Australia to Impose National Age Limits on Social Media Websites | Hacker News Reader

Australia to Impose National Age Limits on Social Media Websites

bloomberg.com

11 pointsfrays23 comments

An alternative Australian source and report: (ABC Australia)

Social media ban for children to be introduced this year, but age limit undetermined

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to introduce a bill to ban children from social media this year.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-09/government-plans-soci...

Some way to go, if at all. A Bill needs to be written, voted on, passed into Law and implemented .. all steps with hurdles.

How does one prove their age? Perhaps dox themselves online?

Note: this is definitely not a ploy by Rupert Murdoch to better control Australian media by preventing access to alternatives. Nope. Never seen anything like that happen before.

Even if this is the case, social media has proven to be detrimental to both children and adults. Social media is not news media, and it’s entirely reasonable to constrain the social media industry having access to children (as society would for other harm). Almost 70% of Australians support such an age limit, per the Bloomberg piece.

You want to impose mandatory ID checks and end anonymous online activity to compensate for inadequate parenting?

MyGovID. https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id

> myGovID is the Australian Government’s Digital ID app which allows you to prove who you are when accessing government online services. You can choose to connect your myGovID to your myGov account.

Because parents are not equipped to defend their children at scale from the threat actors mentioned. Again, high support of these measures from the public. You’re blaming parents for the digital equivalent of tobacco and alcohol. Victim blaming has no place here.

I strongly oppose digital ID as it seems to enable CBDCs, social credit systems, and mass censorship.

Already in production in China. Well beyond anything Orwell wrote about. Scary to see these apparent stepping stones to totalitarianism in the west.

Good luck with your cause. No snark. Checks and balances.

Thanks. Hope you reconsider supporting digital ID and consider the consequences.

Perfectly reasonable to have a position opposing digital ID, however to this outsider, the US seems to be quite happily using other stepping-stones to head in the same direction.

>high support of these measures from the public

The public support is for an age limit of social media (which already exists), not necessarily the measures to achieve it which are yet to be determined. There's not 68% support of using measures like digital ID.

Inadequate parenting ?

It's not always black and white. Pretty much every parent I know, is against their kid using phones at school. And yet, as most kids have phones already, they end up buying one for their kids too. I will inevitably do too. Of course you can take a hard stance and not doing it - but the social isolation your kid would risk, could end up worse.

I'm getting increasingly disillusioned by the whole idea of 'freedom' on the internet. That worked well until big companies and states figured out how to take advantage of it - for profit & influence. And then invested billions with very specific objectives - how to make you addicted to it, and how to influence your thoughts.

It's an unfair game.

> they end up buying one for their kids too. I will inevitably do too.

Yes, that sounds like inadequate parenting.

The answer doesn't seem to be show-me-your-papers in order to access websites.

What is adequate parenting in your estimation?

On this specific issue: not giving kids phones. Case for tablets, watches, desktops/laptops, cameras, etc. depending on individual maturity, but their use is to be appropriately monitored, e.g. no social media in most cases.

This parental responsibility is not be to outsourced to quasi-government surveillance entities with unclear private interests and security practices.

> Case for tablets, watches, desktops/laptops

This makes sense. Social media is much less harmful over wifi vs cellular data or when viewed through a tablet form factor mobile app vs phone form factor mobile app

Tablets don't fit in your pocket and go along everywhere. Watches are still pretty limited in functionality. Constant connectivity is the problem, but again up for families to figure out, not something that demands the end of anonymous social media usage. Will HN need to comply with age checks or face a ban in Australia?

Exactly. It is difficult to the point of impossibility for a youth to move a tablet to a second location. Further, watches can neither display or send tweets. These are the reasons why a phone is uniquely bad and other devices are uniquely manageable

It's the way they're used and how they alter behavior and affect those in the vicinity. Phones are antisocial. Tablets and watches and laptops are not.

Exactly, that is why the phrase “iPad kid” isn’t a thing that describes a phenomenon.

Calling handing a child a 6” screen “inadequate parenting” and calling handing a child a 9” screen “adequate parenting” is rational because 9 is 6 upside down, which everyone knows means that it’s the opposite

I'm not sure you appreciate that your solution is just as absolutist as the proposed ban. You're just banning a different thing.

I've raised two girls to adulthood (now in their mid-20s). When they were at high school, it was a mandatory requirement for them to have laptops (from year 8/9 onwards). (I'm not wanting to kick off a discussion about schooling and the efficacy or not of various tech).

Highly complex problems with lots of nuanced issues are not amenable to trivially simple and seductively satisfying solutions.

You can be anonymous to the public, doesn't mean you have to be anonymous to the platform holder. Bad actors need to be held to account for harmful content.

At the very least, we should hold social media publishers to the same standard we do print media.

If you circulate and promote defamatory or harmful material, you should be held accountable.

No more free pass for social media.

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