Most Australian teens still on social media despite landmark ban

zug_zug•34 minutes ago

Well, this can be interpreted as a reason to give up, but if it has any marginal improvement it can also be taken as a reason to try harder.

Imo it’s actually good to run large experiments like these.

JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago

If there is no provision for fining the social-media companies, the law will be ineffective.

Dfol•about 4 hours ago

I'm shocked...

You cannot easily regulate a generation that understands technology better than the regulators do.

dghlsakjg•about 2 hours ago

While most regulators do not seem to demonstrate the slightest understanding of technology, my experience is that young people have incredibly low understanding of technology.

They have been using simplified overly abstracted systems their entire lives. When I teach an HTML class the first thing I have to do is teach most of them the meaning of “save a file to a folder on the desktop”. A majority of the class will have no idea what any of that means.

If you’ve been using chromebooks or tablets your whole life, you really don’t know much about computers at all.

asdefghyk•about 5 hours ago

More than eight in 10 Australian teens remain on social media despite the country's world-first ban introduced last year.

Bender•about 3 hours ago

I've said in several threads not to try to ban teens. All it takes is one of them to figure out bypasses. They and all their friends will bypass restrictions and they will teach them to small children. Perhaps this was intentional.

Something closer to an effective methodology would be to pick a date in the future and require small children that would be ages 0 through 9 on that date to have child accounts on their devices that enforces local parental controls. Offer courses to parents that help guide them through this process including conversations to have with the child. Give the child a path forward towards being trusted as a young adult. When they show signs of maturity, responsibility and ability to deal with "the internet(c)" and all that comes with it, give them an unrestricted account. By the time they are teen it is likely they will have an unrestricted account and will know how to deal with the pressures of society and all the trashy unstable humans and manipulative AI contained within.

Both public and private schools need to have courses on how to identify and deal with trolls, unstables, psychopaths, sociopaths, groomers, bullies, NGO's, marketing organizations, etc... This should start around age 7 (agōgē) and the child must be battle hardened against most internet threats by age 12 in addition to learning how to form friend groups to deal with bullies. I expect society to step it up.

This would also buy time for device, OS, app developers to ensure there is a solid sand-boxed environment for restricted accounts. i.e. The best pen-testers can't troll, be trolled or goon.

JumpCrisscross•about 3 hours ago

Shift the burden to the multibillion-dollar transnational tech companies. If an Aussie child is found to have an account, they get hit with a fine. If it’s still up thirty days later, another fine. Something tells me they’ll figure it out.

This leaves a hole for social media in unresponsive jurisdictions. But for the major American and Chinese companies—the current worst offenders when it comes to harming kids for profit—this should work.

Bender•about 3 hours ago

That could work but I would rather the responsibility remain where it already legally exists and get parents to start parenting at risk of fines, mandatory parental training and community service if they do not.

Creating a wall for children with no path forward will not prepare them for the real world. Too many young adults have unrealistic expectations of the world but that's a much bigger topic. Preparedness has to start somewhere almost none of which is occurring at the moment.

People that do not have small children should not be involved in anything related to age/ID verification which corporations would have to inflict on everyone to enforce children/teens not be on social media. I for one will not be participating in age/ID verification for anything beyond federal taxes and I know I am not alone.

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

> which corporations would have to inflict on everyone to enforce children/teens not be on social media

Everyone on social media. (I hate the proposals that punt this to literally everyone by doing anything on device.)

Also, this is solved with a two-way fine: one for kids being on, one for retaining age-verification data.

> Creating a wall for children with no path forward

Kids do fine with age gates around cigarettes and booze. Even though practically everyone breaks the latter law.

Also, those walls exist. Device restrictions exist in rich communities. Social media is increasingly a tax on poor children.

Most Australian teens still on social media despite landmark ban

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