This is the opposite of democracy - a group imposing rules "for their own good" on people it doesn't represent who have no recourse. If they had any integrity they'd be banning it for adults not children.
I lived in Singapore for a while and it's a "flawed democracy" where the government has stacked the deck against any opposition party to a degree that's breathtaking.
But a poll in Singapore showed that 70% felt that "social harmony is more important than democracy". Even if Singaporeans knew how undemocratic the government was, they wouldn't care.
It's so tiring.
Doomscrolling in all age groups. Going to bed very late at night.
Girls having body dysmorphia cause of instagram.
Young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
I particularly liked that one Facebook study that is usually taken out of context.
this made me lol so much. porn addition is not the cause, but the consequence.
do you have any idea how hard it is for males to find a willing mate nowadays? most females have men fighting over them, while most men must always do the fighting to get even one low-quality female in their entire life.
When you refer to "males" and "females", and especially use terms like "low-quality female" you sound absolutely unhinged.
I think what they should ban instead is recommendation algorithms. If I subscribe to a source, and explicitly unsubscribe from another, it should be illegal to withhold some of the first’s postings and shove the second’s in my face. This should be a no-brainer and has nothing to do with the age of the user; but it's easier to just ban the people who, as OP correctly noted, have no representation and no recourse.
Up to a point, but AIUI there is credible medical evidence for those being disproportionately harmful (in physical, objectively verifiable ways) to the young. I think setting the same standard of harm and applying it to all ages is reasonable; maybe this law is based on some claim that social media harms children in a way it doesn't harm adults, but bluntly given how much the topic is biased and politicised I just don't trust today's social science establishment enough to justify this kind of law.
Not being exposed to social networks for a few years is no way comparable to depriving them of bodily autonomy.
Do people thrive more in their mental health when they are supposedly 24/7 accessible? Is it necessary? Is it wanted?
Things have gotten much worse since then. These days children get reported if they're out and about unsupervised.
Ok but what's the betting on which of those the actual effect of the law is going to be?
That’s just one tiny example, and no one is calling for circumcison bans simultaneously.
Letting the mutilated children have some social media is the least the state can do for them. Australia is a tyrannical hellscape.
when one group votes to make rules for another group that cannot vote, it can be called many things, but "democracy" is not one of them.
Acting like we should be seriously treating children and teens as an equal political group is a joke
Is it? Last time I checked I thought that was only when parents or legal guardians do it to a small number of children in their care, not when politicians do it to all children in an entire country.
But even if I accept your premise, your comment makes me wonder if you've never heard of people who are bad at parenting, or who are downright abusive to the children in their care.
I think it's clear that as a society we have already decided that government has a role in establishing legal protections to prevent children from falling afoul of systems that are designed to be predatory
This is just another layer of that
Which also establishes a social norm that letting children drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or gamble is not a good thing, so people who are bad parents know at least some baseline of what they should not be doing
Children issue is just the excuse for government to get people obey. Sadly but "kids protecting" propaganda is one of two the most effective ones, works great and there are lots of alternatively gifted persons that do not get the real attitude.
Many countries already tried using objective criteria to decide who gets to vote, and this always results in policy that screws nonvoters at the benefit of voters. Do you think the housing crisis all around the western world is an accident? It's not. The electorate chose this because it benefits them. Is it an accident that the last 2 US presidents are pedophiles? Probably, but that would be much less likely with a younger electorate.
A decision was made about how children's lives should function without their input. Right now do you believe that the class of parent voters votes as representatives of the interests of their children and their future? Or do you believe that all persons under 16 have no concept of time or political interests and couldn't even understand if a politician was making them a good deal through a political ad?
Children understand brand new toys better than anyone; by high school, pretty much all of them understand that they get better teachers if you pay more. Are students not interested in getting better grades for "free"?
The government is not anyone's parent, it doesn't give a lick if your kid dies tomorrow, cause kids don't vote.
Yeah this thread is wild, maybe because those speaking “on behalf” of children here are actually all children?
Age restrictions for social media are as logical and necessary as they are for driving, drinking, etc. It isn’t just a concern about self-harm. The general public has a stake in this too in the long run, and it’s a safety and security issue for them as well. (If you don’t believe this is true, just think about how much power Facebook already has over elections, and how much more they will have if literally everyone alive grows up on Facebook and doesn’t think that power is worth questioning)
Years from now we’ll all be surprised we didn’t arrive at this conclusion sooner.
Young Greens/Labor/Liberal allow members as young as 14.
And these groups have significant and direct input into political policy.
So simply not true to say that have no representation.