This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Right it's going to take longer than a few months to enforce properly and undo the damage and protect new generations from its negative effects.
At least it's a start.
Or maybe it's never going to work because you can't enforce it properly because the parents don't want it to be enforced. And the damage you're talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.
But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it's better than nothing, and they're wrong. If you don't have a good plan, that doesn't make your bad plan reasonable.
Key point: "Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram."
They don't wanna solve the root problem, they just want to make the big tech companies happy as well as the people who is sayiing shit about social media happy, Age verification is their stupid answer to which translates to "We don't give a flying shit about kids"
This and the porn thing have been massively invasive in terms of privacy. It's so transparently just building a database of facial data. It doesn't even make an attempt to comprehensively block everything on the internet, or realistically enforce compliance.
What? There is emence amounts of joy in "I told you so". The majority of people warned them this was a stupid idea and now you want to piss on the good feeling of smug correct calling of the clearly failure idea? Fuck off.
I have never seen "immense" spelled that way!
With a 70% non-compliance rate, that isn't entirely surprising.
Platforms are even less likely to implement real reforms that the author alludes to.
Similar thing happened where I live with porn. Recently passed a law requiring ID. Instead of complying, I just started going to different websites. No way am I giving up my identity to a sketchy porn site, no matter what the law says.
7 in 10 children remain on major social media services? Does this mean they got 30% of the children off of them? I’d say that’s something other than total failure. A start.
But that's nonsense. If the bills sponsors had been honest about the fact that it would fail for the majority of children, then it would have never passed in the first place. They lied to push it through and now you're painting a rosy picture around a complete failure.
Speak for yourself. I find quite a bit of joy in "I told you so".
They're propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors
It was never designed to protect children
Glad to see it's not even working. Let's keep fighting aginst these evil laws
I mean, social media should be banned for everyone, not just teenagers. It's a great evil in the world today, and in a functional democracy that wasn't braindead, we should ban them outright for the mass harm and destruction they have caused.
That being said, I fully understand that the motivations of countries for these kinds of bans have little to do with the harm of social media and are much more about surveillance.
Which type of social media are we referring to here?
Doesn’t Lemmy count as social media?
There's a list of 10 or 12 social networks that are banned: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Lemmy is still legal.
Lemmy is legal because it’s too small for them to notice.
And YouTube is an incredible resource for finding information. It’s not social media at all.
To be fair YouTube Sharts is a thing
Given they have been clear they want you addicted then it counts. Their days of being information were long ago. It’s tat now.
Its also an incredible resource for finding misinformation and disinformation unfortunately.
It's so bonkers how most of the older generations agree that being on the internet cannot make you social, yet became the default method to communicate.
Ban it for everyone? I mean, lemmy itself is a social network platform, if you want it to be. But I know what you mean: social media being the most used platforms, Google, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc . . . And for that, yeah, I do agree with a full ban. We need a cultural reset, where we aren't being fed sensationalist bullshit and pure brainrot as entertainment via an algorithm trained on our insufficient capacity to regulate our attention.
In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.
I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.
There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).
This is the correct response. Social media, as a construct, is not evil and dos not do harm to anyone. The commodification and commercialisation of social media by capitalistic companies is what has caused the harm we see today.
All of the harms and evils of social media can be boiled down to a single concept: the algorithm. Because algorithmic recommendation of content wants to encourage people to stay on a platform (for capitalistic reasons), and the most enticing and attention-grabbing content is hate-content, these companies have forced hate-inducing concepts down the throats of people in an endeavour to make more money and destroyed individuals and families/friends in the process.
If we regulate the algorithms, we regulate the harm without disempowering anyone. We can, and we should, regulate algorithms on social media to turn it back into what it was 20-odd years ago - a measure to keep in touch with people you know or care about.
If you take such a broad definition of social media, then nearly the entire Internet becomes "social media" and the term loses its meaning, IMO.
I agree, social media is harmful for all, no matter the age. We shouldn't be destined to further segment and disfranchise individuals solely because they're "inferior", based on age or any other discriminatory factor - the thing is, who is the victim and who is the abuser in this case? Because the situation at hand seems like the victims are getting punished for the wrongdoings of the abuser.
This is where we are at, the corporations flipped the script, and we as a society gulped it all down, tightening the handcuffs around the wrong hands.
But besides the point, relating to the logic within your statement, who are you trying to ban here? Because you mention both "everyone" and "them" - which consequently makes it ambiguous, which introduces double meaning.
‘…internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway’
Terrific job, gov.
Our government is usually technologically inept.
The first online census (2016) crashed the system because they didn't allow enough capacity. Anyone with half a brain could have told them that most people were going to try to use it during one particular time -- after dinner (especially since the paper census is supposed to count everyone on that particular night). Instead, they decided to rate it for only 1 million form submissions per hour, despite estimating that two-thirds of Australians would fill it out online. At one person per family, that's around 4 million online submissions. Now factor in that the eastern states have most of the population (and are all in the same time zone at that time of year) and, predictably, the site went down after dinner on census night.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-09/abs-website-inaccessible-on-census-night/7711652
I don't know. There's some joy in saying I told you so, to people who had the hubris to try and stop teenagers from being teenagers.
