It has been banned for a few months. Hardly a failure.
It will be a failure if 10 year olds continue to join social media at the rate they have done so in the past.
It’s not likely to get 15 year olds who have been addicted for 5 years off it, anymore than smoking bans have any impact on teens who have been smoking or vaping for years.
There is some effect however. Many kids including mine used to have there first phone around their 10th birthday. Now I see parents around me waiting longer due to the ban.
Sure if you are 15 you can get a phone yourself, but for younger kids the ban has a positive effect.
Banning social media for kids before banning junk food for kids when you have a childhood obesity/health crisis just shows which companies greased the hands that made the laws
Well, they have been trying to fight childhood obesity. It's just that as usual that's difficult too. Ultimately the failures will continue unless parents are the ones implementing meaningful change at home.
I've said this to every single person who pushed for this.
"Imagine you're a teenager, and your parents and government tell you to not do something... What will happen?"
The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.
As an Aussie, and a parent. What I wanted was that the government mandate that in order for your website or app to launch in Australia, that if you want to allow kids between certain ages on the website/app. Then you need to have robust parental controls. Create family accounts where you can link parents and children, share whatever tracking/tracing you have with said parents and make it as good as you can. Mandate specific minimum controls based on what kind of type of app/website it is.
Put the control in the hands of the parents, and not this stupid one size fits all approach.
Here some types of small motorize vehicles can be used by persons under 16. Of course, they have built-in speed limiters.
What if we had this kind of distinction for mobile devices with Internet access? Adult's smartphone vs kid's smartphone?
It could be some sort of combo of a specific "for kids" SIM card (with, say, DNS blocking at ISP level and/or date of birth of the user) and a "kids hardened" OS that prevent bypasses and the parental monitoring tools you mention. The OS (in a wide sense, that could extend to the browser and other mission-critical programs) could be certified by some national agency; commercial products have to pay for the test, FLOSS projects could tested for free on request.
Nice idea but how are you going to prevent the kids from creating their own parent accounts while preserving people's privacy and without being too invasive?
You introduce it at a really young age, which is what we did for our daughter. She doesn't get access to anything that doesn't have good parental controls.
So far it's working fine, I expect that to change in the future. But it's also both the carrot and the stick at the moment.
As for creating parent accounts themselves. Imagine you've got a kid, you've created an account for you and the kid.. you have stats, data, usage etc. And suddenly the kids on their device all day, but you see nothing. That's how you know.
Will the kid find a way around it. Probably.. I expect them too. But it's still a hell of a lot better than what we have. Because it puts more control and visibility in the hands of the parents than it does the state and people like Peter Thiel.
Will there be idiot parents who just don't care. For sure. But thats already happening. You can't stop that.
Of course it is going to fail especially if the social media networks are incentivized to make sure that it fails. The penalties should have been set at a per user basis.
When we give everyone a computer and want to restrict a group of people from some of its capabilities (for their own good), the consequence is a restricted computer. Not giving everyone that computer in the first place could help ensure it stays a true general purpose computer.
Perhaps one can dream that we have a social media ban that affects HN and bans 35 and below. One can imagine if a ban is successful on one site then the kids flood another. It’ll be some kind of Thundering Herd Eternal September.
Anecdotally, all the parents I know and have discussed this with are desperate for this to work.
How it should work I'm unsure in the big scheme of it, but we limit access to various things until age 18 here in Australia, and I think this is one long term battle that I believe the tech sector will lose.
Rather than applying more bans, perhaps we should consider ways of living that allow parents to spend time talking to their children. Understanding what their days are like and the problems they face. For me much of this discussion and the excessive demand it takes from parents sounds more like a problem of the society as whole. That we are not having enough time to raise children since both parents are forced to work, best if they do it over 40 hours a week.
I know! How about new technology that "automates" stuff, letting them pay us lower wages to work more hours (if we're lucky to keep a job)? Maybe it should even be trained on our work
Reducing bulling isn't the primary goal with this kind of thing, more a secondary benefit.
Did you know that heroin (at the time, that was a registered trademark) was originally sold as a "non-addictive morphine substitute" to be used as cough suppressant?
People weren't at all sure how to even regulate substances in the early years of the 20th century, which is why when the US got Prohibition it was via a constitutional amendment rather than a mere law, even though they already knew about drugs laws and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act predated Prohibition by about 5 years.
Right now, we're not sure how to even regulate social media.
Isn't that a mischaracterisation of the goal and the actual implementation? Avoiding social networks is restricting away from unhealthy spaces, not preventing social interactions per se.
I've got news for you - this is how we've protected teenagers since forever in the real world! What do you think age restrictions on movies, casinos, or porn are for? Why do you think children have to be home before a certain time in the evening? Why do we not let them roam anywhere alone until they are old enough?
100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you have to make a conscious effort to "go on the computer", and when there are significant opportunity costs to doing so, you naturally put it into its proper perspective.
A smart phone is a human right, according to you? Of course you can ban them. The addicts will have to wean off, but after that, there's no disadvantage.
I think it is a human right that I decide for myself what is good for me and what is bad for me. I have for example Instagram and Facebook, but only to look what kind of Magic the Gathering Events are at the weekend, do I look at reels and doom scroll? No. So I would not say I am addicted despite having a smartphone.
Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.
And look where that has taken us. Perhaps that was true for the last few decades. But now that period is over, and our ability to exercise our right and to coordinate without it has atrophied to our great detriment.
<tangent>And then we look at AI and think "surely this time it will be different"</tangent>
And why not the one 1895? Some people seem to prefer this as well, but you perhaps would not like it.
If you prefer living without a smartphone its completly up to you and I would always stand for your right to not have one, but on the other side I am also standing for the right to have one if someone desires one.
Are you also standing up for the right of 12 year olds to access porn and graphic violence though?
That's a somewhat loaded question, I'll assume you're not (correct me if I'm wrong) and move on to the question of should 12 year olds have smartphones and if so how should they limit access to porn and graphic violence when used by 12 year olds?
Please don't fob this off by requiring that all parents should have CS degrees or IT qualifications, that's not a thing.
There are degrees to it. The current problem has a "perfect storm" aspect to it, with multiple pieces working together in perfect harmony.
1. a "small" device that a person can use while moving
2. cheap/free internet access (wifi and/or mobile data)
3. high fidelity display with high refresh rate
4. a camera (I would probably group this together with 3)
Disabling 2 or 3 of those would short circuit the delivery mechanism of the "opioid" while still allowing the device to fulfill its more "useful" purposes.
Examples:
- A small internet device without a hi-res display _and_ a camera is still useful for "knowledge at your fingertips", communication, navigation, payments, etc.
- A device with a hi-res display, with a camera, with internet access, but not "small" is either a laptop or a tablet. That breaks the mechanism of one-half of social media addiction, which is the capability to instantly create and upload content right on the spot. (Although I would argue a tablet will still have that problem)
- A camera that doesn't have internet access can still allow a user to record events, but uploading the content will have to be delayed to a later time. A fair trade-off in my opinion.
And this is all possible with current hardware, by extending Parental Controls to disable the camera, and/or internet access, and/or handicapping the beautiful crown jewel displays.
Agree but the parents want the hardware for the kids' safety, and it has to be a smartphone specifically so the parents can GPS track them and to do facetime calls to prove they're OK...
The fact that they'll ban kids from accessing every social media except Reddit tells you everything you need to know about the real motives behind this "ban".
I am not the parent, but there is a view that this was, alongside the earlier News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, the under-16s ban legislation was at least partially motivated by an interest in benefitting the legacy or mainstream media in Australia.
The Prime Minister's announcement of the policy included, unusually, a callout to one of the major news organisations (Newscorp) for their campaign (called Let Them Be Kids) in favour of such a ban[0]:
> I do want to pay tribute to the campaign that's been run by media organisations on this. I do want to single out NewsCorp for the campaign that they've run, Let Them Be Kids. It's an example of a media organisation being engaged in something that's of concern to the community.
Huh. I mean, that's interesting (that legacy media lobbied for the ban). So but Murdoch doesn't own Reddit, what's the upshot there? More links to Sky/Fox?
It has been banned for a few months. Hardly a failure.
It will be a failure if 10 year olds continue to join social media at the rate they have done so in the past.
It’s not likely to get 15 year olds who have been addicted for 5 years off it, anymore than smoking bans have any impact on teens who have been smoking or vaping for years.
There is some effect however. Many kids including mine used to have there first phone around their 10th birthday. Now I see parents around me waiting longer due to the ban.
Sure if you are 15 you can get a phone yourself, but for younger kids the ban has a positive effect.
Banning social media for kids before banning junk food for kids when you have a childhood obesity/health crisis just shows which companies greased the hands that made the laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_obesity_in_Australia
Well, they have been trying to fight childhood obesity. It's just that as usual that's difficult too. Ultimately the failures will continue unless parents are the ones implementing meaningful change at home.
I've said this to every single person who pushed for this.
"Imagine you're a teenager, and your parents and government tell you to not do something... What will happen?"
The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.
As an Aussie, and a parent. What I wanted was that the government mandate that in order for your website or app to launch in Australia, that if you want to allow kids between certain ages on the website/app. Then you need to have robust parental controls. Create family accounts where you can link parents and children, share whatever tracking/tracing you have with said parents and make it as good as you can. Mandate specific minimum controls based on what kind of type of app/website it is.
Put the control in the hands of the parents, and not this stupid one size fits all approach.
Here some types of small motorize vehicles can be used by persons under 16. Of course, they have built-in speed limiters.
What if we had this kind of distinction for mobile devices with Internet access? Adult's smartphone vs kid's smartphone?
It could be some sort of combo of a specific "for kids" SIM card (with, say, DNS blocking at ISP level and/or date of birth of the user) and a "kids hardened" OS that prevent bypasses and the parental monitoring tools you mention. The OS (in a wide sense, that could extend to the browser and other mission-critical programs) could be certified by some national agency; commercial products have to pay for the test, FLOSS projects could tested for free on request.
Won’t kids just make a new secret account that doesn’t belong to the family? Like you said, they will do it anyway
Still better than what we have now.
We just need to go back to telling kids they cant go outside and cant have sex.
They're providing for lowest common denominator.
You already said you've got your own solution.
Nice idea but how are you going to prevent the kids from creating their own parent accounts while preserving people's privacy and without being too invasive?
You introduce it at a really young age, which is what we did for our daughter. She doesn't get access to anything that doesn't have good parental controls.
So far it's working fine, I expect that to change in the future. But it's also both the carrot and the stick at the moment.
As for creating parent accounts themselves. Imagine you've got a kid, you've created an account for you and the kid.. you have stats, data, usage etc. And suddenly the kids on their device all day, but you see nothing. That's how you know.
Will the kid find a way around it. Probably.. I expect them too. But it's still a hell of a lot better than what we have. Because it puts more control and visibility in the hands of the parents than it does the state and people like Peter Thiel.
Will there be idiot parents who just don't care. For sure. But thats already happening. You can't stop that.
Of course it is going to fail especially if the social media networks are incentivized to make sure that it fails. The penalties should have been set at a per user basis.
Here in Australia, every parent I have spoken to is happy about the ban.
The media is predictably unhappy since they lose eyeballs, advertising revenue and money.
Previous approaches like expecting parents to educate children failed miserably.
Most parents lacked at least one or more of motivation, time or knowledge.
> The media is predictably unhappy
this is an article by reuters, they are not affected by the ban.
When we give everyone a computer and want to restrict a group of people from some of its capabilities (for their own good), the consequence is a restricted computer. Not giving everyone that computer in the first place could help ensure it stays a true general purpose computer.
Perhaps one can dream that we have a social media ban that affects HN and bans 35 and below. One can imagine if a ban is successful on one site then the kids flood another. It’ll be some kind of Thundering Herd Eternal September.
I wish I can promote this to the whole internet. this is not the way to control the internet :)
Anecdotally, all the parents I know and have discussed this with are desperate for this to work.
How it should work I'm unsure in the big scheme of it, but we limit access to various things until age 18 here in Australia, and I think this is one long term battle that I believe the tech sector will lose.
Rather than applying more bans, perhaps we should consider ways of living that allow parents to spend time talking to their children. Understanding what their days are like and the problems they face. For me much of this discussion and the excessive demand it takes from parents sounds more like a problem of the society as whole. That we are not having enough time to raise children since both parents are forced to work, best if they do it over 40 hours a week.
I know! How about new technology that "automates" stuff, letting them pay us lower wages to work more hours (if we're lucky to keep a job)? Maybe it should even be trained on our work
I don't understand what you're trying to say sorry.
I got bullied at school, but I'm not sure the solution would be to not let anyone in school talk to me :/
Reducing bulling isn't the primary goal with this kind of thing, more a secondary benefit.
Did you know that heroin (at the time, that was a registered trademark) was originally sold as a "non-addictive morphine substitute" to be used as cough suppressant?
People weren't at all sure how to even regulate substances in the early years of the 20th century, which is why when the US got Prohibition it was via a constitutional amendment rather than a mere law, even though they already knew about drugs laws and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act predated Prohibition by about 5 years.
Right now, we're not sure how to even regulate social media.
Are you confusing some apps with the internet?
Wow. Banning things actually doesn’t work and only makes everyone more secretive. What a surprise!
So banning CFCs didn’t work?
What about the FDA‘s bans on food ingredients?
They don’t work, companies just become more secretive?
The whole idea of excluding teenagers from social interactions because you can't police how shit people are is absurd.
Isn't that a mischaracterisation of the goal and the actual implementation? Avoiding social networks is restricting away from unhealthy spaces, not preventing social interactions per se.
I've got news for you - this is how we've protected teenagers since forever in the real world! What do you think age restrictions on movies, casinos, or porn are for? Why do you think children have to be home before a certain time in the evening? Why do we not let them roam anywhere alone until they are old enough?
That is such a dishonest representation of the ban that I think that even the majority of people that’re against it would admit that it’s BS.
Ban the hardware, not the software.
100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you have to make a conscious effort to "go on the computer", and when there are significant opportunity costs to doing so, you naturally put it into its proper perspective.
So, are you suggesting that the legal use of smartphones should be banned for anyone under the age of 18? What kind of society do you want to live in?
A smart phone is a human right, according to you? Of course you can ban them. The addicts will have to wean off, but after that, there's no disadvantage.
I think it is a human right that I decide for myself what is good for me and what is bad for me. I have for example Instagram and Facebook, but only to look what kind of Magic the Gathering Events are at the weekend, do I look at reels and doom scroll? No. So I would not say I am addicted despite having a smartphone.
Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.
Considering it's how many people engage in speech, yes.
And look where that has taken us. Perhaps that was true for the last few decades. But now that period is over, and our ability to exercise our right and to coordinate without it has atrophied to our great detriment.
<tangent>And then we look at AI and think "surely this time it will be different"</tangent>
The one we lived in 1995?
And why not the one 1895? Some people seem to prefer this as well, but you perhaps would not like it.
If you prefer living without a smartphone its completly up to you and I would always stand for your right to not have one, but on the other side I am also standing for the right to have one if someone desires one.
Are you also standing up for the right of 12 year olds to access porn and graphic violence though?
That's a somewhat loaded question, I'll assume you're not (correct me if I'm wrong) and move on to the question of should 12 year olds have smartphones and if so how should they limit access to porn and graphic violence when used by 12 year olds?
Please don't fob this off by requiring that all parents should have CS degrees or IT qualifications, that's not a thing.
Do you think 12yos have a right to stab each other to death? Why don't you support a knife ban if you don't want this to happen?
I mean there was a time where only adults would typically have a mobile phone.
Times change. There was also a time where only man were allowed to vote, I do not get your point.
There are degrees to it. The current problem has a "perfect storm" aspect to it, with multiple pieces working together in perfect harmony.
1. a "small" device that a person can use while moving
2. cheap/free internet access (wifi and/or mobile data)
3. high fidelity display with high refresh rate
4. a camera (I would probably group this together with 3)
Disabling 2 or 3 of those would short circuit the delivery mechanism of the "opioid" while still allowing the device to fulfill its more "useful" purposes.
Examples:
- A small internet device without a hi-res display _and_ a camera is still useful for "knowledge at your fingertips", communication, navigation, payments, etc.
- A device with a hi-res display, with a camera, with internet access, but not "small" is either a laptop or a tablet. That breaks the mechanism of one-half of social media addiction, which is the capability to instantly create and upload content right on the spot. (Although I would argue a tablet will still have that problem)
- A camera that doesn't have internet access can still allow a user to record events, but uploading the content will have to be delayed to a later time. A fair trade-off in my opinion.
And this is all possible with current hardware, by extending Parental Controls to disable the camera, and/or internet access, and/or handicapping the beautiful crown jewel displays.
Agree but the parents want the hardware for the kids' safety, and it has to be a smartphone specifically so the parents can GPS track them and to do facetime calls to prove they're OK...
The 16 year olds are goners already so who cares about them. It will definitely work for the younger ones who haven't been mindrpd yet.
I bet it succeeded in identifying more adults in order to go after people for speech. Anonymous speech should be protected.
The law doesn't require identifying anyone
Being forced to cough up ID or taking a selfie to verify age sounds like something that could be used identify you.
That's not what the law requires
The fact that they'll ban kids from accessing every social media except Reddit tells you everything you need to know about the real motives behind this "ban".
I'm not on social media. But reddit seems slightly more intelligent than tiktok, instagram, X. What's the real motive then, according to you?
I am not the parent, but there is a view that this was, alongside the earlier News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, the under-16s ban legislation was at least partially motivated by an interest in benefitting the legacy or mainstream media in Australia.
The Prime Minister's announcement of the policy included, unusually, a callout to one of the major news organisations (Newscorp) for their campaign (called Let Them Be Kids) in favour of such a ban[0]:
> I do want to pay tribute to the campaign that's been run by media organisations on this. I do want to single out NewsCorp for the campaign that they've run, Let Them Be Kids. It's an example of a media organisation being engaged in something that's of concern to the community.
[0]: https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-46363
Huh. I mean, that's interesting (that legacy media lobbied for the ban). So but Murdoch doesn't own Reddit, what's the upshot there? More links to Sky/Fox?
Reddit is also a dedicated porn website.
hah. As far as my girlfriend knows, it's dedicated only to cats and people behaving badly at Walmart.
And here I just called it more intelligent, lol. I should qualify that. I've seen her instagram feed too, and somehow it's even more absurd...
if it’s “also” a porn website then it’s not “dedicated”.