Wonder how it’s actually going to be enforced. Judging from the article, it’ll all be up to the tech companies themselves which historically didn’t turn out to be that effective (examples: age fields on services like Discord and Gmail and porn).
The only effective way I can think of is having to send a picture of your ID but that’s hella invasive
This is not good. This isn’t about “protecting the children” this is about control. This will hurt those who are most vulnerable. If it weren’t for the internet I probably would have died a while ago.
Adults, take my warning, they will come for you next. Its a matter of time
You think they’re going to raise the drinking age too? This is not inevitable.
Yeah, maybe I’m being too negative, but people need to act,
This seems like it’s going to be really bad for LGBTQ+ minors. Finding community online at around 13-14yo literally saved my life.
About time somebody tried it
And they expect that a 16-year-old won’t figure that out…
I guess we’ll see what happens.
Awful
I’d prefer for kids to learn to navigate social media whilst they have access to adult supervision and oversight. 16yos aren’t going to listen to their parents’ advice.
16yos aren’t going to listen to their parents’ advice.
That’s why I started and continued to talk to my two sons about it from a very young age (5 years old). Now they are teenagers and don’t have any online problems.
It’s not enough just to discuss it in the abstract, they need to interact with it in a controlled environment
I agree. One of my sons doesn’t want to use social media (he tried several and didn’t like any of them). My other son only uses Reddit to find interesting things and information in niche subjects (he rarely interacts with anyone on the platform).
What did you go over?
Whether this is good or terrible honestly kind of depends on how they define social media. Is discord social media? Are forums? Is Reddit?
Arguably nobody really benefits from exposing children to feeds full of toxic and angry adults, but that doesn’t mean no communities should allow children. Like, there’s nothing wrong with kids dipping their toes into the Internet and learning and growing from it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to just hand them the keys to the worst elements.
Also like, I prefer adult communities over all age communities by a long shot.
But didn’t they already have a popup window asking if they’re old enough? That should have fixed it already.
Australia hopefully has their own home grown social media sites by now. Every other country that decides to wholesale ban all foreign social media tend to have replacements ready when they do it.
Something the article doesn’t clarify is whether this is meant to only to apply to kids in Australia. Normally that would be obvious, except that Australia already has tried to demand social media companies remove content even for non-Australian users on the basis that Australians could bypass geo blocking with VPNs. If age checks are location/ IP based, they could make the same (bad) argument.
*Mass Identification Scheme
Which empire has the best firewall?
