Reddit Launches High Court Challenge To Australia's Under-16s Social Media Ban (theguardian.com) 54
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Reddit has filed a challenge against Australia's under-16s social media ban in the high court, lodging its case two days after implementing age restrictions on its website. The company said in a Reddit post on Friday that while it agreed with protecting people under 16, the law "has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences."
Reddit said there was an "illogical patchwork" of platforms included in the ban. "As the Australian Human Rights Commission put it, 'There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.'" Reddit argued it was a forum primarily for adults without the traditional social media features the government has "taken issue with."
Reddit was challenging the law on the grounds it infringed on the implied freedom of political communication. It was also seeking to challenge whether Reddit could be considered an age-restricted social media platform under the legislation. It said it was not seeking to challenge the law to avoid compliance, and had implemented age-assurance measures since Wednesday. The company said the vast majority of Redditors were adults, and advertising wasn't targeted to children under 18. The Apple app store age rating for Reddit is 17+. "Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online," Reddit said. "So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts."
Reddit said there was an "illogical patchwork" of platforms included in the ban. "As the Australian Human Rights Commission put it, 'There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.'" Reddit argued it was a forum primarily for adults without the traditional social media features the government has "taken issue with."
Reddit was challenging the law on the grounds it infringed on the implied freedom of political communication. It was also seeking to challenge whether Reddit could be considered an age-restricted social media platform under the legislation. It said it was not seeking to challenge the law to avoid compliance, and had implemented age-assurance measures since Wednesday. The company said the vast majority of Redditors were adults, and advertising wasn't targeted to children under 18. The Apple app store age rating for Reddit is 17+. "Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online," Reddit said. "So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts."
Age verification is a backdoor to gov't tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. And when the "think of the children" lie has run its course, they will just continue with one of the other horsemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
These are malicious people, plain and simple. They want everybody monitored and dislike anybody having freedoms. And they will stop short of nothing to get there.
Forget government tracking (Score:2, Interesting)
Now it's all well and good for some racist asshole, although that's a really dumb thing to do this since you never know if he has a gun, but increasingly internet anonymity is the only thing we've got to push back
When that piece of shit Charlie Kirk died multiple people lost their jobs for doing
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You know right winger is burned down police statio (Score:2, Flamebait)
Also the guy who killed Kirk was the right wing extremist and his motive was like the idiot that tried to shoot Trump they were both trying to cause a civil war. It turns out when you engage in stochastic terrorism it can backfire on you.
I mean these peop
Oklahoma BLM leader indicted on fraud (Score:1)
Okay so you're going to do Trump now right? (Score:2)
Look I get it you are not emotionally capable of feeling the combination of shame and self-awareness that is associated with hypocrisy so you aren't actually capable of being a hyp
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until we kick all crazy people such as yourself out of our party like they did in Canada
That included Prime Minister of Canada, so it was no small task. Now they are 1 seat away from Liberal majority.
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It's like nobody around here remembers the McCarthy era.
I think bad actors on both sides fully embraced McCarthyism. For example, on the right Ben Shapiro is all-in on both affirmative action and cancelling people that criticize Israel. That is, after building his entire career around "Facts don't care about your feelings". However, at least on the right, these censorious assholes are losing power, rapidly. Unfortunately, what coming to replace them are even worse - Nick Fuentes, etc. I am deeply concerned that blowback going to be much worse than we could imagi
The death of nuance (Score:2)
So on the one hand we have hardcore racists losing their jobs because they are hardcore racists and the companies that employ them don't want to take the risk of them either pissing off a customer by being a hardcore racist or worse opening them up to civil rights lawsuits by, again, being hardcore racists...
On the other hand we have people quoting a right-wing extremists rig
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Age verification should be handled with an anonymized digital token. One party verifies the age, the other uses the token to create the account. Both can't be owned by the same company. Neither is government. Unless that can be solved cryptographically, because a nationalized method would be simpler and more cost effective if there was already some sort of national digital ID. Regardless, I think age verification can be done relatively anonymously.
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I think age verification can be done relatively anonymously.
It can be, but that is not the goal, so it isn't being done this way anywhere.
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If someone is going to spread lies and rumors publicly, why shouldn't they need to use their real name? Part of the reason the internet has become w
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They have not spent billions of dollars buying and selling info just so that they know nothing.
The country where freedoms are falling the fastest is the USA under Trump, and he is using social media to help him.
US social media companies ARE impacting the mental health etc of children/teens. Yet those companies do everything they can to not pays taxes in those countries so
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Age verification is a backdoor to gov't tracking
There's no need for a back door. They already have almost everything about you already. I used to work in the spam industry. Believe me, unless you completely dark, there's already a full catalog of almost everything about you out there.
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UK is already jailing thousands of people [nypost.com] and clearly Australia wants in on that.
When you need to quote the NYPost to make your point, then you don't have one.
But we know Reddit doesn't care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But we know Reddit doesn't care (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never looked but does Reddit actually push feeds on you? ie: Does it track your account behaviour and then make suggestions?
Without the tracking and suggestions it's not using the terrible behaviour that places like Facebook use. Hell even Ebay does that. I deleted my account the same day I created it because Ebay's behaviour changed the moment I signed up.
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Small fourms, boards and things like A
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1. I saw it on the Internet and therefore it must be true
2. I saw it on the Internet and it aligns with my own beliefs so therefore it must be true
3. I saw it on the Internet and a BUNCH of people seemed to agree with it, therefore it must be true
4. I saw it on the Internet but it seems like such a radical idea that I'm very suspicious about it and therefore I'll do my own due
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So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.
Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that
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Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both.
HTML tags can have comma or space separated values.
<meta name="rating" content="adult">
The above is a tag that Google SafeSearch already respects. But more granular would be easy by just adding additional like 18up or 13up for ages, tags for violence, MPAA ratings, etc. There's no reason to have a single standard when you can just tag individual aspects and the user agent can look at it in aggregate to decide whether it complies.
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They might just want adults to speak more freely because it's good for revenue - which won't happen if they don't feel they have legally protected anonymity. That doesn't mean they are necessarily after just increasing their user count of minors. I'm not entirely on their side but I think it's worth letting them speak and supporting the good in what they say.
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I blame bad parenting for a lot, but they can't do it all - not for alcohol and certainly not for internet access which is nearly free to access from anywhere. Adults need to step up, last I checked
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One impinges on freedom of speech, which is protected. The other doesn't since alcohol, just like driving aren't protected freedoms. Make it easy to lock down the children devices, instead of making a lot of bureaucratic bullshit, speech and privacy issues.
Aussie teens already defeating the block (Score:5, Interesting)
https://archive.is/tRHTj [archive.is]
Teenagers in Australia are cheating the government’s world-first social media ban [archive.is] and openly mocking the Prime Minister on banned platforms.
Young people told The Telegraph how they were getting past the new age-verification technology by frowning at the camera. Others told Anthony Albanese [archive.is] to “f--- off” after accessing sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, which the new law has banned for those under the age of 16.
The group of self-styled “social media survivors” [archive.is] had skirted the ban within minutes of it being introduced on Wednesday, raising concerns that the policy is not fit for purpose.
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frowning at the camera
Well this is pretty sad. Not because the teens get past it, but because whatever AI trained on the data decides that adults are generally unhappy.
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Great, tell the politicians how you trick the face detector, so they can introduce a new law forcing you to upload your full id, or letting yourself be verified by some GAFAM company who they trust more than the webcam verification companies. These are possibly shady, but better than giving Meta your data so they can vouch for your age.
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So what ! , no one ever claimed any laws stop everyone, but they WILL stop the vast majority.
So now US social media is pumping out shills, bots etc to try and stop other countries from follow suit. And I can almost guarantee they will be the ones supplying the teens the work arounds.
And all the paranoids, sovereign citizens , and conspiracy nut will be out. What they forget is that in a democrac
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Of course they will, the goal was never to block everything. It was to put in place a barrier that stops a portion of the population from engaging. And have a think about this: If the block isn't doing anything, then why is Reddit suing?
The reality is some people will bypass anything (I myself had no problems using Facebook in China), that doesn't mean that the laws don't have a significant impact, which is precisely why they are being sued by a for profit organisation.
Also telling the prime minster to fuck
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Reddit is a microcosm. You might as well ban the Internet. Or come up with a real plan that allows nuance, like partial access. We're at the point where AI and LLMs aren't great but they can do basic classifying at a level that should be sufficient to just gate the material that should be gated.
Reminder that Lemmy exists (Score:2)
Reddit is not social media (Score:3)
Reddit is not social media; it's a message board. Nothing so similar to 1980s UseNet can be considered social media, which debuted in the mid-2000s with MySpace (though the term "social media" wasn't even coined until the launch of the second such example, which was Facebook).
The difference between Reddit and social media? The latter puts profile and pictures at the core, whereas they are incidental in the former -- both used only to support the primary purpose which is text-based discussion.
Reddit is totally social media (Score:1)
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I'm not sure what Reddit you are using, but mine is wall to wall picture posts, mixed with picture related adverts, and if I click the popular button I get wall to wall targeted algorithmically picture posts. You may use reddit for text based discussions, but posts without images are in the minority in literally all of the over 100 subs I'm subscribed to.
Reddit is social media in every definition.
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Guess I am using a different Reddit.
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conspiracy 7287 4758
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DataHoarder 542 510
I, too, think they should reverse the ruling... (Score:1)
From under 16 to over 16... The adults are out of control, not the kids
This is healthy (Score:2)
Every policy should have a robust administrative appeals process, and pushing that responsibility over to the high court is often better than creating some government department to do it.
Any website that registers users and lets them chat with each other, and
"but children are our most groomable patrons!" (Score:2, Informative)
The entire place is a swampy echo chamber.
You would know (Score:1)
The entire place is a swampy echo chamber.
You would certainly know about "echo chambers":
We have better evidence that 20m votes were manufactured in 2020. [slashdot.org]
and as the typical #MAGAturd that you are, you fail to provide any counter arguments backed by your voluminous "evidence". #releaseTheEpsteinFiles