Australia's social media ban in chaos as youths flock to Chinese alternatives | Hacker News Reader

Australia's social media ban in chaos as youths flock to Chinese alternatives

gbnews.com

18 pointsdelichon20 comments

Please don't post GB News articles. It's worse than Daily Mail for sensationalist ragebait and gammon-pandering garbage.

You don't have to read it bud.

I don't. There are standards that HN should try and achieve, though.

Nothing new under the sun. Blanket Prohibition always breeds worse circumvention.

Should we let teenagers buy alcohol since some get past the measures and buy anyway? Cigarettes? Drive a car?

No! But we should allow them use of the regulated social media.

Alcohol is regulated, why not let them have it too?

They have access to messaging and interest/group based social media. Just not public algorithmic feeds.

Social media is barely regulated and the New America will likely retaliate if non-American countries regulate it in way required for productive participation of 16 year old children.

It's absurd to read anything about Australia through the lens of an antipodean GBNews Overnight News Editor who's never visited the country.

Other crackin' GBNews headlines by James Saunders include:

* 'Women-only' block of London flats now accepts men who 'identify as women'

* UK town plans balaclava ban after masked youth crimewave - but burkas EXEMPT

etc. ~ https://muckrack.com/james-saunders/articles

Great source of the latest disinformation by the likes of Nigel Farage, Michael Portillo, Jacob Rees-Mogg, et al, but:

  The channel is described as right-wing on political issues.
  As of 2025, polling suggested that GB News is the least trusted of the five main news broadcasters in Britain.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News

As to the subject matter, few in Australia thought it would keep kids off of social media, at best most hoped it'd push the tide back a little and provide some leverage for parents to exert more pressure.

Kids flock to where other kids are, so far that's all the usual watering holes after side stepping bans .. it'll take a little longer for larger crowd shifts elsewhere.

If have read a lot about censorship that this step is doing. Its simply protecting the youth from clever businesses making them dumber every day. They are not cut from communication, they still can call their friends. Teachers complain about the decreasing abilities of youngsters and true addictional behaviour.

This is a strong argument in favor of hardware-based verification. Just force everything in the app store to verify whether a iphone is "child-locked" in some way. Also makes it much harder to bypass by users. And of course no risk of having your personal information exposed by data breaches that way.

Or to finally ban illegal Chinese products, both hardware and software..

Why would you need to ban something that's illegal?

Because making something illegal down mean you actually check for it, intercept them at customs, or prevent them from being able to be accessed

You miss my point. You said these products were already illegal.

I don’t miss your point, you miss mine.

There is a difference between saying something is illegal, an actually preventing it from being accessed.

If you say a Chinese product is illegal, but you let people order it anyway, you made it illegal but didn’t actually ban it from entering the country

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