Australia To Ban Under-16s From Social Media After Passing Landmark Law (yahoo.com) 99
Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media after its senate approved what will become a world-first law. From a report: Children will be blocked from using platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, a move the Australian government argue is necessary to protect their mental health and wellbeing.
The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill will impose fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($32.5 million) on platforms for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts. It would take effect a year after the bill becomes law, allowing platforms time to work out technological solutions that would also protect users' privacy. The senate passed the bill 34 votes to 19. The house of representatives overwhelmingly approved the legislation 102 votes to 13 on Wednesday.
The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill will impose fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($32.5 million) on platforms for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts. It would take effect a year after the bill becomes law, allowing platforms time to work out technological solutions that would also protect users' privacy. The senate passed the bill 34 votes to 19. The house of representatives overwhelmingly approved the legislation 102 votes to 13 on Wednesday.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
No free speech in Australia for you.
How many rights do you really think minors should have? Should we complain they don’t have voting rights too? The blasphemy.
We gave the kids that freedom. The sadly showed how they can hang themselves with it due to immaturity. Literally. Which mental health is the focus here. We don’t block kids from porn and then cry about blocking their right to “free speech”.
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Forcing social media to open their algorithms: hostile to corporations
Forcing young people to not use social media: hostile to young people, helps prevent them from organizing
You think they did this for the benefit of the young people?
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It's not hostility, it's responsibility that parents have to keep young minds from bad things, the gamut of phishing, bots, solicitation, harassment, bullying, and other problems that youth aren't equipped to deal with.
Fuck corporate profits at the rendering of suicides, bullying, socially-engineered madness, disinformation. Adults have enough problems with temptations; youth are not well equipped to deal with the adult world. It stanches a race to the bottom, instead of the top, for young people.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Good idea, but not in this round. The minors can't give consent, morally or legally. Temptations abound. You were a kid, you know what they are. There's a reason why parenting is important, and not all parents can catch their children doing many things online or not.
Children should not have anonymity in social media. And it's up to social media providers to authenticate this fact. Children will try to work around it, clever and bright. Clever and bright still means vulnerable.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Good idea, but not in this round. The minors can't give consent, morally or legally. Temptations abound. You were a kid, you know what they are. There's a reason why parenting is important, and not all parents can catch their children doing many things online or not.
Children should not have anonymity in social media. And it's up to social media providers to authenticate this fact. Children will try to work around it, clever and bright. Clever and bright still means vulnerable.
You are quite right. Here in the UK we have recently had an horrific court case. [bbc.com]
TLDR: This guy built a huge collection of CSAM material by catfishing young girls on social media; mainly Snapchat and Instagram. He targeted 10 to 14 year-old girls - posing as a young girl himself - catfishing them into sending him a risque picture of themselves which he then used to blackmail them into performing ever more depraved acts on camera. It is estimated that he may have up to 3,500 victims. One of his victims committed suicide. The evidence presented in court was just heartbreaking.
These kids had no idea that there were "wolves in sheep's clothing" online, and now they and their families are living with the consequences. If you live in the UK there's an excellent documentary on the BBC iPlayer [bbc.co.uk] about the case. It's something every parent of under-age kids should watch before they even think of letting their kids near social media.
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I would not fine parents for #1 or #2. These are for acknowledged adults to use, and not minors. Acknowledge which is which. Be fined for not doing so. Admittance controls must keep minors and children out. Lose profits in an alarming way if you don't comply by building not uncertain barriers of entry for minors and children.
All the other failures of social media perhaps make "social media" an oxymoron, but that's out of the scope of the topic at hand.
Re: So... (Score:2)
Face it. You're not arguing in the hopes that you can somehow magically reverse Australian law against social media for children. That ship just sailed and past. You're arguing in the case this might be adopted in other countries. It really depends if other countries want to be left behind!
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You're not arguing in the hopes that you can somehow magically reverse Australian law against social media for children. That ship just sailed and past.
Correct, I am not. My one and only goal there was to help people understand the world.
You're arguing in the case this might be adopted in other countries. It really depends if other countries want to be left behind!
It's not just that, this is part of a globally rising tide of authoritarianism in general and fascism in particular. The mega corporations get to just follow whatever rules are cooked up that they can afford to follow and upstarts can't, and it will bless their behavior. It's corporate protectionism and an opportunity to push online ID laws wrapped up in one Orwellian package.
Re: So... (Score:2)
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Forcing social media to open their algorithms: hostile to corporations
Forcing young people to not use social media: hostile to young people, helps prevent them from organizing
You think they did this for the benefit of the young people?
I take your point and mostly agree with you, but I think that last sentence may be a bit unfair. I do think they did it for the sake of young people's health.
That said, I'm as unhappy as you seem to be about the compromise they made. Social media should be made safe for everyone to use, and the crime of addiction-by-algorithm needs to be punished by putting suits in jails for extended periods.
It's way past time for us to put the wannabe oligarchs back in their place and make governance truly democratic agai
Re: So... (Score:2)
Nobody cares about the âoeyouth organizingâ why donâ(TM)t you go out on social media and protest see how much impact you have.
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Nobody cares about the Ãoeyouth organizingÃ
This is of course demonstrably untrue. There are crackdowns on protests all over the planet.
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I already won't let my kids on social media until they're old enough. It's actually a bit crazy that people will let their children associate with content and other people that can be anonymous around the world with tons of other adult strangers interacting with them in various ways.
When you really think about it, regardless of their intentions for making it a law, you still shouldn't be letting kids on social media.
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16-and-unders tend to be clueless teenagers. At best they're drones that have been manipulated by someone else. They can't vote for a reason!
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He's talking about Australians not just minors. How do you determine a minor? How do you restrict part of your population without identifying the individual?
This is the guardians job and responsibility.
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Minors don't get rights. They are wards until emancipation. They might not agree, but technically they are indentured servants until emancipation. Every right they have are just privileges that can be revoked at a moments notice. The fact it was taken away proves prima facia that it wasn't a right to begin with.
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How many rights do you really think minors should have?
I would say ALL rights. With some rights subject to the management of their guardian to ensure it won't be exercised in a manner that unreasonably risks their safety, health, or well-being.
Should we complain they don’t have voting rights too?
Definitely. The reasoning for denying minors the right to vote is basically the same as the reasoning that was once used to deny Women's suffrage. And the logic of denying a 16 or 17-year-old voting righ
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How many rights do you really think minors should have?
I would say ALL rights. With some rights subject to the management of their guardian to ensure it won't be exercised in a manner that unreasonably risks their safety, health, or well-being.
Should we complain they don’t have voting rights too?
Definitely. The reasoning for denying minors the right to vote is basically the same as the reasoning that was once used to deny Women's suffrage. And the logic of denying a 16 or 17-year-old voting rights is just as broken and defective as denying Women's or different races, religions, or legal Immigrants' suffrage ever was.
I believe the argument goes something like: Children have no stake in the outcome of elections, and they are incompetent and would likely just vote whatever their parents told them too, so they would dilute the vote.
I would say the premise is faulty. In fact 16-year old so-called children are often more educated about the candidates and the political races than voting adults around them are, And it is a fundamental violation of democracy that government is allowed to pass laws which affect minors with minors having No direct representation within the legislative process. Including taxation. We tax minors without representation in violation of the founding principles of countries such as the US. Our government basically acts like it's still the 1700s when children are legally treated as property in the eyes of the law just like slaves.
So 16-year-olds should have the right to vote? 12-year-olds? 8? 6? 2? Newborns suckling at their mothers' teats?
"Of course not!" you reply. "You're using reductio ad absurdum against me, so your argument is invalid. There's obviously an age cut-off at which someone is too young to be able to make those kind of -- oh, wait"
Re: So... (Score:3)
In most countries, you're not considered a legal person until you reach age 18. No way to even form contracts about legal free speech or not.
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Tell that to media corporations, please. The ones that make kids as young as 13 to sign legally binding contracts by which said kids forfeit 80% of their future earnings to the recording label. And which are almost never successfully challenged in court.
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Tell that to media corporations, please. The ones that make kids as young as 13 to sign legally binding contracts by which said kids forfeit 80% of their future earnings to the recording label. And which are almost never successfully challenged in court.
I thought that in the US, you could not sign a legally-binding contract until the age of 18 unless you had gone through the process of having a court declare you legally emancipated and granted you POA of your own affairs. It was my understanding that all those child stars to whom you refer had someone with a fiduciary management responsibilities signing their contracts for them.
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Indeed. Wait you think this is a surprise? Australia doesn't have free speech in the constitution. They have specific classifications of protected speech, but no free speech. In fact most countries in the world don't have free speech and based on ranking general quality of life (as well as quality of policing and justice) against the United States of the First Amendment, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
But I'm sure in America it is difficult to grasp the concept that your way isn't the right way.
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Australia is a signatory to international human rights treaties. From their attorney general's page:
Nobody has unrestricted free speech, not even the US. Various constitutions are just a little more up front about that fact, rather than hit you with enlightenment revolutionary zeal and the
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Indeed. Wait you think this is a surprise? Australia doesn't have free speech in the constitution. They have specific classifications of protected speech, but no free speech. In fact most countries in the world don't have free speech and based on ranking general quality of life (as well as quality of policing and justice) against the United States of the First Amendment, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
But I'm sure in America it is difficult to grasp the concept that your way isn't the right way.
It's not that we can't grasp that it's not the right way; it's that we can't grasp that it's not the only way.
But I would argue that the tendency of those in power to subjugate those without power despite what the law says knows no borders, and is not limited to the US -- it just rings especially hypocritical coming from us, considering how loudly we proclaim our pride in our special brand of personal freedom.
Re: So... (Score:2)
Funny. Equating access to any platform as either allowing or disallowing free speech just clearly shows you have no idea what you are talking about. Just how is this preventing any person from talking about what they want to talk about? Because they donâ(TM)t get to share their really stupid ideas with the world? To bad. They can still freely talk about anything they want to. Nothing is preventing that. Using your logic nobody had freedom of speech prior to the internet. In reality though when we
Doesn't go far enough (Score:5, Funny)
Given the incredible damage social media has done to democracy and our mental health, I'd like to see it banned for anyone under 200 years old.
News (Score:1)
Keep in mind that most of the outlets telling you how terrible social media is, are the direct competitors to social media.
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I'm not being told how terrible social media is. I'm observing it for myself.
Re:Doesn't go far enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the incredible damage social media has done to democracy and our mental health, I'd like to see it banned for anyone under 200 years old.
As drinkypoo pointed out above, it's all about the algorithms. If social media wasn't driven by advertising and engagement - if it was implemented as societal infrastructure for the well-being of all citizens and the financial profit of nobody - then it would be a great good in society. As it exists currently, it's a Trojan horse whose belly is full of contagious cancer.
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Yes, exactly. If Facebook let me connect with friends and see only what they post in strict reverse-chronological order, and didn't feed me any ads or sell my data to marketers, I'd happily pay $5/month for that. And that's probably about what Facebook's revenue per user is currently.
Unfortunately, that business model will fail, so we're stuck with the cesspool that is for-profit social media.
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How? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: How? (Score:3)
Social media is engineered specifically to be addictive. Most countries have age restrictions and other regulations on such industries such as gambling, alcohol, and cigarettes. This is no different. Free speech is not violated in any way whatsoever.
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Parent poster didn't say anything about whether social media is good or bad. Rather, they pointed out that "Social Media" as a term is not easy to define.
And you can't ban "social media" until you can first define what, exactly, social media is.
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Don't care. Hope they try, fail and disappear in a tsunami of fines and legal action. The village mobs could pack up their pitchforks and go and do something far happier and constructive.
Plenty of Free Speech before Social Media, trying to convince us they invented it, and monetise it, what a bunch of cynical w4nk3rs.
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Plenty of Free Speech before Social Media, trying to convince us they invented it
There is a question of scale. Say we unwind the clock, how are you going to prevent mailing lists and usenet discussions with hundreds of millions of people from turning into 100% noise or worse? As much as I would like to go back in time when it was predominantly academia and techies, that state of existence requires 99% of the population to be disconnected.
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Social media as we know it now has only been around since about 2005. We coped without it before then and we can cope without it now.
Re:How? (Score:4, Informative)
This law is a trojan horse. "How are social media companies supposed to enforce this?"
The only way they can enforce it is to take advantage of the Australian Government's Digital ID. In effect, if you want to access social media in Australia you'll have to sign up to this government-issued digital ID so that the social media companies can authenticate your age.
This isn't about protecting kids -- it's about effectively mandating the Digital ID for every man, woman, child and VISITOR to Australia.
If it was about protecting kids then why doesn't the ban include hardcore pornography sites such as PornHub?
Yeah, that's right... under this law PornHub will be exempt from its provisions but YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok etc won't.
Asutralians should be marching in the streets to show their opposition to the way they've been shafted.
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Take a good look at the suicide statistics from underage kids exposed to porn.
Now do the same for social media.
They chose to prioritize what is actually harming kids, as the priority. Go figure.
Simply trying to sheild kids from social media won't solve this problem.
I"m 72 years old and bullying was a problem when I was a kid. Some kids picked on other kids and made them feel bad about themselves. Suicides resulted from such abuse even way back then.
How did our parents deal with the problem?
They taught us that "sticks and stones may break your bones but names can never hurt you" -- ie: ignore those who seek to bring you down.
That may sound glib and unhelpful but trust me, it was incredibly helpfu
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Some kids picked on other kids and made them feel bad about themselves. Suicides resulted from such abuse even way back then.
As a parent of school-aged children I can tell you that nothing changed even if you remove social media from the equation. Despite all that talk by teachers about anti-bullying, the in-person bullying is still there as always. Only now fighting back is harder, because teachers are disempowered, don't care, and all too happy to blame the convenient person, often a victim, and/or turn the blind eye.
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They taught us that "sticks and stones may break your bones but names can never hurt you" -- ie: ignore those who seek to bring you down.
In other words, they taught you something that was simply not true.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can spark genocide. Think that's over egging it? Well, as far as we know, (take your pick) [Hitler, Stalin, Mao] never killed anyone, and yet is regarded as one of the worst mass murderers humanity as known.
They did it all with the power of words.
That may soun
Re: How? (Score:2)
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Words don't hurt people unless they let them.
Repeating a lie does not make it true.
The parent post was talking about personal interactions not political rallying cries.
Words have power to spark a revolution or genocide. And you expect a kid to shrug off what a nation cannot?
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Maybe PornHub is less harmful than social media? I certainly think that's the case.
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They know perfectly well who the kids are, because they know whom to display kid ads to.
They don't, though. They assign tokens to you based on post interactions. It doesn't matter which reaction you use or what words are found in your comment replies, when you interact with content (which is all auto-tagged, though ofc the tags are not displayed) its tokens are copied to your profile. They can rapidly get up into the thousands and you can only remove a dozen or so at a time practically with the tools they provide (some bad UI in settings.) Faceboot actually doesn't know shit about you even if
The big ones will be forced to get government IDs (Score:2)
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How are the social media companies supposed to enforce this? What test is available that would distinguish between say a sixteen-year-old and an adult or prevent a child from using a parent's access? Most teenagers are savvier about these things than their parents.
There in lies the problem with this law, well one of them... it's completely unenforceable. None of these companies are Australian, they can simply tell the Australian government to go do one and the Australian government can't do anything about it. Its extremely daft to make a law you know can never be enforced, it just makes a government look weak and Albo really doesn't need to look weak right now.
The other problem is thinking that banning something means that kids wont see it, as you've pointed out.
Re: How? (Score:3)
"teenagers are savvier about these things than their parent"
I don't think that's true anymore. There was a time when exposure to computers and youthful learning have them a leg up, but with the introduction of phones that are locked down, most teenagers have lost the basic understanding of how computers work.
As a notable example, teenagers no longer understand hierarchical file systems. It's Clarke's technology/magic threshold. To teenagers and boomers, this stuff has always appeared magical, so there's no
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How are the social media companies supposed to enforce this? What test is available that would distinguish between say a sixteen-year-old and an adult or prevent a child from using a parent's access? Most teenagers are savvier about these things than their parents.
Enforcement difficulty is a bit of a red herring.
With something like this, just having the law on the books is a tool in the toolbox, as well as acting as a bit of a teacher (per Oliver Wendell Holmes).
"It was illegal for them to be on there in the first place" can have all kinds of utility.
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The same way you enforce no cigarettes to under 18 and no alcohol sales to under 21. Its not a violation of your rights to require ID to prove you are old enough to but cigarettes or alcohol. Now you will have to have ID to use certain websites. Most likely using a 3rd party site like ID.me that scans your ID card barcode, and compares the image on file with a special rendering with your phone camera using different filters. Even the IRS uses ID.me to authenticate you. No ID, no access. Just like booze.
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The US passed a law twenty years ago that restricted data collection on kids under 13. Many of the social media sites just said you're not allowed to use them if you're under 13, and figured out the age verification. I think mostly parents are happy if they can just report their kid and get their profile deleted.
Presumably... (Score:2)
nobody under 16 in .au knows how to use a VPN
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nobody under 16 in .au knows how to use a VPN
However there will be absolutely no need. The sites aren't being banned, they're just saying under 18's aren't permitted to use them.... which means they'll still be able to access them.
Papers please, comrade. (Score:3)
Moving forward, Australia will have dubious privilege of joining China and the likes for mandatory VPN for simply using internet for people that do not want to comply with "Papers, please" government overreach.
Re: Papers please, comrade. (Score:2)
Adults in Australia already have digital IDs. It's not like the backward country you probably come from.
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Oh you're right. The only suitable laws are laws which have never been broken! We need to cover 100% of all cases in society otherwise we can't progress anything! /s
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The laws are perfectly enforceable.
Laws don't prevent people from doing things. Laws describe what happens to people who do certain things.
Murder has been illegal for millennia. People still murder. The law just provides codified consequences for making that choice.
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And a much lower crime rate
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Does your tv have the Fox logo burned in? It’s really affecting your thinking.
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Presumably you have had your brain massaged enough that you don't neve need to anymore.
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Age verification likely means no more anonymous speech for adults.
Not necessarily. Recently, for some reason, LinkedIn decided that I needed to verify my account. However, it used a third party to do the verification. If what I was told in the terms I agreed to is true, the third party verified my government identity document, and once it was verified, discarded the info and simply told LinkedIn "Yup, she's OK."
Some mechanism like this could be used for social media to verify your age without obtain
Just like Pirate Bay? (Score:2)
In 2016, the Australia federal court ordered ISPs to block piracy sites.
They responded by just blocking lookups in their DNS servers. So now every kid knows that setting your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 will bypass the roadblocks.
Easier to remember than 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 :-)
So how much effort will anyone really make to keep kids off TikTok?
A good start but... (Score:2)
A better idea would be to ban anyone under the age of 116 from accessing social media.
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You do realize Slashdot counts, right?
Great idea (Score:2)
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I'm not an alarmist... but... (Score:3)
Apparently I play one online. I'm concerned that we are running a terribly unsafe alpha test on two generations of kids. We have no idea how it will turn out. A never ending supply of porn and toxic connectivity are part of their formative experience, and neither should be. I shudder to think of what it must be like to be constantly online without the "born in 1970" suit of armor I wear effortlessly that renders the internet powerless over my basic wellbeing.
I'm not going to declare the experiment a failure just yet, but the trend doesn't seem positive to me. It might just be me being the stereotypical old guy viewing the incoming cadre with disdain... but this X-er thinks perhaps we are making an unviable populace, and maybe this restriction of access isn't a bad start.
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More "feel good" band-aid crap (Score:2)
Work on addressing the underlying causes/issues? Nah, too expensive and takes too long. We'd rather keep applying lipstick to a pig.
In the meantime, VPN/proxy use will surge a bit, and the youth this is supposed to stop will just lie about their age, etc. to get on anyway.
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U S E N E T ? (Score:2)
Will this lead to a renaissance of USENET to continue the flamewars? No central authority to bully.