traditional media companies like bbc, guardian. Perhaps I'm holding it wrong, but finding other trustworthy sources is actually really hard...
I don't understand what you're referring to. How do you recommend reigning in a newsroom? Especially one beholden to owners and advertisers with interests directly opposed to those of readers? How do you as a consumer opt out of the financial barriers to quality reporting? The only answer is the peer to peer nature of social media and the internet.
Perhaps what you're missing is that traditional media has zero incentive to highlight the positives of direct communication between disparate populations, creating farcically-negative hysteria about the dangers of worldviews not beholden to giant interests (yes, including domestic and foreign state powers, but also individual entities with massive capital to throw around).
Not me. Having a solid experience living in some far-from-democracy countries, I can state with all certainty that social platforms opened at least a crack to alternative opinions for a lot of people. Yes, they are full of propaganda, but I think they still provide more pluralistic picture compared to the world where old media ruled supreme. The real problem with those platforms is not "misinformation" (which will be everywhere anyway), buy addictiveness, and the fact they incentivize aggressive tribalism
I find data collection and tracking disconcerting not because I'm doing anything nefarious, unlawful or something I'm ashamed of—my life is pretty boring and uninteresting—but because it has the effect of reducing one's autonomy. If one knows one's data is monitored and one is being tracked then one acts differently. For some, they'll make minor changes in behavior, for others a lot. Even for those who've no idea about others tracking or collecting data about them there's the broader issue of how society ought to be conducted. That's a very big issue I can't address here.
Of course, the authoritarians amongst us would argue that monitoring is good thing as people won't be tempted to misbehave, commit crimes and such. I'd answer that by saying those who've nefarious intent will find ways of circumventing the surveillance so the net effect on society is negative as the 'innocent' are the onrs who are targeted without a good or just reason.
Right, pretty much everyone has a mobile phone. What has truly surprised me is how many people are prepared to trade data and being surveiled for convenience. I often wonder if they make such conscious decisions knowing the full implications of that surveillance. I suspect most do not.
Having a mobile phone it's inevitable I will be tracked by multiple entities from government to Google. My response is governed by how much I am prepared to trade privacy and autonomy for convenience and I reckon that's a large amount. Not having Google account and killing and or removing all Google services goes some considerable way but I'm under no illusion that Big Tech is still tracking me. That said, the info colllected wouldn't hold much value.
Not, it's not. You could use a GNU/Linux phone with hardware kill switches for modem and WiFi/Bluetooth: Librem 5. This is what I do.
WiFi is set to only reconnect manually and mobile data is off until needed. There's lots of other protections too such as no Chrome browser and JS is turned off by default on the browsers (I've three different browsers set for different jobs, none keep cookies between sessions). With ad protection and JS off I never see ads. I've no social media accounts, HN is pretty much it—and you can hardly call it social media. YouTube is viewed through NewPipe and so on.
That's pretty tight. But it's easy for me because I've no need of social media and such. Right, my ISP can track me but I'm not in the drug trade or espionage so that's pretty irrelevant.
I've a box of older phones and GNU/Linux is a pending project for them. I'm watching Librem and I'll likely go that way eventually.
What I really want on my phones are manual click-type (air gap) off switches to switch the phone off in a split second, same with WiFi. Unfortunately, I've been spoiled forever. My ancient Nokia had a battery with a quick release button on the back. If say I was in a meeting and wanted to kill the phone quickly I could reach into my pocket and push the button and slide the battery abount 1cm which disconnected it—the phone was off in a fraction of a second, none of this nonsense waiting for the phone to shut down.
I miss that feature with a passion and I want it back.
I remember watching my sister and her husband calling each other frequently with, "How far are you away from home?" and just kind of scratched my head. (I think I have sinced talked them into enabling Find My.)
When my wife or I want to call a daughter we can see immediately if they are at work or at home... things like that are nice. There's also an indescribable sweetness to just looking longingly in on a daughter who is far away and wondering how her day is going. Empty nest blues? (Or maybe Miner at the Dial-A-View.)
Can you at least conceive that some people might find it deeply creepy that someone can follow their every step, and equally creepy to be able to 'spy' on another person 24/7?
Then they get decent paying jobs and vote for the party that gets rid of the programs they no longer qualify for in order to reduce their taxation.
Broader swathes which they're part of. This is just the millennia old has and has-nots, don't fall for wishful thinking this base.
Whoa now. Just because I am childless doesn’t mean I don’t care about future generations. I still have friends and family that do have children and I vote with that in mind.
The irony. How can you be certain that it's not social media making "problem worse than it naturally is"? Many people believe that social media is.
As someone who was not particularly visible, and was not invited to every party, I am very aware that "there are plenty of situations where someone gets invited to something if and only they are visible to others and easy to invite". Is "not being on social media" really all that different than "not being on the <insert sport> team"? The same arguments apply. Easier to see and invite teammates, more social cache, etc.
In any case, if all teens were off social media then it would not be a determining factor, and I'm sure alternative systems would emerge for inviting people to places.
It is the problem. I don't think you understood my point. If nobody in high school had it, I wouldn't be bringing it up. The problem here is some students will have it the last year and some won't. By seeing it at 18, you're making it worse for the younger kids. Either 19 or 16 would be better.
In any case, I’m probably not the right person to determine the cutoff criteria. Whatever the boundary, that’s going to be a rough time for those going through it.
And it still doesn't come close to justifying taking away someone's input to democracy. I find all these discussions massively distasteful.
Also short-sighted because they tend to assume that the age cohort making the claim have more stake in the future, are all of one mind, are thinking long term themselves, or are generally going to do things better. None of these things hold up to much scrutiny AFAICT.
Meta studies often illustrate this well, but one can also do this on an individual level. Seek up reliable sources which opposing core audience compared to ones own demographic and it becomes obvious how horribly wrong they seem with miss leading statements, omissions, weasel words, emotional labeled meanings, mixed with with straight falsehoods.
The only trustworthy sources are multiple sources, and even then we are likely to fail since we are going to be searching for confirmation of what we already believe to be true. Social media do not usually help here, through Wikipedia seems to be a fairly good starting point (especially the talk pages are good to see where different reliable sources disagrees the most).
There's obviously still room for exceptions (especially in small niches, where individual content creators can still make a dent) but this isn't 2006 anymore. The vast majority of the content that covers social, political or economic issues on social media platforms is paid for and pushed by directly interested parties (political parties, companies etc.) with ample funding and is often part of campaigns that span both social media and traditional media. The "indie" outlook is part of the packaging.
The terms of the "paid by" disclaimers are sufficiently generous that they're all but useless once you get past things like goodie bags for influencers or regulated campaign ads.
Yes, it is hard, but there's no such thing as easy trust, and you should always be questioning whether such trust is actually earned or just comforting.
I don't think the "bbc" or "the guardian" are very trustworthy, either (at least by themselves)—both have obvious polemics and blind spots. They also only cover a very narrow, western-centric view of the world, leaving you with piss-poor understanding of world politics. I'm not saying you should ignore them but they're still propaganda.
Substack is invaluable; blogs are invaluable; twitter, as miserable as it is, is invaluable (for direct access to reporters sans newsrooms, if nothing else).
As always, I highly recommend Manufacturing Consent, which well illustrates how to examine financial interests to determine the above. Propaganda does not require conspiracy nor explicit instructions on what messages to convey; it only requires a class of people produced from the same environment, aiming to reproduce that same environment.
The linked article is way more informative and in depth compared to the link in the original HN post.
In which case the entire conversation is moot.
I mean there's a reason (well, multiple) why I suggested 16 instead of 19. I just pointed out that 19 to try to get my point across about social media being harmful.
> Whatever the boundary, that’s going to be a rough time for those going through it.
Again, this wasn't the point. The point was that if you do this in the last year of high school, you're not just giving younger kids a temporary rough time for that one year. You're also robbing them of their very last opportunities to form the stronger long-term connections they would have made during that time, which inflicts life-long damage to them socially. If you put the cutoff a little earlier so they all have a year or two to adjust to the new social environment, you avoid that long-term harm.
Also, nobody said the cutoff has to be rounded to the exact day. It could just as well be moved to coincide with the start or end of a school year, avoiding this problem entirely. And it'll be easier to enforce in school too.
But I don’t think it’s a distopian nightmare that I want it.
On this basis we have to exclude all "citizen jounalists" as unreliable click bait at best or just plain manufactured news.
There’s nothing keeping you here in a casino, gambling your wages away.
There’s nothing keeping you here in a bar drinking yourself to oblivion.
There’s nothing keeping you here smoking three packs a day until you’re shitting tar.
The age old advice to “just stop” doesn’t quite work for those most at risk. Harm minimisation is a reasonable thing. We don’t think it’s a good idea for young kids to smoke, drink, drive, vote or have sex. Since we know that social media can be specifically harmful to the youngest demographic, why wouldn’t we want to regulate it based on age?
Who is this "we" that accepts that uncritically? I've been on "social media" since I was 8yo and my little brother has been on social media since he was a baby. Now he's becoming a doctor. He grew up with the 1st gen iPhone which was released 17 years ago.
FWIW I think the drinking age of 21 in the US is kinda silly. Many Americans start driving at 14 (with employment letter) or at 15.5 and many Americans buy their first rifle at 18 years old.
I’m not a social media addict, I only use HN occasionally and really only to remind myself what other people are like. Without this I would forget and assume things about people that are just not true. I treat social media like the dangerous drug that it is and intentionally limit my exposure. But not everyone can do that. I personally know many people who have let social media ruin their lives and their minds to the point I’m not even sure they are rehabilitatable.
I wasn’t proposing a ban, I don’t trust the government with that much power and regulation would be difficult- at what point does a social club become social media. I guess my appeal to time travel did not properly reflect this perceived futility.
I think the only way would be as an Amish like intentional community with a religious level of enforcement. E.g. You can use social media but only in the shed, not in the house. But that’s not realistic so I just have to accept that X% of the population are not going to make it unscathed. These people will become a burden on the state at a time when the state is increasingly reaching to voluntary euthanasia for solutions. Perhaps in time people will socially and genetically evolve in ways that’ll be able to deal with it.
The people for instance, when everyone is on social media, you won't find people in the streets anymore, except for the homeless and junkies.
(but luckily it is still possible to find people in the real world, but it did became hard to find real undistracted people)
So can I
- They want to control people like property - They want to impose their views and values - They don't want any competition - They have a power trip - They want to use others time for their own benefit
What else am I missing?
The CEO is not controlling their time, he's buying it and they're selling it.
What other reasons do you have?
No, it was not an unfortunate typo. You have merely not bothered to take anything more than a superficial glance at the details.
Please, before you rush to be right about something you know nothing about, try a simple google search, at least - especially for such a subject where some of us were victimized by our own governments.
The link given goes directly to the section on the White Stolen Generation:
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
(Look at the URL...)
The "white stolen generations"
Did you know that in Australia there is another stolen generation, one which shares the pain and consequences? It's called the "white stolen generation" to distinguish it from the Aboriginal stolen generation.
In the five decades up to 1982, the newborn babies of young, single women were forcibly removed from them for adoption, a practice sometimes called 'baby farming'. Mothers were drugged, tethered to beds, not allowed to see their babies, told they were dead. [54] Many of these adoptions occurred after the mothers were sent away by their families due to the stigma associated with being pregnant and unmarried.
More than 250,000 white mothers lost their babies to forcible removal at birth by these past illegal adoption practices. Groups such as Adoption Loss Adult Support and Apology Alliance offer help and support.
Between 2010 and 2012 apologies were offered by Western Australia, South Australia, ACT, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Prime Minister Julia Gillard offered a national apology to those affected by forced adoptions in 2013.
Source: A guide to Australia's Stolen Generations - Creative Spirits, retrieved from https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/...
Then there is this:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/white-mothers-of-sto...
.. and of course you could read what Wikipedia has to say about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_adoption_in_Australia
In fact, an "apology" was given by the Australian government, but as we can see, it was not enough.
General public awareness of the subject, as you have demonstrated, is terrible. And, yet again, Australia gets away with it as a result.
I don’t have a dog in this fight and know very little about this piece of history, so I am bowing out. I did think it was legitimately a typo
Yes, white children were stolen and officially trafficked by their governments, as official policy. From around the Commonwealth, in fact.
And some of us are still suffering.
>Sounds like you're not qualified to talk on it.
What part of "(Disclaimer: White Stolen Generation Australian.)" didn't you understand?
That didn't turn out well thanks to kiddy fiddling "Christian Brothers" at multiple institutes across Australia who worked their way through literal boatloads of children.
eg: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/child-migran...
Clontarf Boys Town, Castledare, Bindoon, and several other sites in this state alone were the subject of a massive nation wide Royal Commission into child abuse.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/bindoon...
An apple tree has 2 apples on it. It's a fact. There is no 'other position'. So sick of narrow-minded idiots/bigots. The article I linked to has way more factual information than the Reuters one.
The government is trying to legislate something it can't control. The whole situation is stupid.
- The post in question is about legislation which has opinions on at least 2 sides: for it or against it.
- The post in question openly advocated for 1 of the sides while effectively ignoring the others. It's not more informative, it's just someone announcing a lot of their opinions. Their opinions aren't additional information, and thus are not informative.
- Someone disagreeing with you doesn't make them obsessed or narrow-minded or a bigot.
> The government is trying to legislate something it can't control
This suggests that you consider unbiased journalism to be journalism which agrees with you. That's the outside perspective from someone who, unlike you, doesn't feel one way or the other on the legislation in question (it doesn't affect me).
EDITED to remove a stupid phone autocorrection/autoinsertion.