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#kids#parents#media#ban#more#social#should#sure#kind#doesn

Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

teruakohatuabout 1 hour ago
It has been banned for a few months. Hardly a failure.

It will be a failure if 10 year olds continue to join social media at the rate they have done so in the past.

It’s not likely to get 15 year olds who have been addicted for 5 years off it, anymore than smoking bans have any impact on teens who have been smoking or vaping for years.

FrankyHollywood39 minutes ago
There is some effect however. Many kids including mine used to have there first phone around their 10th birthday. Now I see parents around me waiting longer due to the ban.

Sure if you are 15 you can get a phone yourself, but for younger kids the ban has a positive effect.

thesmtsolver237 minutes ago
Banning social media for kids before banning junk food for kids when you have a childhood obesity/health crisis just shows which companies greased the hands that made the laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_obesity_in_Australia

UberFly33 minutes ago
Well, they have been trying to fight childhood obesity. It's just that as usual that's difficult too. Ultimately the failures will continue unless parents are the ones implementing meaningful change at home.
intothemildabout 1 hour ago
I've said this to every single person who pushed for this.

"Imagine you're a teenager, and your parents and government tell you to not do something... What will happen?"

The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.

As an Aussie, and a parent. What I wanted was that the government mandate that in order for your website or app to launch in Australia, that if you want to allow kids between certain ages on the website/app. Then you need to have robust parental controls. Create family accounts where you can link parents and children, share whatever tracking/tracing you have with said parents and make it as good as you can. Mandate specific minimum controls based on what kind of type of app/website it is.

Put the control in the hands of the parents, and not this stupid one size fits all approach.

astrobe_3 minutes ago
Here some types of small motorize vehicles can be used by persons under 16. Of course, they have built-in speed limiters.

What if we had this kind of distinction for mobile devices with Internet access? Adult's smartphone vs kid's smartphone?

It could be some sort of combo of a specific "for kids" SIM card (with, say, DNS blocking at ISP level and/or date of birth of the user) and a "kids hardened" OS that prevent bypasses and the parental monitoring tools you mention. The OS (in a wide sense, that could extend to the browser and other mission-critical programs) could be certified by some national agency; commercial products have to pay for the test, FLOSS projects could tested for free on request.

jtokophabout 1 hour ago
Won’t kids just make a new secret account that doesn’t belong to the family? Like you said, they will do it anyway
intothemildabout 1 hour ago
Still better than what we have now.
blitzar29 minutes ago
We just need to go back to telling kids they cant go outside and cant have sex.
ranger_dangerabout 1 hour ago
Nice idea but how are you going to prevent the kids from creating their own parent accounts while preserving people's privacy and without being too invasive?
intothemild39 minutes ago
You introduce it at a really young age, which is what we did for our daughter. She doesn't get access to anything that doesn't have good parental controls.

So far it's working fine, I expect that to change in the future. But it's also both the carrot and the stick at the moment.

As for creating parent accounts themselves. Imagine you've got a kid, you've created an account for you and the kid.. you have stats, data, usage etc. And suddenly the kids on their device all day, but you see nothing. That's how you know.

Will the kid find a way around it. Probably.. I expect them too. But it's still a hell of a lot better than what we have. Because it puts more control and visibility in the hands of the parents than it does the state and people like Peter Thiel.

Will there be idiot parents who just don't care. For sure. But thats already happening. You can't stop that.

strogonoff15 minutes ago
When we give everyone a computer and want to restrict a group of people from some of its capabilities (for their own good), the consequence is a restricted computer. Not giving everyone that computer in the first place could help ensure it stays a true general purpose computer.
Alien1Being30 minutes ago
Here in Australia, every parent I have spoken to is happy about the ban.

The media is predictably unhappy since they lose eyeballs, advertising revenue and money.

Previous approaches like expecting parents to educate children failed miserably.

Most parents lacked at least one or more of motivation, time or knowledge.

ShinyLeftPad24 minutes ago
> The media is predictably unhappy

this is an article by reuters, they are not affected by the ban.

arjie17 minutes ago
Perhaps one can dream that we have a social media ban that affects HN and bans 35 and below. One can imagine if a ban is successful on one site then the kids flood another. It’ll be some kind of Thundering Herd Eternal September.
martinkemabout 1 hour ago
Of course it is going to fail especially if the social media networks are incentivized to make sure that it fails. The penalties should have been set at a per user basis.
sermah29 minutes ago
Wow. Banning things actually doesn’t work and only makes everyone more secretive. What a surprise!
croes26 minutes ago
So banning CFCs didn’t work?

What about the FDA‘s bans on food ingredients?

They don’t work, companies just become more secretive?

bogomilabout 2 hours ago
I wish I can promote this to the whole internet. this is not the way to control the internet :)
grebcabout 1 hour ago
Anecdotally, all the parents I know and have discussed this with are desperate for this to work.

How it should work I'm unsure in the big scheme of it, but we limit access to various things until age 18 here in Australia, and I think this is one long term battle that I believe the tech sector will lose.

Skyy93about 1 hour ago
Rather than applying more bans, perhaps we should consider ways of living that allow parents to spend time talking to their children. Understanding what their days are like and the problems they face. For me much of this discussion and the excessive demand it takes from parents sounds more like a problem of the society as whole. That we are not having enough time to raise children since both parents are forced to work, best if they do it over 40 hours a week.
ShinyLeftPad9 minutes ago
I know! How about new technology that "automates" stuff, letting them pay us lower wages to work more hours (if we're lucky to keep a job)? Maybe it should even be trained on our work
stavrosabout 1 hour ago
I got bullied at school, but I'm not sure the solution would be to not let anyone in school talk to me :/
ben_w15 minutes ago
Reducing bulling isn't the primary goal with this kind of thing, more a secondary benefit.

Did you know that heroin (at the time, that was a registered trademark) was originally sold as a "non-addictive morphine substitute" to be used as cough suppressant?

People weren't at all sure how to even regulate substances in the early years of the 20th century, which is why when the US got Prohibition it was via a constitutional amendment rather than a mere law, even though they already knew about drugs laws and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act predated Prohibition by about 5 years.

Right now, we're not sure how to even regulate social media.

croes24 minutes ago
Are you confusing some apps with the internet?
r0ckarongabout 1 hour ago
The whole idea of excluding teenagers from social interactions because you can't police how shit people are is absurd.
vintagedaveabout 1 hour ago
Isn't that a mischaracterisation of the goal and the actual implementation? Avoiding social networks is restricting away from unhealthy spaces, not preventing social interactions per se.
9dev32 minutes ago
I've got news for you - this is how we've protected teenagers since forever in the real world! What do you think age restrictions on movies, casinos, or porn are for? Why do you think children have to be home before a certain time in the evening? Why do we not let them roam anywhere alone until they are old enough?
UqWBcuFx6NV4r39 minutes ago
That is such a dishonest representation of the ban that I think that even the majority of people that’re against it would admit that it’s BS.
ares623about 2 hours ago
Ban the hardware, not the software.
mrob40 minutes ago
100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you have to make a conscious effort to "go on the computer", and when there are significant opportunity costs to doing so, you naturally put it into its proper perspective.
Skyy93about 1 hour ago
So, are you suggesting that the legal use of smartphones should be banned for anyone under the age of 18? What kind of society do you want to live in?
tgvabout 1 hour ago
A smart phone is a human right, according to you? Of course you can ban them. The addicts will have to wean off, but after that, there's no disadvantage.
Skyy9339 minutes ago
I think it is a human right that I decide for myself what is good for me and what is bad for me. I have for example Instagram and Facebook, but only to look what kind of Magic the Gathering Events are at the weekend, do I look at reels and doom scroll? No. So I would not say I am addicted despite having a smartphone.

Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.

Cider998641 minutes ago
Considering it's how many people engage in speech, yes.
hahahaa43 minutes ago
The one we lived in 1995?
Skyy9338 minutes ago
And why not the one 1895? Some people seem to prefer this as well, but you perhaps would not like it.

If you prefer living without a smartphone its completly up to you and I would always stand for your right to not have one, but on the other side I am also standing for the right to have one if someone desires one.

gib444about 1 hour ago
Agree but the parents want the hardware for the kids' safety, and it has to be a smartphone specifically so the parents can GPS track them and to do facetime calls to prove they're OK...
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dazzatronabout 1 hour ago
The 16 year olds are goners already so who cares about them. It will definitely work for the younger ones who haven't been mindrpd yet.
Cider998638 minutes ago
I bet it succeeded in identifying more adults in order to go after people for speech. Anonymous speech should be protected.
ShinyLeftPad34 minutes ago
The law doesn't require identifying anyone
mindok30 minutes ago
Being forced to cough up ID or taking a selfie to verify age sounds like something that could be used identify you.
ShinyLeftPad13 minutes ago
That's not what the law requires
nullbioabout 1 hour ago
The fact that they'll ban kids from accessing every social media except Reddit tells you everything you need to know about the real motives behind this "ban".
noduermeabout 1 hour ago
I'm not on social media. But reddit seems slightly more intelligent than tiktok, instagram, X. What's the real motive then, according to you?
hydrox2439 minutes ago
I am not the parent, but there is a view that this was, alongside the earlier News Media Bargaining Code in 2021, the under-16s ban legislation was at least partially motivated by an interest in benefitting the legacy or mainstream media in Australia.

The Prime Minister's announcement of the policy included, unusually, a callout to one of the major news organisations (Newscorp) for their campaign (called Let Them Be Kids) in favour of such a ban[0]:

> I do want to pay tribute to the campaign that's been run by media organisations on this. I do want to single out NewsCorp for the campaign that they've run, Let Them Be Kids. It's an example of a media organisation being engaged in something that's of concern to the community.

[0]: https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-46363

noduerme30 minutes ago
Huh. I mean, that's interesting (that legacy media lobbied for the ban). So but Murdoch doesn't own Reddit, what's the upshot there? More links to Sky/Fox?
Cider998642 minutes ago
Reddit is also a dedicated porn website.
noduerme38 minutes ago
hah. As far as my girlfriend knows, it's dedicated only to cats and people behaving badly at Walmart.

And here I just called it more intelligent, lol. I should qualify that. I've seen her instagram feed too, and somehow it's even more absurd...

UqWBcuFx6NV4r38 minutes ago
if it’s “also” a porn website then it’s not “dedicated”.