Australia's social media ban in chaos as youths flock to Chinese alternatives (gbnews.com)

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.

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.

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

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