This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
7 in 10 children remain on major social media services? Does this mean they got 30% of the children off of them? I’d say that’s something other than total failure. A start.
But that's nonsense. If the bills sponsors had been honest about the fact that it would fail for the majority of children, then it would have never passed in the first place. They lied to push it through and now you're painting a rosy picture around a complete failure.
It was never designed to protect children
Glad to see it's not even working. Let's keep fighting aginst these evil laws
I mean, social media should be banned for everyone, not just teenagers. It's a great evil in the world today, and in a functional democracy that wasn't braindead, we should ban them outright for the mass harm and destruction they have caused.
That being said, I fully understand that the motivations of countries for these kinds of bans have little to do with the harm of social media and are much more about surveillance.
Which type of social media are we referring to here?
Doesn’t Lemmy count as social media?
It's so bonkers how most of the older generations agree that being on the internet cannot make you social, yet became the default method to communicate.
Ban it for everyone? I mean, lemmy itself is a social network platform, if you want it to be. But I know what you mean: social media being the most used platforms, Google, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc . . . And for that, yeah, I do agree with a full ban. We need a cultural reset, where we aren't being fed sensationalist bullshit and pure brainrot as entertainment via an algorithm trained on our insufficient capacity to regulate our attention.
In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.
I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.
There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).
If you take such a broad definition of social media, then nearly the entire Internet becomes "social media" and the term loses its meaning, IMO.
‘…internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway’
Terrific job, gov.
Our government is usually technologically inept.
The first online census (2016) crashed the system because they didn't allow enough capacity. Anyone with half a brain could have told them that most people were going to try to use it during one particular time -- after dinner (especially since the paper census is supposed to count everyone on that particular night). Instead, they decided to rate it for only 1 million form submissions per hour, despite estimating that two-thirds of Australians would fill it out online. At one person per family, that's around 4 million online submissions. Now factor in that the eastern states have most of the population (and are all in the same time zone at that time of year) and, predictably, the site went down after dinner on census night.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-09/abs-website-inaccessible-on-census-night/7711652
I don't know. There's some joy in saying I told you so, to people who had the hubris to try and stop teenagers from being teenagers.
We will simply pass laws requiring them to be adults! Easy!
Careful, you might give the pedo states an idea.
With a 70% non-compliance rate, that isn't entirely surprising.
Platforms are even less likely to implement real reforms that the author alludes to.
Speak for yourself. I find quite a bit of joy in "I told you so".
They're propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors
7 in 10? so 3 are off of it? good news 🥳
please expand to over 65 year olds as well
IMO It's not a question if they remain on, but how much time they spend on it. She's focusing on the wrong metric.
AI companies support the age verification laws because they want to ban kids from talking to anyone on the internet except their robot pedophiles
