Australia is the first nation to ban social media for under-16s
globalvoices.org
On Wednesday, the lower house of the Australian parliament voted to pass legislation to ban social media for children under 16 years, and the Senate passed the bill on Friday.

Landmark legislation sees the Australian government committed to the novel step of child protection by banning social media for under sixteens.

    • piecat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      Put it on the parents. That’s enforceable, and the root of the problem…

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    Oh those poor kids.

    I remember when we banned porn for the under 18s and now nobody under 18 can access porn.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      This is my favorite argument against government regulation.

      Anything not foolproof definitely isn’t worth doing at all.

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.

    An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.

    What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.

    Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn’t disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn’t really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that’s a very real issue.

    I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.

    Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn’t going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It’s just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.

    • CTDummy@lemm.eeEnglish
      01·
      8 days ago

      No offence but that’s shortsighted to be generous. I feel like half of lemmy will carry on about social media being cancer, the frequent articles citing negative effects of SM on mental health and the fact that multiple social media companies are accused of propagating misinformation (Zuckerberg face sure is in lemmy a lot lately for some reason). Like Zuck has all but greenlit harassing lgbt+ people on FB and the SM ban is to stop gay kids finding a community? Please. Corporate SM is a blight and before someone says lemmy/reddit check the mod logs or the fact that lemmy only got CSAM under control relatively recently before suggesting it’s fine for kids.

  • transhetwarrior (he/him)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    So where exactly are kids supposed to go? People will go on about “they should just go outside” but kids have literally had the cops called on them for the crime of walking around their own neighborhood “unsupervised”. I’ve seen calls to ban kids from all sorts of places - planes, theme parks, restaurants, libraries. I’ve seen these “mosquito” things put up to drive kids away from public places. Kids are spending all their time on social media because they have nowhere else to go.

    • EsmereldaFritzmonster@lemmings.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      I think this perspective (that teens have nothing else in their lives other than social media) is harmful. I don’t understand why they’re not able to do the same things teens did before social media…

      Police being called on harmless teenagers by the same busybodies over and over again kind of sorts itself out after awhile.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        This is the travel range for kids in the UK by generation. Such a map would be far worse in the US or Australia