As of Wednesday, all youth under 16 in Australia will be banned from major social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and X. For over a decade, whistleblowers, politicians, academics, and experts around the world have sounded the alarm about the online harms people of all ages are exposed to.
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The ban does nothing to prepare teens to respond to digital harms. It makes no investments in education, community training, or parental support. Youth will not be magically prepared to address problematic online behaviours or content when they turn 16.
The time and resources spent on the ban could be better spent on things like providing education and support for digital citizenship, media literacy, privacy rights or resource centres.
If social media is problematic for a 13, 14 or 15 year old, it’s still likely to be problematic for a 16, 25, or 80 year old. There is no body of research that establishes 16 as a “safe threshold” for social media use and the age for healthy use can vary across genders.
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Under the current model, companies will not be inclined to improve their reporting systems for harmful content. In fact, in response to the ban, YouTube is actually removing a feature that would allow teens to report content they find inappropriate.
Youth under 16 who find ways to use these platforms, despite the bans, will be unlikely to come forward and ask for help if things go wrong. After all, they weren’t supposed to be online in the first place.
The answer to mitigating online harms is not kicking teens offline.
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Social media companies also need to be accountable to the ways the platforms are designed and run. These platforms are designed in ways that push certain content and elicit particular engagements.
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Seeing the comments under every post about this kind of thing and I’m confused: when the fuck did lemmy become so anti- online privacy and pro- large-scale internet censorship???
Is this place being botted to hell already? Are you people actually just this stupid?? Or do all the bitter ancient fossbro fucks on here just hate young people and/or socialising that much that they’ll immediately abandon their principles because this is ostensibly targeted at them???
There are all kinds of ways we protect kids and many things we regulate their access to so we can protect them. I’m not a fan of the particular way Australia is approaching this, because I think it’s clumsy and not an ideal method, but protecting kids from toxic social media and predatory companies is a pretty sensible thing to do.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Believe it or not, column 2.
One part of the answer is imo that some tankies here want to campaign for less privacy, more surveillance as this helps to make China look better. Just look at the post histories of some commenters.
I am not saying that everyone with a different opinion is a tankie, but this is a major reason why you read this here imo.
Speaking for myself, social media can go fuck itself. I wouldn’t shed a tear if all of this bullshit was banned entirely in Canada. Wishful thinking though.
Right, chalk one up in the third column.
Yup, the intelligent people, who need to parent the kids and old folks.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
Believe it or not, column 2.
In China’s system, when a parent buys a phone, they can lock it into child settings at the device level, which not only forces all apps to operate in child mode but also does stuff like turn off internet from 10pm to 6am, caps screen time depending on the child’s age, and imposes break reminders after every 30 minutes of continuous use.
All the social media platforms are legally required to adjust algorithms and content for phones in child mode to only show age-appropriate content and to increase educational content, also to prevent dms with strangers, tipping, in-game purchases, and things like live broadcasting yourself.
All the online gaming platforms also require proof of age to use them or face restrictions.
So, there are much more sophisticated ways of making things work.
In “China’s system,” there is no privacy at all. We don’t need anything of this 24/7 surveillance nor the accompanying censorship.
This is not a sophisticated system what they have in China, this is an Orwellian dystopia.
Okay, Scotty Sockpuppet.
I think we should just ban social media entirely. If people want to stay in touch with each other, it should be through direct messaging (including email); and if people want to publish their opinions to the world let them use blogs; and if people want to discuss topics, let them use forums.
Conveniently, if social media is banned, then we don’t need ID verification.
The bigger problem is how you define “social media”.
Do we can all message forums and Discord? Wikipedia has the “Talk” section, doesn’t that make it social media?
What about the drives of worthy educational content on YouTube?
What about the flood of misinformation sites that are likely to pop up as they’re going to be much harder to filter out?
Well we should define it sensibly. It’s not the bigger problem.
Right, and how does one define it sensibly? Especially when you’re considering a law that affects a group of people as diverse as a country’s population, and when it is regarding something that is dynamic in nature.
Start conservatively, and ban only things which are bright-line social media. Then expand if this isn’t enough.
I miss MSN Messenger and Live Journal.
None of these are good arguments against introducing a ban. Worst argument of all is that “we shouldn’t ban it for 15 year olds because that wouldn’t protect 16 year olds.” Seriously? Is that intentional rage bait?
I think it’s more than clear by now that algorithmic feeds are hazardous, at least without significant effort in research and safeguards which nobody seems to be doing. So yeah, I’d say: definitely ban algorithmic feeds for teenagers. Hell, ban them for everyone if you must.
Gating should be done either by ZKP (zero-knowledge proofs, which don’t expose any information to any party other than “I’m at least x years old” – look this up if this is a new concept to you) or device-side by standardizing and streamlining child safety locks.
No, just go for the jugular and ban such “algorithms” for EVERYONE, no exceptions.
Ban American corporate social media altogether? 🍁 Fedecan 🍁 take over with Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Friendica?
Nevermind, we’ll get invaded for that.
Yes.
I mean I wouldn’t say no if it comes down to that and I’d probably sign up to work for the technical effort.
There can be no software without algorithms. Your proposed ban effectively bans computers.
My proposed ban is on social media algorithms that take into account things like retention, political opinions, sexuality, etc. Chromological and popularity-based algorithms are not affected.
You say “no,” as though you are disagreeing with me. But did you notice I said this?
Hell, ban them for everyone if you must.
Gating should be done either by ZKP (zero-knowledge proofs, which don’t expose any information to any party other than “I’m at least x years old” – look this up if this is a new concept to you) or device-side by standardizing and streamlining child safety locks.
100%. If a government is truly serious about the issue, then verification can be solved quite easily with ZKPs in a way that preserves privacy.
Any of these solutions are similar to someone coming into my home and telling me how to raise my own kids.
Instead provide parents with routers that support parental controls, and a countries government can instead maintain a curated list of websites that are accessible for certain age groups.
This would be the most practical solution and would meet the “protect the children” narrative.
Anything more then this is a invasion or privacy and a way to monitor the public.
Any of these solutions are similar to someone coming into my home and telling me how to raise my own kids.
I’m not aware of any country in the world that doesn’t do that ?
Australia has cumpolsory education for children, doesn’t allow smoking, doesn’t allow alcohol consumption, doesn’t allow children to drive, doesnt allow them to participate in porn, doesn’t allow them to have sex, enforces vaccination and a litany of other directives that over ride parental choice.
Many of the above are considerd harmful for children, like a swathe of experts say about chikdrens exposure to social media.
Some places in the US you are arrested for child endangerment for allowing your child to walk to school and the US continues to condone regularly shooting their children in the 1000s…
What I, some random on Lemmy thinks should be irrelevant, this should not be a “do your own research and go with your gut” sort of nonsense, thats what gives us RFK Jr.
What a majority of clinical experts do think is important. I was just pointing out the blantant flaw in your argument.
Problem is the vast majority of parents won’t have any idea what your talking about or anything.
Routers is not the way. It should be device-side. Children’s phones and computers should blacklist social media, or even whitelist allowed sites IMO. Otherwise they can get around this with data, or public wi-fi.
This can already be done TBH, phones have something called private DNS settings, so all one would need to do is set your phones DNS to a appropriate DNS that blocks or allows a specific websites.
This DNS could potentially be curated by a local government. This would allow a parent to set their child’s phones DNS appropriately at their discretion.
This would be less privacy invasive and would remove the need for a “digital ID”. While at the same time checking the box of protection ones children at the parents discretion.
Yes. But it’s not easy for parents apparently. Indeed, there’s a coordination problem – while the standard is for kids to have social media, removing social media for one child disconnects them from their peers. So standardising the ban would be needed.
I’d love a ban in Canada. There’s nothing compelling in these arguments, protecting kids from online garbage is more important than any of them.
I’d also like to see it banned for those over 60.
This would imply having to give your ID to access social media.
Are you willing to trust tech companies with your ID? Discord already suffered an ID leak.
No they could do a deive thing. Isn’t Apple already working on this. And seems kind of private, the site just says yes they are old enough or no they are not.
Hell to the no. It’s an incredibly slippery slope from banning kids to requiring real ID verification to use portions of the Internet. Parenting is hard, but needs doing.
Parental controls have existed on home routes for years.
This leaves the ban of certain websites at your own discretion and allows you to raise your children the way you see fit.
Hell, parental controls can be tailored to only allow certain device on your home-network designated as “children’s devices” to only access a list of certain websites blocking everything else. This would the easiest option to implement for any parent as they see fit.
Handing over personal info so easily to corporately owned websites for the sake of convenience in a huge privacy issue.
Most people don’t think social media is an issue. But it’s funny when the people who create this don’t let their kids use it.
If a parent is letting their kid on social media then they aren’t qualified to be a parent.
However the use of modem parental controls is much better than spying on people.
Age-restricting corporate social media isn’t “kicking teens offline.” That’s a funny straw man.
We need age restriction and regulations on moderation and algorithms. The latter alone won’t solve the problems social media poses for developing brains. Age restrictions aren’t bulletproof and that’s alright. It’s much easier to stop my child from smoking at the age of 10 when there’s a smoming ban in place than when there isn’t. I want it to be easier to raise them without developing prepubescent brain rot than not. And I think my neighbours would appreciate bringing up another Canadian that has their marbles intact.
E: Plenty parents outside of the terminally-online circles don’t even realize they should restrict social media use at an early age.
E2: Tha fact that the Australian ban doesn’t deal with the ID problem is a problem that I definitely would not want us to emulate. A problem in that it does not forbid ID collection by private corporations and it does not provide a privacy-preserving public service for proving age. Besides, Meta already knows the age of most of its users. A reasonable compliance criteria could be established that isn’t 100% that would also be good enough, subject to regulatory audits.
