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Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban (www.reuters.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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After reading about this on hacker news, I get why they do it. Its to make people upload identification documents, to get them prepped to authenticate for using the internet. Now the world makes sense again. I was wondering why they would do something positive. But now I get it.

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[–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

No kids getting fined or arrested for using VPNs or buying accounts off others

It's actually explicitly not going to do that. The social media companies are the only ones with any legal burden here. That's the intent, and you don't need to go into cooker nonsense to justify it. It's no different from how a harm reductionist approach to drugs involves targeting dealers, not people buying for personal use.

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

    As a European 'cooker' was new to me, but I found https://cookerpedia.org/wiki/Cooker which is probably it.

    I hope you're right that it's nonsense but it's way too obvious that this law ain't gonna achieve its stated aim and has huge negative drawbacks for me to dismiss concerns so readily. Governments and oligarchs around the world seem mad keen on getting everyone's ID and biometrics with broad consent, including the exceptions to most privacy laws, and they usually seem to tie ID laws to "won't somebody think of the children" pleas.

    As others point out, the big media companies don't have to change their algos to stop harming children or adults. Just gather their ID and whatever lies about age.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    it’s way too obvious that this law ain’t gonna achieve its stated aim

    Absolutely. See my much longer comment elsewhere in the thread for all the real problems with this bill. We don't need conspiracy theories. Hanlon's razor very much applies here. It's incompetence, not malice.

    However, I think we can look at the worst part of this Bill—the nature of its passage through Parliament—for a clue as to its underlying purpose. It passed in just a week, right before Christmas last year, but didn't actually come into effect until yesterday. The goal was good PR. I suspect not rattling cages with the big social media companies was part of it too. They wanted to look like they were doing something to protect kids, and hopefully win the election off the back of it (not that they needed much help with that, with how incompetent the LNP were), but they didn't want to put up the fight that would be necessary to force the social media companies into actually making their algorithms less harmful...to children and adults. It's lazy, it's cowardly, it won't work. But it's not a secret ploy to spy on you.

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

    Incorrect.

    Deliberately circumventing controls on telecommunications is a criminal offence.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Sorry mate, but you've got it wrong. The Prime Minister has specifically come out and said that this law is aimed only at companies, and that children or the parents of children who are able to get onto social media anyway will not be punished. Only the companies that let them slip through.

    And you only need to read the legislation to see that that's true. There are no penalties associated with accessing social media under the age of 16. Only with "a provider of an age-restricted social media platform...failing to take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts". Or less closely related, "a provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not collect information...for the purpose of complying with [the above requirement] if the information is of a kind specified in the legislative rules", and another similar "a provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not...collect government-issued identification material...for the purpose of complying with section [the above requirement]", but this last clause "does not apply if...the provider provides alternative means...for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user". It is also the case that a person who provides an age-restricted social media platform "must comply with a requirement...to give to the Commissioner, within the period and in the manner and form specified by the notice [about that person's compliance with the law]...to the extent that the person is capable of doing so."

    That's it. That's all the new penalties that can be applied.

    Here's a page from the eSafety Commissioner that also confirms it.

    Are there be penalties for under-16s if they get around the age restrictions?

    There are no penalties for under-16s who access an age-restricted social media platform, or for their parents or carers.

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