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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban (www.reuters.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 8 months ago* (3 children)

I fully believe it will work. The point is not to make it impossible to visit, but very annoying to. I cannot forsee the average kid jumping through hoops to maintain access, especially when most of their and their friends accounts were deleted. Eventually, they'll realise there's nothing left to go back to. Social media lives and dies by it's number of users after all.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You could present literally the same arguments for why teenagers would never drink alcohol. Its against the law for them to purchase right, so its an inconvenience to access, so clearly they would all abandon it as all their friends become unable to access it as well. You could make the same argument for most kinds of bans. There are actually very few things for which imposing barriers to access has ever eliminated its use. Porn is an obvious example as well. Porn bans are essentially meaningless to consumers. They are so trivial to bypass as to be functionally non-existent. The only thing that imposed bans have done is make it difficult for companies to profit off of it. I am essentially ambivalent about that, but it's a literal direct parallel in this case.

    What is likely is that tools for circumventing in simpler faster ways will develop. Installing a VPN is already a single click operation. You dont have to do anything else. Teenagers are not going to abandon social media. Maybe you havent encountered many in the past 2 decades, but social media use is and has been near universal among them since social media came to exist. Like you're nuts if you think they're actually going to stop using it haha I dont know what else to say. But yeah maybe youre right. Making stuff against the law totally eliminates it because everyone is so lazy and incompetent they won't expend any effort to overcome trivial barriers to access things they have built their entire lives around lol

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    I don't agree with porn as an example. It clearly isn't a social activity.

    Alcohol on the other hand.. Haven't you heard that Gen z and younger have much lower rates of drinking? Social drinking is on the decline, and I argue it supports my theory. Their friends aren't drinking socially as much, so many don't either.

    I don't think VPN are going to help much. Good VPNs are paid services, and it's kids under 18 we're talking about here. They would somehow need to maintain a recurring VPN subscription fee from their pocket money. Free VPNs aren't the same thing, they're usually exposed to steal data or other nefarious activities.

    Platforms like discord and roblox aren't blocked because they're considered communication apps or games. Kids will probably just stay there.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Porn is comparable because of its implementation and circumvention strategy, not because of its substance.

    Drinking rates are decreasing, yes, but i disagree that it has anything to do with carding. It has been illegal for minors to drink since... at least the 60s? Earlier? Lol

    Free VPNs are abundant and teenagers using instagram are almost certainly entirely unconcerned with their data being stolen. A market gap will come to exist for better free VPNs, advertising revenue being the driving factor.

    I dont think that the majority of teenagers on Instagram / Facebook / TikTok are using discord or even aware of what it is. Some of them are definitely but I dont see those platforms as being interchangeable or serving the same functions whatsoever.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    And now on to recreational drug and alcohol use…

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is... pointless?

    So what if you get to watch a tiktok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    The majority of influencers are not in the same geographical regions as their fans. Content is not as regional as it once was. The TikTok algorithm is based on time spent viewing something, and things like search terms and engagement, more than it is about where you are geographically.

    The same can be said for Instagram. How you connect with other users on instagram is by following them. It will recommend you new users based on who the people you follow also follow. Where you are does not have really anything to do with how you would engage with your fellow peers. They'll mostly be asking you directly what your handle is and then following you. Your geography would mostly impact what kinds of new content the algorithm will feed you without any prior data, drawing instead from content that is popular with where you are from and what age you said you are and what gender you said you are.

    I think a lot of people in this thread are misunderstanding how people use social media in general. Activating a VPN and creating an account somewhere else will not fundamentally alter how you use the platform. It just adds a very simple very easily accessible bypass measure to using it.

    I personally expect that the platforms will make whatever concessions the government is asking for so they dont have to do this. Because teenagers make up such a large part of their userbase that it would be a massive hit financially to lose out on it. But the ban itself would be ineffective in ultimately preventing teenagers from accessing those platforms.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won't impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won't impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

    • Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn't be suing to stop this if they didn't think it was a major threat to their platform.
    • The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
    • A cohort aging up doesn't mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren't tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn't married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
    • Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

    Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc...).

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