I’m not against teens communicating with each other online, but I’m very much against the algorithm-driven dopamine addiction factories that are social media today.
Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
If you ever worked with people who fully grew up with modern social media and just entered the workforce you know we're already doomed, there is no recovery from this, that's why governments are starting to act
> Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
Quite a decisive move by the Australian government. I don't know if it's a move in the right direction or not but the research clearly shows that around the time social media became mainstream, teens' and preteens' mental health took a nosedive (Especially girls).
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.
* The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
* Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
How does a country effectively enforce this? Below is how they propose doing this. If you don't have any form of verification of your actual age, it's seems like they are just going on what the user says ( self reports). How can a company be found liable if a used lies about their age?
>the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature, but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued identification as the only way to prove their age because of privacy concerns.
Australia does not have a bill of rights. Our freedoms are guaranteed by our participation in the electoral process which is very high. This government governs with a large majority and the social media legislation is broadly popular with parents and older people.
The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.
The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.
As an Australian experiencing this first hand and considerably older than 16, absolutely nothing has changed. It seems like all the social networks are doing age estimation of accounts and only taking action on those that fail and are detected as underage. The change is otherwise completely invisible if you're an adult user. Obviously I'm only a sample size of 1, but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this, so it seems the estimation is accurate.
Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
I'm an adult, not living in Australia, and yet my backup Roblox account has been barred from using any form of in-app chat unless I send my face and ID to some third party service.
All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.
I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.
> but I've not heard of any other adults being adversely affected by this
I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.
There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.
I really hope other nations, including the United States, copy this. Australia proved that it is possible. I think the results will be so overwhelmingly positive that others will take notice. Good job Australia!
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Its crazy how the AusGov has just tried to turn this into some kind of nationalistic celebration. Passing laws isolating children isnt to be celebrated by lighting up national monuments.
Do you have kids ? Do you see kids in your day to day life ? I do, every day, and even <10 years old already have permanent neck damage from scrolling as soon as they haves 5 seconds of free time. I see groups of friends walking back from schools, they're side by side, scrolling on their phone, not talking, not even looking in front of them. I walk by 3 schools multiple times every single day and that's all I see as soon as they're outside of the playground (because they're not allowed while inside). Locking up kids inside social media echo chambers is much more isolation than kicking them out of them imho
I don't necessarily think this as it is will "work" but I'm all for someone at least trying to do something. Yes, there are a bunch of externalities and potential second order effects that don't sit well with me but, at this stage, I'd rather some attempt at trying to regulate than throwing up hands and saying its all too hard.
Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they did this or not frankly
Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10% but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
I like to win another poster said about addiction to cigarettes other things. The world drugs was an absolute failure. I think that is how this is going to go, lots of regulation and expenditure for something that's going to ultimately fail. Can't really work unless it's a little authoritarian, such as permitting Websites to only allow youth who have a permit. But I am in agreement, we need to do more, and we can't really depend on the parents anymore. So I think in a way, we have to make it costly for children to do things they're not supposed to be doing, but without disadvantaging certain groups.
any kid who cant figure out how to slide right by a government hack is a looser, and while we should feel a little bad for both of them, presumambly someone will take pity and fix there phones up , and let them know that there is sex and everything on the net
There is a pattern of government using moral panics to exert greater control. Australia and New Zealand seem to be used as a testbed for projects which are introduced elsewhere.
The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
The offline-socializing point is good, but it's also a cultural shift that won't magically happen because a law is passed. If anything, the hard part is rebuilding the offline spaces and social norms that used to make that easy.
Australias eSafety office only occurred because of the Christchurch shooting. The Australian government wanted a sniff of that moral panic, and said it needed the right to remove videos of the shooting from the internet. Thats the office that has been pushing for this law. You can draw a direct line from Christchurch to this event.
The Kiwis tightened their gun laws after the incident, despite having done pretty well with what they had until that year.
In both events, both governments paraded around saying shit like "Leading the world" such as Australia is once again doing here. Its much like Godwins favourite dictator going abroad to spruik his fantastic free holiday / political retraining resort. "World Leading" is the absence of any other quality terminology.
For Australias case, during the 00s and early 10s we actually had a really huge internet freedom movement. Previous attacks on the internet had bee repelled quite gracefully. It took such a moral panic to finally put Australia in its place, and now we are looking at a further consequence of that moral failure.
I'm not sure what you think is happening in New Zealand still. Your one example is a tightening of gun laws following a mass shooting. Something that virtually all Kiwis are in favour of.
Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are attempting to but are blocked by federal courts. Will be interesting to see if the tech industry allows it, or decides to break up the federal government before it becomes too powerful.
Why ban social media when ad-supported media is the culprit? Remove the incentive (to get users to doom scroll, to polarize, to impulse buy…) and you change the behavior.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
I remember when Facebook required a university address. That made it..unique to me. Perhaps there are ways to have a permitting process for kids through their parents and guardians that only access sites with that permit. Idk. South Korea has those internet license which I chaff at but.. It's a hard problem.
Decades ago, there was less competition for eyeballs, much more high-quality content (vs. slop), and investors were a bit willing to just build an audience without seeking immediate returns. Early social media was aspirin: a useful drug, but not addictive. Now it's super-cocaine and hyper-meth trying to keep the user high.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
Yeah, ad-driven feeds definitely pushed platforms into the doom-scrolling feedback loop. But for better or worse, governments don't really know how to regulate "the business model" without blowing up the whole internet economy
I despise ads. I take any chance I can to pay for my content rather than support ad-based revenue.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
The ad supported is just the reason to make it addictive. Get rid of all likes/thumbs/follower(counts)/notifications and it loses the endorphins and stops being the problem it is today.
I do agree that banning advertising would be good (though not the only problem). However, you don't need social media to socialize online (text messaging, messaging groups, etc. all still exist).
The real danger isn't the ban itself... it's the precedent that could be built on top of it if governments decide they like controlling digital participation
I kind of get it, except youtube... which has much more educational, news, and long form content. Also also forcing face/age verification sounds ripe with issues.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadImagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
....
But then also global measures?
> Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
* The ban only targets ten services.
* The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
* Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
>the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature, but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued identification as the only way to prove their age because of privacy concerns.
the law of unintended consequences looms large.
The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.
The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.
In football we call this an own goal
Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
All of my (adult) friends living in AU had to perform various forms of age checks on almost all platforms they used, which seems to be very far from invisible.
I'd much prefer anonymous, safe, reliable age checks (that can be done!) that don't require me to spray my personal data at the dozens of companies either in the weird jurisdictions or with dubious privacy commitments records (like Bluesky using Epic Games services, famously fined over half of billion dollars for violating children's privacy laws and deceptive practices). Yeah, that's doable. No, won't happen because it's a out the control.
I’m a 40 year old man and I’ve been impacted. A huge circle of people I know have been impacted. A number of companies now want to scan my license or my face, which will be fantastic when they keep it (despite saying they don’t) and then get breached in 6 months.
There's a long way still to go on this. It's one of those changes where positive effects are experienced early but many if not most of the negative effects will surface over weeks, months or years.
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they did this or not frankly
Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10% but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
The Kiwis tightened their gun laws after the incident, despite having done pretty well with what they had until that year.
In both events, both governments paraded around saying shit like "Leading the world" such as Australia is once again doing here. Its much like Godwins favourite dictator going abroad to spruik his fantastic free holiday / political retraining resort. "World Leading" is the absence of any other quality terminology.
For Australias case, during the 00s and early 10s we actually had a really huge internet freedom movement. Previous attacks on the internet had bee repelled quite gracefully. It took such a moral panic to finally put Australia in its place, and now we are looking at a further consequence of that moral failure.
This muskian "I am above laws so I'll break up the USA/EU" is asinine and societies should come down on it like a ton of bricks.
When much of government ( federal, state, local ) communication is done via social meda, would it be legal to ban anyone from accessing it?
Or are official government social media sites required to be accessible to everyone?
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?
The amount of human hours spent watching others play video games / gamble / creating parasocial relationships: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/watch-time