Weird at how we’re not talking about the technology behind social media aka algorithms that are provoke a specific emotion. Since it’s those algorithms that is hurting children and society.
Its definitely not the unmitigated housing shortage, the dramatic rise in food prices, the dramatic drop in healthcare access, double digit youth unemployment after mass immigration and LMIA scams.
Its just social media making the youth upset, they dont realize their lives are great.
Age verification not mentioned. Wake me up when it is.
I wonder how its all being coordinated, is it large tech companies pushing it I assume?
I doubt it, big tech doesn’t really benefit from this as far as I know. I think it’s based on public outrage.
As someone who was a teenager when the internet became a thing, I agree there should be a debate on the topic. Because as I see it, our brains got broken differently after the internet.
There is a healthy way to approach this. There is a minimum age for social media. Buuuut… I’m not the one who should be saying what that is.
the problem here is that all politicians are reallty after is “age verification” which is just an excuse to deannonymize the intenet and track everyone
That’s exactly it. It has nothing to do with protecting children, it’s sole purpose is to get rid of any semblance of privacy
It’s also to de-platform an silence them.
For sure, I think that is more akin secondary consideration in their eyes, however.
Uh yeah…
That’s what all parents want. 😆
So, mass surveillance for everyone under the guise of “think of the children!” while billionaires are trafficking and raping them.
I’m still confused as to how this has anything to do with the population at large. Monitor your fucking kids.
“Protect the kids” is just the current excuse to erode privacy and implement further government surveillance measures. If this was truly about protecting children they’d be regulating social media companies to stop them from being so harmful in the first place.
“Monitor your kids” hasn’t really been good enough and now we are seeing literal cognitive decline due to social media use in youth. I agree that global age verification is a privacy violation, but there ARE genuine problems with unrestricted social media use for youth.
Websites who can’t handle the data without getting hacked should not be asking for my government ID.
Stop preying on kids you degenerate pedos
Seriously, just be an actual parent to your children and let adults be able to enjoy things without everything being censored to shit because you use the internet as a babysitter.
Really hate the way the internet is moving and the increasing control governments are enforcing and reaching for.
Why I am moving to Mastodon (sorta I don’t use it much), Lemmy (yes I know it is part of Mastodon), I want to move to peertube but that is a hard thing at least that is how I am finding it. My computers are raspberry pis so I do not use MacOS or Windows, sadly I still use an iPad and iPhone as I do not have the money to change them yet. I hide as much about myself from the ad market with piholes and single use email addresses with my own domain. I have a VPN back to my LAN so that when I am away I still get all the ad blocking. I realize that this is blocking the ad market and not the government, but I am going to make it as hard as possible for governments to check me and my internet habits out as hard as possible.
Oh great it’s time for that again. So many things they might try to do to protect the children. So few of them that would not do more harm than good.
Please let this government fall before they fuck it up too badly, and the same to its successor. Delay is all we can do, and hope we can hold them off long enough for the utter stupidity of “age verification” systems to become obvious to even the politicians as its failure in e.g. the UK continues to play out.
Stupid as fuck
While I agree kids should not have Facebook or IG, I don’t really think it’s up to the government to decide. Parent your kids.
The problem with this is that parenting your own kid doesn’t address the strong network effect these platforms have, which is what makes them enticing for kids to begin with. But making it illegal for kids gets ride of this network effect
It does the same way no minor ever purchased alcohol.
As a millenial I grew up on the internet and I watched my own children navigate an ever evolving internet, especially social media. My home did not allow social media before 16 as I agree there is an age limit. The problem is how do we verify this? Requiring ID for anything on the internet is a slippery slope that politicians seem all too happy to throw us down.
We set the standard for parents and other adults and institutions like we do for tobacco. That makes it easier for adults to enforce the ban. It’s much easier to enforce no social rule when it’s illegal than when it isn’t.
I’d really recommend the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. It addresses the exact thing that this policy is trying to tackle.
In short, regarding many of the comments already here, the current (but unenforced) internet ‘age of consent’ is 13, essentially the exact age where girls and boys are most vulnerable to developing addictive habits and where (in-person) social connection is most needed.
The “just parent your kids” argument falls flat, because kids will find a way around even the most savvy of digital parental controls.
The “f off govment” argument really doesn’t help either. Should we eliminate minimum age requirements for the purchase of other addictive substances like tobacco, alcohol and marijuana? Of course not. Kids addicted to social media exhibit the same symptoms as those addicted to other things, and the health effects can be even more detrimental. Why should it be regulated any differently?
My biggest concern is how they’re going to implement age verification, because there are many privacy-invasive wrong ways, but a few privacy respecting right ways as well.
Great recommendation! Added to my reading list!
Yeah, I know everyone is concerned about the government overreach and for good reason but it’s not an “empty” issue. Hell, I think social media has done a number on me as well. I’m afraid of what it would do to me if I was younger to be honest.
Does this mean going back to a BBS and FidoNet?
Even if they somehow implement this in an anonymous way (let’s be real, it’s the government), it would have to be through government services and a lot of people that use social media, specifically Indigenous people, well, let’s just say, do not trust the government. So, if this is implemented in a mature, reasonable way without any involvement from the private sector; you are still excluding a significant portion of the populace just by having the government involved.
This should never have even been brought up. It’s idiotic.
Ideally this would be implemented in a way that had some sort of mathematical guarantee of anonymity, similar to the guarantees you get from encryption. I’m not sure what that looks like but I known people smarter than me have put a thought about this sort of thing (it involves two factor authentication keys or something). If there could be some sort of way to have age verification and also have zero-trust proof of anonymity, that would be ideal in my opinion.
Good but unenforceable.
Maybe? It won’t stop them all, but the network effect also works in reverse - one teen leaves, and it’s less attractive to their friends. Hmm, I should check the latest from Australia.
Politically this seems like a bad move. I imagine if this passes that it will be a sticking point that the conservatives can fixate on, sort of like the carbon tax
