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The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.
There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.
It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.
From 63C (1) of the legislation:
For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:
- a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
- i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
- ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
- iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
- iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
- b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).
Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.
It’s a good thing we wiped out covid and will never need students to use Zoom again!
Oh, wait
- a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.
I DGAF about your kids.
Yeah I agree with you on this. It’ll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don’t have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.
Frankly, decentralized networks make it even harder to take content down.
Wouldn’t it be easier to take content down if the app was not federated? I don’t know for sure but couldn’t you have a completely private instance only for the people you know?
Sure, if it is already private. But if it is not, then it gets copied to different instances and so if the original post gets removed, it is up to each instance to follow and when.
I DGAF about your kids.
Preach!
One of the craziest wtf moment of my life resulted from an oversharing parent.
At a hot summer day a few years back someone posted a picture of them barbequing in their backyard to our company’s “off topic” teams chat. Nothing unusual. I was over at a friends place so I send back a picture of us sitting in lawnchairs having a beer. In comes the third colleague, first time father with a roughly 1.5 year old at the time. So he posts a picture of his kid running around in his backyard. Completly naked, full frontanl nudity.
It took me a minute to recollect and I messaged him to please take down the picture. I know he didn’t mean any harm and was just sharing his hot-summer-weekend expirence … and he did realise his blunder and took it down. But wtf mate?
After that I immediately googled how to clear my teams’ app image cache …
For a second I thought the headline said Australia banned social media for 16 seconds 🤣
Imagine if this was done around the world. And then imagine how empty the Internet would be.
You don’t need to ban kids from the Internet. You need to ban pedophiles from it.
We can’t rely on the assholes running these site to ban pedophiles. They’d endorse a pedophile president if they thought it would give them less taxes/regulations.
This is a prudent move, we’ve only seen the very beginnings if the sorts of indoctrination and manipulation our kids might be subjected to.
Never thought I’d sound this way, but i can no longer ignore reality.
You need to raise kids better instead of delegating that job to the internet.
I strongly disagree.
Social media is terrible for mental health especially for the youth. Phones and tablets help in some areas like motor control development but also hurt other places like attention deficiencies and critical thinking, and very rarely does it lead to a kid learning how technology works (that’s usually from the computer nerds, aka kids who want a computer, doesn’t happen even close to the same rate as smart phones.
Smart phones make people dumb. That’s my opinion. But the above are scientifically backed.
100% agree. These things get talked up as benefits when they are mostly treated as revenue streams by the seller and distractions by the buyer. Kids and adults. We all need to be way more critical of the tech we use.
Then parents need to stop using such things as babysitters.
And parents also need to get up in arms about lazy “educators” using tech to make their job easier (instead of making learning more effective, which is the bullshit argument that’s always used).
Most of the technical problems with learning/teaching are actually caused by sticking to outdated 19th century concepts in schools such as having the (by definition average) local teacher explain things instead of someone who actually knows how to explain the subject matter well and pretending that kids need to memorize everything in a modern world instead of incorporating the ability to look up things into the learning process.
Most of the actual major problems with education are caused by funding structures and deliberate sabotage by parts of society who benefit from an uneducated population without critical thinking and research skills.
Parenting is harder than ever, so I don’t blame parents.
Back in the day you would have the mother home all the time, even more recently there was still a strong community in most places and big families meant lots of babysitters.
Nowadays it’s fend for yourself for everybody almost everywhere, so raising a kid properly is almost impossible unless you are rich or have a lot of free time.
While I can see your point I would like to point out that that might excuse problems parents have raising their children but not parents making that everyone else’s problem by insisting the rest of the world is made child-safe somehow.
The damage to children’s lives done by social media is catastrophic.
And “banning children”, wait, I mean forcing every adult to verify who they say they are online accomplishes what?
Oh, that’s right, a massive tracking database for any bad actor to use.
If your children get into shit, it’s your fault for not raising them right. I got into some shit as a kid, and had friends that got into more/less shit.
I watched those fuckups raise their kids, and they learned from their own childhood experience and chose to guide their children how to use the internet properly. To understand how it works, the risks, etc.
You can’t bubble wrap the world. The idiots (myself included) will always find a way around such safetyism, and in the process you’ll be harming everyone else.
Are we not already subject to massive tracking databases anyway?
So then it is okay to add another? ;-)
People used to say the same thing about video games. And movies. And even books.
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Now everyone gets to hand over their ids to the tech companies.
Identification would need to be handled by a 3rd party to even remotely work. Then they pass on the “yes they’re over 16” tick to the social media platform, with no actual identity details.
Edit: and likewise, Identity company have no details about the social media account name or anything. Just a token transfer of sorts.
Identification would need to be handled by a 3rd party to even remotely work. Then they pass on the “yes they’re over 16” tick to the social media platform, with no actual identity details.
The legislatiion specifically allows SM sites to handle ID.
I guess Australia.gov can be the site in the middle handing out the tokens
Tech company’s probably already have enough info to know a person age without requiring an id. They could even use ai for something actually useful
We should make a bet how long it will take before the ID databases get leaked.
It would take too long.
Making the bet that is, it would be leaked before you are done setting up the betting system.
Australia requires mobile phone providers to verify IDs before providing cell phone service. As a result, in September 2022, Optus leaked the records of 10 million Australians including passport and drivers license details.
So negative 2 years, 2 months.
But this is just asking for more.
I support this move. Some here are delusionally arguing that this impacts privacy - the sort of data social media firms collect on teenagers is egregiously extensive regardless. This is good support for their mental health and development.
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This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry to implement and enforce rules against hate speech, grooming, fake news, etc. They surely cannot verify the age of a human without any official ID made in the real world. This leads to other problems but that’s not the concern of the government! Social Media wants it’s users, not the government.
This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry
what? Why would tech industry care? If anything it’ll have the reverse effect and dimiss tech role in brain rott because “see, kids are not on it! It’s all good here”
Government provided open id service which guarantees age. Website gets trusted authority signed token witch contains just the age. We can do this safely. We have the technology. They could even do it only once on registration.
Digital id’s exist already in the EU, and many countries run a sign on service already. We aren’t far from this.
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Why not just look up how it actually works in the real world instead of hypotheticals
No. I don’t want governments to know what social media I use, nor do I want social media to know what country I’m a citizen of. I don’t want any connection between the two.
I’m pretty sure they all know this already.
Sure, but I don’t want to hand it over on a silver platter, especially for my kids.
If i recall correctally, Australia tried to fine adults if they didnt have thier phone with them. Ive heard a relaible youtuber say it, but i couldnt find a news article to confirm it.
Went to look for the article. Found something even worse https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-24/can-border-force-search-your-phone-when-you-travel-to-australia/100774644
This is good support for their mental health and development.
This is good pseudo-science.
How can you look at the state of things pretty much everywhere since social media has become so ubiquitous and think that it has no effect on people, young people especially? It’s full of hate, envy, propaganda, and brainwashing
There is no published science definitively proving that it is harmful or helpful. The effects of this particular legislation, if it is impactful at all, remains to be seen. I’m just offering my opinion based on my personal experiences. I expect it to have some success in reducing acute adolescent mental health issues. If the matter is ever settled through consensus, I’ll defer to that.
Strange that the adults don’t want those benefits for themselves also.
I’d support banning it for everyone as well.
Probably going to get downvoted for this, but this just makes kids look for VPN’s and other ways to skirt this restriction. It may make VPN’s less useful for the rest of us as a result when certain services are forced to comply with the law, breaking those services for those of us using VPN’s. It sounds like a great idea but I don’t know that the implementation will make a noticeable or effective difference.
Most kids are not going to pay a subscription for a VPN, I don’t think that would be as big of an issue as you think.
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There are free VPNs that are subsidized by payers and are legit (though most are not). Calyx and Proton to name two.
Also Tor is free, and the most popular site on the darknet is Facebook, so I dont think you’re informed about the nature of Tor traffic.
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Well unless they go for free vpns and get data mined to the moon and back… Which is a far worse outcome imo.
There are free vpn services? How do they data mine you?
Well they have to host the servers and pay for them somehow… So they take all of your traffic going through their servers and sell it. They know when you go to any website, at what time, and how long you were there… That’s why anyone recommending a VPN strongly recommends vpns that do not keep logs of what their clients do when connected to their servers. Even some paid vpns double dip and keep logs and sell them as well as charging for access.
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Us right now are on a service that’s totally going to follow this law. /s
Just because it isn’t perfect it doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn’t mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.
There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren’t too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.
And before you say “Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it.” Never underestimate tech illiteracy.
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???
How is restricting access behind an age requirement the same as the “Great Firewall”. Right now, as we speak, you cannot use social media until you are 13. They are just increasing that requirement to 16.
There are many many many other things that are already lock behind an age restriction and I don’t see you freaking out. Here are a few examples of things locked behind an age restriction:
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alcohol
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gambling
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cigarettes
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pornography
Media has age restrictions. Books have age restrictions, movies have age restrictions, games have age restrictions. Media has had age restrictions for a very long time and it’s high time the same standards are applied to social media.
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Yup… right what I suspected! The Slippery Slope Fallacy!
Whats gonna happens when politicians realize kids are just gonna click “I’m at least [Age]”?
Many pornography work like that and can, as such, be easily bypassed. But does that mean we should drop the age restriction for access to pornography? Of course not!
Here is another example:
Murder. Murder shouldn’t be legal and it is not. However, despite this restriction, some find ways to get away with murder. Does that mean that laws against murder are useless since we cannot stop murder 100% of the time? I highly doubt it.
It is impossible for any law enforcement to prevent 100% of all crimes, but that is not justification for those law to not exist.
Either you have a toothless law, or you live in a country with Great Firewall of China.
False dilemma fallacy.
Again, I’ll refer to pornography. Many pornography work on the trust system. By your logic, that means we should drop all laws restricting access to it. However, that is absurd.
The point isn’t to stop 100% of all usage. It is simply there to reduce the usage. You are forgetting that we are talking about human beings. Beings which have a natural tendency to conform to social norms as to not be cast out of their tribe (since humans cannot survive in the wild without each other, such would be a death sentence).
This law would set the societal precedent that people need to be of a certain age to access these social media apps (as shown by scientific data, which revealed that social media usage can have many negative effects on a developing mind). This societal precedent will, hopefully, make it taboo for people bellow 16 to access social media, which will, in turn, reduce, but not outright 100% stop, underage social media usage.
The point is to prevent the detrimental effects to the mental health of teens and preteens. That doesn’t work unless you plug the holes. That’s the problem. Fallacy in argument or no fallacy.
The point we’re trying to make isn’t that we don’t want the restriction. We just understand that it’s not going to work specifically because it requires the same thing the under 13 privacy laws already include. Companies to comply (which they will, probably with detriments to legal users), and that parents be involved in what their children are doing online and restrict that accordingly to comply with the law (which we already know they aren’t).
I as a full grown adult am not willing to provide my details (picture of a government issued ID or similar) to most online entities. I certainly won’t ever be giving it to social media or a porn site of any kind. But that’s what’s going to end up being required to enact this law and make it enforceable. Is the law going to fine parents whose children aren’t in compliance? Is it going to fine businesses for not enacting enough restrictions? Is it going to outlaw VPN’s for use on social media?
Where is the burden of proof and who’s privacy gets invaded in order to enforce the law?
I was not (in my original comment or any subsequent ones in the thread) intending people to take this as “we shouldn’t do this because XYZ”. And I am aware that you weren’t responding to me. I was saying that it’s going to be problematic to enforce and isn’t likely to have the results intended.
It’s not about the handful of people per hundred who commit a murder. Because murder being illegal isn’t a deterrent and we have scientific studies to back that up. It’s about how 75-85% of teens will find a way to circumvent the law because they don’t understand the dangers and parents aren’t doing their part. So the rest of us will have to jump through hoops to use any social media.
If 75% or more of people the law effects aren’t following the law, the law doesn’t do what is intended and is going to have to be reworked.
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The thing about kids getting a VPN, free or paid is that it will spread like wild fire. It only takes one kid who knows how to do something. They tried this at my highschool, blocking websites and such. That was more than 20 years ago and we knew how to use VPN’s or similar then and once we figured it out it was an open secret.
I’m not saying the law shouldn’t exist or that we should do nothing. I’m saying that this isn’t going to be effective as it is and could end up leading to worse things.
performative nonsense which does nothing for kids or their mental health and harms queer kids who lose one of the first places they can find community.
Then it seems there is something other to fix in society than making sure facebook knows anything about that kid.
The Zuckerbergers of the world aren’t the ones to trust with that.
Not a bad choice.
Now ban it for over 16s
People should be allowed to do as they please. I think, however, people should be presented with all the potential risks in very clear language if they’re going to, in the same way a pack of cigarettes has a warning, access to social media should present similar disclaimers.
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The difference being you can’t stop a federated protocol. I was being cheeky, but banning or at least regulating algorithm-based social media would do nothing but good for society. User engagement and user safety are directly at odds in a for-profit model.
Some mastodon instance has it covered already. https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/113519360107067092
“being angry about inaction on climate change” hahaha
That is both hilarious and a brilliant solution.
Okay, that is fucking awesome. LOL.
This is going to harm kids.
teen go to website
please enter your birthdate
1/1/2000
welcome!
Lawyer sues tech company
But we asked for the birthday
Lawyer points to law text
Company fined
I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
A large part of this will help maintain liability for harm to young people. How ages is verified is irrelevant
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Are you over 16: Yes/No.
That wasnt difficult.
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They have no specified otherwise so its a case of why would they waste money doing otherwise.
Problematic for who, the tech companies? They’re practically printing money. Let them spend it on actual solutions to issues that are causing problems for the World.
Problematic for the children who are having their rights taken away. This change bans children from connecting with their friends in other countries, other states, and even other cities.
Even something as simple as hopping in a voice call with your squad to play Deep Rock Galactic is now illegal for 15 year olds. That’s ridiculous. The fact that they can break the law is great, but they shouldn’t have to break the law in order to do something so harmless.
What about using Zoom to speak to a doctor or therapist? What about contacting queer support resources through social media? What about using a text based suicide hotline? According to the law, that’s social media.
it’s not a problem that can be solved by tech.
It forces them to implement solutions that make having anonymous accounts impossible.
Facebook/Meta has developed software to estimate the age from a video.
I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
Comes with the territory. The point is to control who has access to what information so that they don’t get wrong ideas.
if you think AI software will be able to differentiate between a 15 year old and 16 year old then I have this cool bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.
This is delusional to the point where it feels like we’re literally devolving.
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I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.
The senate inquiry outlined the two likely solutions :
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Uploading ID to the website.
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3D face scanning. This will include continual monitoring so if another person comes into view they will have to face scan in. Remember, its prohibited for chidren to even watch prohibited content with their parents.
How can it possibly be legal to 3D face scan a child, especially if it needs to be authenticated by a remote server somewhere.
I can only ever see option 1 working
Lol those options harm children
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I’m well old enough to satisfy these checks and I also do this. If I’m feeling productive, I’ll pick a random date.
Not a bad idea all things considered
Edit: Save for the “Showing your ID” part, anonymity is healthy for the net and far too rare these days
Now ban everyone else (except Lemmy of course).
