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Comment by pinkmuffinere | Hacker News Reader

At the very least, I appreciate that this test should help us determine the causal impact of social media. I don't know if rolling out to the whole country is justified just for the test data, but I feel it will give a pretty conclusive result one way or the other.

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Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.

Even if it achieves only a small reduction in usage (say 10%), i would expect that should have a measurable effect on happiness if the hypothesis of [social media causes unhappiness] is true. If no increase in happiness is observed, i think we could say that social media does not cause unhappiness.

Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.

If a kid uses a pseudonymous account and fraudulently bypasses an age verification system, I have a hard time believing that the company would be fined $50M.

I would guess that this massive fine is more for situations like if a company can be shown to have wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly negligent. (But I have not read the law!)

violation would be: not making a reasonable effort,

violation would not be: a kid bypassing their reasonable effort.

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