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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
Sure if you are 15 you can get a phone yourself, but for younger kids the ban has a positive effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_obesity_in_Australia
"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.
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.
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.
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.
this is an article by reuters, they are not affected by the ban.
What about the FDA‘s bans on food ingredients?
They don’t work, companies just become more secretive?
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.
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.
Technology is in most of the cases not bad, and their use can enrich lives.
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.
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
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...