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Comment by asgerhb | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts immediately go to all the queer kids in rural areas who stand to be cut off from the only support networks they have.

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I think messaging apps are exempted so hopefully online communities in places like Discord will be perfectly fine

if Discord is fine then I really don’t understand this legislation at all…

Any and all kids in rural areas.

Experience deprivation is a very real thing. I grew up in a desolate rural area, circa the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.

Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.

That very reason was raised in parliament, during question time by one senator, but neither side (LNP/Labor) gives a shit.

The internet today is a very different place from the 90's. I really hope your children don't have access to the sickest, shallowest, most addictive and most dangerous place on the net.

The idea that social media is like a Meta commercial, all making new friends and video calls to smiling Grandparents, etc. is a fabrication, presumably one that a lot of HN folks have a vested interest in maintaining. Kids are lonelier now than they have ever been.

This has been one of the hard things to deal with working in tech. Tech has advanced so much but am I happier or more connected to people than my parents were at my age? Not really. I've had an existential crisis recently about what all this work I've been doing is for. Outside of work I've been using less and less tech and I think I've been happier (like today I have a physical cookbook and a couple handwritten recipes instead of using recipes on my phone).

Not everyone who disagrees with you is lying.

1. How granular does that data get for urban/rural/suburbs? 2. What effect does social media have on the floor of loneliness?

> Cutting off young teens from access to the world via 'social media,' is a human rights violation.

Is that more or less of a human rights violation than preventing children from buying alcohol, preventing them from buying cigarettes, preventing them from buying pornography, preventing them from voting, preventing them from working full time, preventing them from entering into contracts, or preventing them from driving an automobile?

I'd say human rights violation is a bit of a stretch - the negative impact of social media use on an adolescent's psychological well-being is well documented - so possibly even the exact opposite.

> The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.

I grew up in a wealthy very tech-savvy area, and most kids except the really geeky like me didn't get internet until the mid or late 1990s, so you weren't as "backwards" as you think. You would have still been on the bleeding edge to have internet in the early 1990s.

>immediately concerned with the leftist recruiting ring that social media had become, being compromised. I've already trawled your internet presence enough to know you're an activist. you're revolting.

> My thoughts immediately go to all the queer kids in rural areas who stand to be cut off from the only support networks they have

I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff), but if the article is correct then I find myself strongly in support (so-far...): my impression is that this is targeting the kinds of vacuous mass-market "engagement"-driven social-media services that us HN denizens aren't exactly fans of: Facebook, Instagram, the like. The article says that sites like YouTube and IM services are exempt.

> Messaging apps, "online gaming services" and "services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users" will not fall under the ban, as well as sites like YouTube that do not require users to log in to access the platform.

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For an anecdote: when I was middle-school-aged and unsupervised on the net, the "mainstream" platforms of the day (AOL Groups, I guess?) were just as unappealing then as Facebook is today (fortunately I wasn't on AOL anyway) - instead I found my home in places you get to via IRC - or extremely niche phpNuke-then-phpBB sites: these places aren't run by companies, just basement-dwelling sysadmins so they'd be exempt I imagine, so it doesn't look like any harm will come to those kinds of places.

For those youngsters-that-dont-fit-in starting their journey of self-discovery, I think getting banned from Facebook is a good start. Who wants their parents (and let's be honest: it's only our parents on Facebook now anyway) to get notified about your joining a cybergoth meetup group.

...now if only we could ban everyone else off Facebook too.

> I shared those concerns at first - as that was similar to my situation (though less lgbt+ but more just on-the-spectrum stuff)

The catch is, unfortunately, that our social media data trails make it all to feasible to detect which of us is on the spectrum using machine learning.

And which if our kids have what is vulgarly called "daddy issues."

And which of us are beginning to succumb to schizophrenia.

We've only begun to see the creepy dystopian consequences of centrally archived social media.

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