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Comment by lysp | Hacker News Reader

The "behind the scenes" of this was a repeated campaign based on News Corp's (ie. Fox News / The Murdoch's) newsrooms (TV, radio + paper).

The legislation was primarily based on their campaign - likely as an attack against TikTok and other social media companies, who are taking their viewership and advertising revenue.

I believe in the premise of the change (to protect young children), just not the motivation or interests behind this law.

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There’s an interview on The Rest is Politics Leading podcast with the politician Peter Malinauskas the premier of New South Wales who started the introduction of this law in his state first. I think it was maybe then taken up by the federal government.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leading/id1665265193?i...

It’s very insightful and from listening to this it seems unlikely that murdoch was a huge influence on this.

Even if they were, aren't they are unlikely to gain much from this. I.e, when the average teenager can't consume social media platforms anymore, they surely won't go back to a more traditional outlet?

Just as a note. Peter is premier of South Australia. Same political party as national and NSW though

Apologies you’re right, I looked it up but my brain had obviously already decided it was NSW as that’s what I wrote. It’s a great interview, he seems like a good guy.

I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos and the new corpos are more than likely aware of this from their own research so I don't think fighting over viewership is a factor in this.

> I rather doubt under-16s ever watched any news corpos

Well, no, because social media is a better alternative. Hence why they're getting it banned.

No, because kids don't care about news channels. It's not a darn kids on tiktoks thing, before tiktok or twitter or facebook they were outside, or playing video games, or reading books, or any number of things because underage kids don't give a hoot about talking heads newsstations.

Edit:

Quick summary of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8SkLRxFRVM (First 8 minutes)

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