Most Australian teens still on social media despite landmark ban
news.sky.com
news.sky.com
You cannot easily regulate a generation that understands technology better than the regulators do.
They have been using simplified overly abstracted systems their entire lives. When I teach an HTML class the first thing I have to do is teach most of them the meaning of “save a file to a folder on the desktop”. A majority of the class will have no idea what any of that means.
If you’ve been using chromebooks or tablets your whole life, you really don’t know much about computers at all.
Imo it’s actually good to run large experiments like these.
Something closer to an effective methodology would be to pick a date in the future and require small children that would be ages 0 through 9 on that date to have child accounts on their devices that enforces local parental controls. Offer courses to parents that help guide them through this process including conversations to have with the child. Give the child a path forward towards being trusted as a young adult. When they show signs of maturity, responsibility and ability to deal with "the internet(c)" and all that comes with it, give them an unrestricted account. By the time they are teen it is likely they will have an unrestricted account and will know how to deal with the pressures of society and all the trashy unstable humans and manipulative AI contained within.
Both public and private schools need to have courses on how to identify and deal with trolls, unstables, psychopaths, sociopaths, groomers, bullies, NGO's, marketing organizations, etc... This should start around age 7 (agōgē) and the child must be battle hardened against most internet threats by age 12 in addition to learning how to form friend groups to deal with bullies. I expect society to step it up.
This would also buy time for device, OS, app developers to ensure there is a solid sand-boxed environment for restricted accounts. i.e. The best pen-testers can't troll, be trolled or goon.
This leaves a hole for social media in unresponsive jurisdictions. But for the major American and Chinese companies—the current worst offenders when it comes to harming kids for profit—this should work.
Creating a wall for children with no path forward will not prepare them for the real world. Too many young adults have unrealistic expectations of the world but that's a much bigger topic. Preparedness has to start somewhere almost none of which is occurring at the moment.
People that do not have small children should not be involved in anything related to age/ID verification which corporations would have to inflict on everyone to enforce children/teens not be on social media. I for one will not be participating in age/ID verification for anything beyond federal taxes and I know I am not alone.
Everyone on social media. (I hate the proposals that punt this to literally everyone by doing anything on device.)
Also, this is solved with a two-way fine: one for kids being on, one for retaining age-verification data.
> Creating a wall for children with no path forward
Kids do fine with age gates around cigarettes and booze. Even though practically everyone breaks the latter law.
Also, those walls exist. Device restrictions exist in rich communities. Social media is increasingly a tax on poor children.
That comes up a lot in these debates. You and I know full well that it is not even remotely the same. I show an ID to a clerk and that is where that ID ended. The only thing that clerk has to protect themselves from is an undercover cop sending in a minor to by cigarettes or booze. There's no centralized system correlating my cash purchase at the liquor store and other stores around town. That's where the ID trail ended. I leave the building there is no copy of my ID following me around town like a billboard on my forehead.
No, the age/ID government/corporate collusion scam on the internet is going to end one way or another otherwise we get Scroogle Ad-Sense v5.5vbis ID/Financial History tracking up the backside. Everyone will be wearing their bank account information on their forehead everywhere they go on the internet.
uBlock, PiHole, NoScript and others will have some heavy ahead of them to block what's coming assuming that will be an option.
Some scan IDs into god knows what. It’s not required. But if consumers don’t push back, it happens.
Again, just make the law require destruction with the teeth of severe fines. This is highly solvable.
According to a brief search, the main mechanisms of circumventing the law seem to be vpns, false identities, and moving to platforms currently out of scope for the legislation like Discord and ironically Roblox, given its reputation.
As side notes, the Australian legislation does include fines.
Also, the e-safety report for the titular claim includes usage of social media platforms not prohibited by the legislation.
Well for starters you would not. Not the internet police anyway.
It is up to the parent to decide when their child is mature enough for mature content. If a police officer gets called to a situation they ask if the minor should be on the internet. Parent answers yes or no. If there is some manor of legal fallout as a result of them being online then it is just like we handle it today. If law enforcement get called they do their job and investigate what happened and gather details. Law enforcement have already arrested countless numbers of Reddit moderators, predators and all manor of other unstable people. The body-cam videos are great. If required they call in social services to interview the parents and children. This has already existed for some time. The internet does not require anything new. If the parents are facilitating a child using the internet when they are clearly not ready then the parents could be fined, have their children taken away, arrested, etc... depending on the circumstances and number of repeat incidents. The courts can handle family issues like they always have. If the child is being bullied the court can issue a restraining order. If a groomer is stalking the child the police can meet up with the groomer.
As for Discord they will likely be left alone just like 4chan as it is a great place to log what everyone is saying both text and even better, silently transcribed voice.
It seems significantly different in scope, intent, and impact.
Even if we don't get it right this go around, when the planet is destroyed by Vogons and rebuilt we can do it right in version 2.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Same way one does most crimes. Start with complaints. Parents reporting their kids being taken advantage of is a precedented responsibility. After that, let the fourth estate and concerned citizens screenshot offending accounts. (Or hell, give kids an incentive to self report.)