“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”
Powerful words.
Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?
I think it’s clear that there are problems with children’s use of social media today.
But a blanket ban is not the way to go. Especially since it will most likely just lead to age verification and all the issues that brings.
There will be loopholes and those loopholes will be exploited by children. The intention is good but the solution is the usual “we don’t know what to do so let’s ban it”. There is a rule or law for everything in Denmark.
As usual, here are my (extremely) unpopular opinions: 1: This ban is made to extend to smartphones for children overall, allowing some abuse situations to be carried out without risk. Furthermore, this might (later) extend to some workers, women overall, then lower “castes” and classes. 2: This is another way for Chat Control to also be implemented later, by setting the roots for such.
Oh, another thing: using age as a metric is darn stupid — aren’t some of the worst leaders actually quite… elderly?
100% on your last point. We need IQ and EQ tests to decide who gets access to sharp social objects.
I think its simpler than that, its not about banning children its about identifying everyone else
She is right. I don’t use a smartphone anymore. I now use a dumbphone. It helps me focus and reduce stress. Turns out you don’t need the internet with you 24/7. If someone really needs me, he can call.
This isnt about protecting kids, its about age verifying and de-anonymising everyone. Australia has already gone down this road, dont fall for the trap.
When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.
I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”
I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.
I dont even think this is related to the intelligence community, who are happy to spy on anyone regardless of age, I think it’s just a poorly thought out law.
They definitely need to own the responsibility though. When these ID databases leak, and they will, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people are going to be caught up in the mess, such as:
- Closeted LGBTQ individuals, who may get outed.
- Domestic violence victims trying to escape.
Doxing/Outing these people will result in significant harm, upto and including death. These inevitable deaths with be on the politicians hands.
And the worst part? It won’t stop kids getting online or bullying each other.
Personally, I may just intentionally leak my drivers licence online, and get it reissued or something. Give plausible deniability to anything that happens associated with the ID. Not sure exactly what the ramifications are for doing that though.
I think kids shouldn’t have smart phones at all. Banning from social media is the wrong way to handle it. Parent’s need to be held accountable for allowing their kids to have too much phone time. It rots the brain. There are way too many kids that can’t read, do basic math, or do anything by themselves without the help of AI. It’s ridiculous.
Smart phones are by them self fine. It’s no different then when we were kids with a gameboy and a cheap prepaid flip phone
Like what’s actually fucking the problem with smart phones? It’s a camera phone and Gameboy all in one. There’s nothing inherently problematic with that
Every problem people always bitch about are various apps and companies and have absolutely fucking shit and all to do inherently with the phone it self.
Proper parenting, and bitch slapping the dipshits companies shoving additive and invasive software at kids is the solution.
Not getting rid of a useful tool that kids should learn to properly utilize and one of the single largest tools of safety for kids.
Social media is to kids today what cigarettes were to teens last century. Might even be better compared to the Radium marketing blitz that poisoned so many while making a few very rich.
