Comment by manindahat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manindahat | Hacker News Reader

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That is an argument and worth monitoring, but IMO it's not a strong enough argument to stop this.

This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving until kids are of age they will (on average) have sufficient maturity to handle the responsibility. Something we accept.

Kids are not banned from digital communication. My daughter can still send text messages and make phone calls.

Kids are not banned from the consuming content on those platforms. They simply can't have an account to create their own content as it was too often abused. For example, my 12yo daughter was asked by a friend to message bomb and abuse a 12yo her friend had a crush on. That's mild compared to some of the stories I've heard from platforms like Facebook, and between about 10 - 16 many kids are just nasty.

I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that leverage account history to supercharge the already addictive behaviours caused by UI designs optimised to manipulate your attention and direct your purchasing power towards whoever is paying them. Something kids are particularly vulnerable to. The algorithm doesn't care if it is pushing you towards radical content as long as you are watching it for as many hours in a day as possible.

How long will it take them to ban communications ?

A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying....yet a recent death in the news this week, the kid was literally bullied/sextorted via SMS....not social media.

Without banning SMS and possibly calls as well, it debunks this argument

> How long will it take them to ban communications ?

Just ban Australia themselves.

> A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying

Oh really now? It has been going on for so many years... A big reason they've been pushing this is it impacts their own pockets i.e. the traditional media companies.

Well I should have worded it "A big reason the say they are banning it is Cyberbullying" , I don't believe that at all, but you are 100% correct, they hate big tech as it always beats our corrupt, biased and inept traditional media.

Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet. Social media however allows for easier targeting especially for bad actors that are not in the kid’s friend/acquaintance group.

> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet.

Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.

That is true. The ubiquitous mobile internet and social media I should have said.

> Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.

The internet has evolved meaningfully over the last 10 years, even. Evolved might be generous, though.

Yeah, myspace was already dead and buried 10 years ago and we’d all stopped using msn/aim and moved to other platforms by that point

Funny enough, adults are also prone to bullying in large groups online. This does not go away later in life.

That is true and we have certainly seen our fair share of that.

Adults are however also better equipped to deal with that, especially if they have not been subjected to such abuse as children. It is worth noting that online bullying is however not the most serious matter here, rather (in my mind at least) it is the systematic targeting of kids/teenagers to get inside their head and get them to perform violent acts against themselves or others around them.

> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet

I seem to remember real bullies would do it to your face before the internet. Not just anyone behind a keyboard.

I remember when a bully would have to go up to you themselves to mete out whatever harassment, and you could avoid a lot of it by just being aware and avoiding that particular person.

Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.

This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.

You can do all of this with SMS.

Kids know how to download or use free texting apps and sites, giving them access to potentially thousands of different numbers from which they can engage in harassment campaigns. In fact, it's an incredibly common tactic.

Similarly, someone from Minsk and Timbuktu can do the same thing, they have access to the same tools.

My point was not "oh, social media bullying is some kind of special case compared to other ways kids today bully their peers". My point was "modern bullying is different from historic bullying, and dismissing modern bullying as the same as historic bullying is intellectually lazy"

This appears to be a slippery slope argument: if they ban specific algorithmic social media platforms that have a verified extremely negative effect on children, soon they'll ban all communications.

It could happen that they ban all communications, but if you think so, it needs its own argument; it can't hang off the social media ban. Otherwise it is like saying that if they ban children from drinking beer, soon they'll ban them from drinking liquids.

That's the slippery slope fallacy. You assert that communications will be banned as a consequence of this, but provide no evidence that this will cause the banning of all communications.

The assertion is not that something will inevitably happen because of this other than the further normalization of government authority over individual autonomy. That is an inherent result of this, as well as the prohibition of sale of alcohol and drugs to kids. You can argue on and on whether or not these are good, righteous, moral laws, but you cannot deny the intrinsic fact that widespread acceptance and even support of widening the scope of government control normalizes government control

Government already had the control. It's enforcing the will of the people, and the parents DO want this. So I don't see the issue.

Not sure who you have spoken to, but I don't know one single parent who wanted this. In fact most of them have said they will assist their kids to bypass it.

Government control is the only way to address corporate abuse, because they are the only body that have both enough power (to restrain corporations) and the possibility of being influenced by voters. Too much government control and you have a problem. Too little and you have no safeguard against bad actors.

> How long will it take them to ban communications?

Following your reasoning:

Alcohol is banned for children. How long until they ban all drinks?

Driving is banned for children. How long until they ban all self-directed transport?

Voting is banned for children. How long until they pan all political opinion?

No. Just no.

All those services are wall-gardened so without an account, you already cannot consume the contents.

That’s a choice made by those services. They can change it.

> That’s a choice made by those services. They can change it.

Why do these services have to lose? That's a choice made by this country's government. They can change it.

They’ll lose revenue in Australia. If more governments copy this move, they’ll lose revenue there too.

> If more governments copy this move, they’ll lose revenue there too.

That's like saying every government should copy the new tariffs too. If only it was so simple...

> They’ll lose revenue in Australia.

Why is it always 1-way? Australia can also lose people and lose people's interest.

Lol you think people are going to leave Australia because their kids cant go on Tiktok?

Well, who knows what they will be doing if it is not Tiktok. Hopefully they will pick up a book, but doubtful. They need a way to communicate with their peers.

Families aren't going to move because their teens can't use social media.

I am not sure I understand how it is relevant to my comment.

I'm not seeing how this stops kids from communicating with their peers. That seems like a bad-faith argument as they can send an SMS, make phone calls, send emails, meet in-person, play video games, etc. The things many of us grew up doing with our friends.

Yes, I did those things in 2000. Except when I look at the city I grew up in, it is no longer safe for kids, and kids do not even go outside anymore, and I do not think social media is at fault here.

BTW SMS and phone calls cost money.

Sending e-mails was not a thing even when I was a kid, 25 years ago.

Playing video games, yeah well, that may be the only thing where they may communicate. Except that is going down in the shitters too these days. Say "shit" or "fuck" (especially) and get banned from chat for days.

> Except when I look at the city I grew up in, it is no longer safe for kids, and kids do not even go outside anymore

Which city? I ask because I am raising my kids in Chicago. It is far safer than when I was a child and I was under the impression that most cities are far safer. We also have plenty of kids playing outside in our neighborhood. I'm not saying you are wrong, but my lived experience is significantly different.

> BTW SMS and phone calls cost money.

That depends on where you are and what network you are using. That same would go for using social media sites which require internet connection.

> Sending e-mails was not a thing even when I was a kid, 25 years ago.

I was also a kid 25 years ago and we absolutely sent emails.

> Which city?

I prefer not to disclose it (somewhere in Central Europe), but there have been extensive discussions here on HN about how many modern cities have become increasingly hostile to children because their design prioritizes cars over walkability and accessible public spaces. The concerns I am referring to stem directly from that context.

> That depends on where you are and what network you are using.

In my country, prepaid SIM cards still charge per call and per SMS. The alternative is a monthly plan, which at least for young people without their own income was not really financially practical. Back then, even adults did not use these monthly plans, if it was even available at the time here.

> I was also a kid 25 years ago and we absolutely sent emails.

That is interesting, because email never became a popular medium among kids where I grew up. What was popular, however, were synchronous, real-time forms of communication: in-game chat, ICQ, and especially MSN Messenger (I miss those days), and a local web-based chat platform that many of us used. Email, by contrast, felt slow, so we only used it occasionally, for example, when I used it to check up on someone to finally get on Yahoo Chat.

Do not get me wrong, when I was a kid we were always outside, hanging out in abandoned buildings that are long gone now, for example, and I barely see any kids running outside together in groups like we used to. They are probably inside playing games or something. :P

(There are still many playgrounds where you can see very young children playing with their parents. But they are way too young to use a computer or to be left alone, even, so I am not referring to them.)

May I ask where you are from? The contrast is quite interesting, and I would like to hear more.

I feel like people are either arguing in bad faith, or we’re trying to talk to fish about the water. Its so obvious to me that people are going to get their identities stolen and the internet is going to get so much worse that I can’t understand how someone would think otherwise.

No, about half of them (mostly) aren't : Reddit, YouTube, Twitch...

(That's also not what «walled garden» means. You're thinking about «deep web».)

> I believe that the line in the sand over which platforms this applies to is the ones that

You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.

> This sort of ban is the same as existing laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol or driving

No it's not. Is every social media platform banned? How is it defined? This is the equivalent of going into a supermarket with a "kids" alcohol section and 1 for everyone else hand-picked by whoever in charge.

Like the worlds richest man claiming to be a free speech absolutist. Because you just know the sappy fuck has your best interests at heart.

> You know a law is broken when its definition is defined by random people "knowing" where and how it applies.

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