• ouch@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I don’t think there is a technical way to implement this without privacy issues and potential for future misuse and scope creep.

    Government doing parenting instead of the parents never works.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I mean, yeah. But also, this isn’t really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.

      And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.

      Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it’s an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).

      • ouch@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        But it IS different. If you compare to alcohol for example, age checks are performed in shops. No record of those is made or available to anyone. There is no centralized infrastructure related to age checks that could be abused in the future to track everyone who buys alhocol.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Yeah but if you think about to, from a law perspective that’s an implementation detail. Sure, from our perspective it’s a really important one, but from the perspective of a lawmaker it’s about whether it should be done, not how it’ll be done in execution (different branches of state, basically).

          • ouch@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            You are correct that from juridical point of view the difference does not seem great.

            Hopefully politicians listen to experts of different fields.

  • Chick3nDinn3r@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    What the government should be doing is mandating that a social media/drugs literacy course is taught in schools. Kids should fundamentally understand that things are not black or white, good or bad; things are grey. They have upsides and downsides; risks and rewards. Kids should be taught that Social media is a great way to connect with your friends, but you are also susceptible to being influenced/manipulated/addicted in X, Y, Z ways.

    • Moghie@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      100% agree. I think it’s a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      5 days ago

      As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything

      you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.

      if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.

      i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly

      so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed

      but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?

      that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.

      but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.

    • s08nlql9@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path

  • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 days ago

    Is anyone talking about the fact that it’s the predatory, short-term-quarterly-gains oriented behavior of the platforms themselves which is in fact rampaging though democracies, massively affecting and survielling Adult’s behaviors on a loop of ragebait-induced dopamine/seratonin manipulation?

    Because Kids are going to connect with one another, on whichever the next platform is that’s not banned. What’s more, the institutions they attend will inevitably ask them to do so as…things like Youtube arent exactly 100% avoidable.

    Pretty pathetic to clamp down on Youth Liberty in a society that has basically none, when centrally-hosted platforms owned by corporate behemoths are all-but-physically trampling the landscape like some kind of fucked up gentrification-glorifying-voiceline-repeating Megazord

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      It is easier to enforce access than to enforce ethical algorithm. Sadly, it is not perfect, but it is better than allowing it.

      • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 days ago

        Well we agree but it’s only as much better as it is effective…because when it’s not it’s giving the impression of doing something while in reality it’s legitimizing the stripping of the autonomy.

  • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.

    I DGAF about your kids.

    • remon@ani.social
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      6 days ago

      I DGAF about your kids.

      Preach!

      One of the craziest wtf moment of my life resulted from an oversharing parent.

      At a hot summer day a few years back someone posted a picture of them barbequing in their backyard to our company’s “off topic” teams chat. Nothing unusual. I was over at a friends place so I send back a picture of us sitting in lawnchairs having a beer. In comes the third colleague, first time father with a roughly 1.5 year old at the time. So he posts a picture of his kid running around in his backyard. Completly naked, full frontanl nudity.

      It took me a minute to recollect and I messaged him to please take down the picture. I know he didn’t mean any harm and was just sharing his hot-summer-weekend expirence … and he did realise his blunder and took it down. But wtf mate?

      After that I immediately googled how to clear my teams’ app image cache …

    • Eezyville@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      Yeah I agree with you on this. It’ll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don’t have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.

      • Madis@lemm.ee
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        6 days ago

        Frankly, decentralized networks make it even harder to take content down.

        • Eezyville@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          Wouldn’t it be easier to take content down if the app was not federated? I don’t know for sure but couldn’t you have a completely private instance only for the people you know?

          • Madis@lemm.ee
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            6 days ago

            Sure, if it is already private. But if it is not, then it gets copied to different instances and so if the original post gets removed, it is up to each instance to follow and when.

      • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com
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        6 days ago

        Australia requires mobile phone providers to verify IDs before providing cell phone service. As a result, in September 2022, Optus leaked the records of 10 million Australians including passport and drivers license details.

        So negative 2 years, 2 months.

        But this is just asking for more.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        It would take too long.

        Making the bet that is, it would be leaked before you are done setting up the betting system.

    • FuryMaker@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Identification would need to be handled by a 3rd party to even remotely work. Then they pass on the “yes they’re over 16” tick to the social media platform, with no actual identity details.

      Edit: and likewise, Identity company have no details about the social media account name or anything. Just a token transfer of sorts.

      • JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Identification would need to be handled by a 3rd party to even remotely work. Then they pass on the “yes they’re over 16” tick to the social media platform, with no actual identity details.

        The legislatiion specifically allows SM sites to handle ID.

    • kurikai@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Tech company’s probably already have enough info to know a person age without requiring an id. They could even use ai for something actually useful

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.

      The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.

      Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.

      So the bussiness won’t have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.

            • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 days ago

              This kind of control tend to be ip based, like cookies in the eu. So if they don’t know they won’t know. And if they know means that they knew. Nothing changes on that regard.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                5 days ago

                That depends on the law. For example, it’s possible that the US could require Meta to verify ages regardless of nationality, so you the EU (for example) would be subject to it.

                I’m not saying that’s how any of these laws work, I’m merely saying that it’s possible. If enough people sidestep the law by using a VPN, I could countries use a heavier hand (e.g. verify everyone or don’t do business here).

                I will always oppose these types of laws. I set up my WiFi to connect over a VPN to the next state over because my state has ID laws for porn and social media. It’s annoying and increases latency a bit (only like 10ms), so I’ll oppose them even if I can sidestep them.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days ago

    This is technically feasible, and bussiness don’t need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.

    But I’m morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.

    But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it’s too late.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, we need better terms than “social media.” Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don’t think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.

      I don’t know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the “personal social media,” not glorified internet forums.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        5 days ago

        Those kids already have exploiters; their parents. The right to communication should be granted to all, and especially the most vulnerable.

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          They have schools, churches, neighbors, other family, etc etc. There are plenty of organized groups online looking for kids to exploit.

          You’re assuming that they’ll find good people online. If they don’t they’ll end up much worse than when they started.

            • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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              5 days ago

              I live in New York City. Old timers here remember when 42nd Street was called ‘the Minnesota Strip.’ It got that name because thousands of young people [some as young as 12] would jump on buses and come to New York to live the dream. They’d be met by pimps who routinely patrolled the bus terminal and quickly gathered up as many as they could.

  • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister.

    Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.

    The law does not require users to upload government IDs as part of the verification process.

    Sounds like a pretty weak law. It will require a birthday when creating an account and accounts under the age of 16 will be restricted/limited. As a result users (people under 16) will lie about their age.

    Companies don’t like this because it messes with their data collection. If they collect data that proves an account is under 16 they will be required to make them limited/restricted. However they obviously collect this data already.

    I wonder if Facebook and other apps will add/push education elements in order to become exempt.

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Oh I agree. I wouldn’t want a stronger law. I’m just not too concerned with this one. I think if there are concerns with social media we should discuss how to solve them for everyone.

        We generally say 16-21 you are an adult so fuck it, whatever happens to you is your fault and ignore the predatory nature of organizations.

        We should outline the specific concerns and determine what, if any, steps we can take.

        As an example, gambling. I think it’s fair and reasonable to allow gambling. I think ensuring gambling isn’t predatory is a reasonable limitation. I expect for most people it isn’t a problem but I think providing help to gambling addicts is also reasonable. Social media should be viewed through a similar lens.

    • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I wonder if Facebook and other apps will add/push education elements in order to become exempt.

      I doubt it, and if they do, they’ll classify a whole bunch of nonsense as educational content in order to do so, e.g. religious content as science.

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I mean YouTube has educational content, but that is far from its primary purpose. Assuming YouTube is completely unrestricted it wouldn’t be hard for Facebook to add enough content to be arguably educational.

        Hell plenty of people use TikTok for educational reasons. I’m not saying it’s right, but you could argue TikTok is educational in the same way you can argue YouTube is educational.

        Now if YouTube is forced to classify it’s educational content the same way they classify children’s content (aka poorly), maybe that’ll work.

    • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      People should lie about as much as possible to most companies they interact with online anyway (obviously don’t lie to your bank, or doctor, or whatever). Do always, without fail, lie randomly about your age, gender, address (if it’s not relevant) or anything else that’s not actually needed to provide the service.

    • JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The law does not require users to upload government IDs as part of the verification process.

      No, it merely requires the sites to provide an alternative, such as face scanning using a mobile phone unlock. Using a computer ? Then you’ll have hand over your ID.

      The law also explicitly gives sites the right to onsell private information if its outlined in the terms of agrrement.

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Re verification per AP,

        The amendments passed on Friday bolster privacy protections. Platforms would not be allowed to compel users to provide government-issued identity documents including passports or driver’s licenses, nor could they demand digital identification through a government system.

        So it sounds like an ID will not be a requirement.

        I suppose a face scan is possible, but I find it unlikely. Obviously if it heads in that direction then the law should be amended to clarify that is also not acceptable.

        In terms of selling information I assume that just clarifies the status quo and isn’t new. Not that that makes it acceptable, it just means that’s something to tackle.

        • rcbrk@lemmy.ml
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          6 days ago

          So it sounds like an ID will not be a requirement.

          Sure, but gov ID is permitted as an option if another non-ID option is also available.

          Simply choose between submitting your government ID or, say, switch on your front facing camera so we can perform some digital phrenology to determine your eligibility.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    The fact that people even considered this with a straight face, discussed it and passed it is just indicative how tech illiterate we’ve become.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      I don’t know how they are going to do over there.

      Here the plan for the same goal is force any social media company to request a digital certificate when entering, or directly overtaking the ip of the social media and force a certificate check to let the user through. This certificates would be expedited by the government to people over certain age.

      The haven’t implemented yet, as they were going to start using the system to ban porn for minors and got a lot of backslash.

      It’s technologically doable, some kid will always find a way to enter but vast majority will not (next to a bunch of adults that will stop using them because they cannot be bothered with the same system). Moral considerations aside.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        It’s technologically doable

        I’d disagree here. Sure in theory you could design some system that authenticates every user on every connection but in practice it would be impossible to maintain without complete authoritarian oversight like North Korea. Even closed authoritarian countries fail to achieve this (like Iran or China).

        This would cost billions of not trillions in implementation, oversight overhead and economic product loss. That money would be much more effective in carrot approach of supporting mental health institutions and promoting wholesome shared culture, anti bullying campaigns etc.

        It’s not a new problem either. We know for a fact that the latter is the better solution and yet here we are…

        • glassware@lemmy.world
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          Come on, this is silly. You can disagree with it politically but technically it would work fine. I already have a digital ID issued by the government for doing online tax returns. Validating a social media account against that ID would be no more difficult than letting people sign in with Google or whatever. There will always technically be a way to get around it but 99% of people won’t bother.

          • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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            Nah not a good comparison. Once there’s market people will find a way to easily corrupt this. Remember that this is a 3 way interaction: government, private company and private citizen - the opportunities for bypass are basically endless here. You are comparing it with a 2 way market between government and private citizen which has no incentive to break the system.

  • rcbrk@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.

    There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.

    It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.

    From 63C (1) of the legislation:

    For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:

    • a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
      • i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
      • ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
      • iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
      • iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
    • b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).

    Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.