Just because we agree with the news doesn’t make it correct.
The ban was brought about in December 2025. It’s clearly far too early to draw any conclusions about the impact.
If we are going to cherry pick data let’s make sure to cherry-pick data from both sides: https://yougov.com/articles/54334-new-yougov-research-shows-cautious-optimism-as-australians-assess-impact-of-under-16-social-media-ban
What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?
Pre-fucking-cisely.
Then you’d have a massive “but what about the children?!” censorship situation for everyone.
We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.
The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.
You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?
A 30% reduction of kids being exposed to these harmful platforms is a good thing and I’m glad to see it.
Also, all laws are imperfect, and expecting 100% efficacy is moronic.
Don’t you know? Nothing is worth doing unless it solves all problems at once right away
As a parent who dont like id requirements but who also wants my children away from social media, this is my take:
Social tech does not require a tech solution, but instead a social solution, because social media is a social problem. My children has restricted access, no accounts etc. But that helps little when all the other parents believe social media to be fine. A law clearly sets a social norm, which apparently 30 % of parents understand.
Right, but the politicians didn’t sell the law at 30% efficiency. They sold it at something like 95% efficiency. So they lied and they haven’t solved anything.
Maybe they could have used all of that money to run campaigns to help convince parents to properly supervise their children. Maybe that would have done more than this 30% figure.
Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.
You don’t think they’d happily target Lemmy if it were larger? It’s still “social media” to them
Seriously. Murders still happen so lets legalize murder.
Such place exists. It’s called middle east.
For whom exactly is it legal there though?
For those currently doing all the bombing, of course! 😉
Yeah, I suppose anything is legal for those fuckers these days
The addictive design of platforms, software and algorithms should be adressed, not the users age.
And the tech companies should be made responsible to design more healthy platforms, etc.
The problem is the design of tech, not the people using it.
Why is everyone forgetting the parents in this shit. They are the ones giving their kids access to this shit, not monitoring and moderating their access to this shit, and letting screens do the job of raising their kids instead of doing it themselves.
Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don’t have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It’s usually the parents paying for this stuff.
There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn’t what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child’s phone.
There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.
https://families.google/familylink/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121
The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech
Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated
If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.
A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)
Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.
A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.
The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.
The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.
Yep… Theres an idiot in my family that gave their grandkids unrestricted, flagship phones, with full social media account access, at 7 years old.
And no, they are not too old to understand technology. They perfectly understand technology, the internet, and everything else. They are just stupid.
Its on the grandparents for doing it. its on the parents for not taking the fuckin phones away. and its also on social media companies for being algorithmic predators.
The parents are also suffering from the negative medical effects of algorithms designed to manipulate and addict. You’re asking why a victim of drug abuse isn’t a more responsible parent.
You are correct, but that does not absolve the companies or the government of any responsibility. It should not be “anything goes” as far as intentionally addictive designs on anything with a screen for the same reason they can’t just put cocaine in Doritos. They still engineer in what they can, but with some guardrails. And even in that case the regulations here in the US leave a lot to be desired.
Saying stop ignoring parental responsibility, doesnt mean ignore everyone elses culpability.
What you say is true but it’s off topic because that’s not the current situation. What we’re actually seeing right now is that parents literally do not want to take their devices away from their kids and they don’t want to supervise their kids. It really is that simple.
This is not a situation where most parents are trying to do the right thing and they can’t do enough and they need an extra hand. This is definitely a situation where many parents aren’t even putting in a good effort.
You know like what if they didn’t give their kid a cell phone. What if they took the cell phone away at 9:00 p.m. Most parents would never dream of doing either of those things.
What you say is true but it’s off topic because that’s not the current situation. What we’re actually seeing right now is that parents literally do not want to take their devices away from their kids and they don’t want to supervise their kids. It really is that simple.
So saying its a parental responsibility is off topic, and what we should focus on is… parental responsibility.
The same parents who scream anytime a teacher grades them fairly?
Teachers should be legally allowed to posses a metal gauntlet for backhanding idiot parents across the face.
It’s interesting because I was talking to my psychologist about this last week.
Mental illness runs in my extended family specifically my best friend is a functional alcoholic. He grew up the son of a functional alcoholic.
We all agree that alcoholism is an addiction, just like gambling, social media, etc.
The problem is that as a society we are addressing the specific addiction. AA for alcoholics. For gambling the government has programs you can admit yourself to.
What I was postulating to my psychologist is the real problem is some people have un underlying susceptibility to addiction. My experience with addicted people is regardless of good or bad if you remove an addiction they will replace with an unhealthy obsession on something else. Alcohol will be replaced with something else because the problem is the person has an imbalance they can’t do something in moderation. I’ve seen this time and time again.
Plus factor in comorbidities like ADHD and you have a stew going.
My point being, yes you’re correct tech is a problem, but it’s 100% the people too in some cases it’s just without the social media their addiction may have been benign so not visible. “Oh look at Mary with her beanie baby collection.” Or “oh look at Jack he really is a go getter running his 10k rain or shine every day.”
The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.
I wish more people understood this. Changing something can mean you’ve caused harm unintentionally, even if you haven’t identified it yet. Too many people seem to have the thought process “We have to do something! This is something. Let’s do this.” without ever considering the harm they might do.
Key point: “Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.”
They don’t wanna solve the root problem, they just want to make the big tech companies happy as well as the people who is sayiing shit about social media happy, Age verification is their stupid answer to which translates to “We don’t give a flying shit about kids”
Censorship is never the answer. Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer. A world where you burn down shit just to get a job as a firefighter makes this path a bit more difficult and harder to follow.
Censorship is never the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Formally banning certain forms of vulgar and bigoted expression establish a code of conduct for the community, even if they aren’t strictly enforced.
Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer.
Morality is as much about proactive and affirmative pursuit of justice as internalized codes of conduct.
If there is no social consequence for immoral behavior, there is no reason to believe the act is immoral.
Censorship was never their intention. So they couldn’t give any less fucks. They just want to control us.
“Just Say No” would work if the Liberals would just stop saying Yes.
Dear reader of the above OP - this is the liberal thread. If you want a socialist thread, please scroll down.
I get it. You don’t want my kind here. I’ve heard that call made throughout history.
WHAAAAT?!?! Educating people is better than telling them what to do?
What? There is emence amounts of joy in “I told you so”. The majority of people warned them this was a stupid idea and now you want to piss on the good feeling of smug correct calling of the clearly failure idea? Fuck off.
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.
Do you realize you posted this very comment on social media ? Do you think they should ban the fediverse as well !?
Which type of social media are we referring to here?
Doesn’t Lemmy count as social media?
There’s a list of 10 or 12 social networks that are banned: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Lemmy is still legal.
Lemmy is legal because it’s too small for them to notice.
And YouTube is an incredible resource for finding information. It’s not social media at all.
Its also an incredible resource for finding misinformation and disinformation unfortunately.
That’s an issue with any form of information sharing, though. Your local library is full of false information as well, whether that’s because it’s outdated or because you live somewhere like the US where all school curriculum books have to be approved by a Texas based group per federal law.
Lies spread faster than the truth, and the internet is great at spreading information.
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).
excellent take, I never thought of regulation on something digital like an algorithm (concerning social media) to be, I guess, possible when some government officials barely understand what an IP address is.
But that’s the thing, where’s the motivation for this board of experts to exist coming from? There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.
That is why I just generalize and say that social media is the problem, because most people won’t care to hear anything deeper. They are already addicted, and don’t care for a cure.
There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.
I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.
I don’t remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It’s possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do think it’s an idea worth exploring.
This is the correct response. Social media, as a construct, is not evil and dos not do harm to anyone. The commodification and commercialisation of social media by capitalistic companies is what has caused the harm we see today.
All of the harms and evils of social media can be boiled down to a single concept: the algorithm. Because algorithmic recommendation of content wants to encourage people to stay on a platform (for capitalistic reasons), and the most enticing and attention-grabbing content is hate-content, these companies have forced hate-inducing concepts down the throats of people in an endeavour to make more money and destroyed individuals and families/friends in the process.
If we regulate the algorithms, we regulate the harm without disempowering anyone. We can, and we should, regulate algorithms on social media to turn it back into what it was 20-odd years ago - a measure to keep in touch with people you know or care about.
Social media does cause harm. It tricks you into thinking you are socializing with those near you when you aren’t. It tricks you into thinking people are talking in good faith, similar to in person communication. Finally, social media is a huge attack vector for scams and abuse due to the anonymity and ability to connect anywhere in the world.
All of these things produce an overwhelmingly negative social experience from social media. That wouldn’t be a problem if our defining trait wasn’t how we socialize in groups. Socializing is as important as water and food for humans.
I’m not trying to do a gotcha, but doesn’t your post also mean that Lemmy is bad and no one should use it?
Yes, and if I spend too much time on here it affects my perceptions of people in real life. I do a few other things that aren’t really healthy as well. I’m sure I could do better.
I wish I saw this kind of insightful point of view more often in the discourse over social media. It’s stopped being about being social once algorithmic content curation became the norm to drive engagement and advertising money which is the real evil.
I don’t think they are evil. A bunch of people with good intentions who didn’t understand the problem are trying to solve it with a gut feeling rather than analysis and evidence. It’s really disappoi ting that they would waste so much of our time and money like this.
Good intentions without the spirit of cooperation or respect for consent is still evil.
The main problem with all of these internet surveillance tools being marketed as ways to protect children is that people are engaging with them on that basis.
As far as I’m concerned they haven’t done anything to establish that they actually intend to protect children or that this is a reasonable way to do it. This seems like a solution to a different problem that ignores all of the problems it creates.
Parents should be responsible for their children. A random website creator shouldn’t have to be responsible for your children.
Websites aren’t stores where people walk in off of a public street. They are services that people reach out to and engage with specifically and intentionally. If we can address the non-consensual non-intentionality part of internet tracking and surveillance a lot of this stuff goes away. So maybe rather than regulating the website to protect your children we should be regulating the website to protect consent.
There is no problem to solve that hasn’t already been addressed with parental controls.
There is a problem with social media addiction but the solution isn’t restricting teens from it. The solution, as with most things, is education. Educating the kids, educating their parents and making sure they both have the tools available to them to make smart decisions.
That’s a bit like saying ‘there is a problem with smack/nicotine/alcohol addiction, but the solution is not restriction, it’s education’. You can educate all you want, but very clever people make a lot of money by saying ‘fuck your education’.
Drug prohibition has also historically not worked out very well for anyone except prison industry shareholders
But we still prohibit children from having drugs. Legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine, cannabis) are illegal to sell to children, even though we can legally sell them to adults.
You can’t download weed with a phone, not a good comparison
You can’t educate someone out of an addiction. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding about addiction…
No but you can educate their support networks and build other systems to help them work through their addiction.
Or we could focus on preventing the addiction to begin with.
Great examples include making people wait until adulthood to smoke nicotine or cannabis, or to drink alcohol.
Great examples include making people wait until adulthood to smoke nicotine or cannabis, or to drink alcohol.
I mean, I agree with you, but highschool is a thing… these laws are basically useless to my knowledge. I think about 50% of my grade had smoked weed by tenth grade, and half again were addicted to nicotine by 12th. The only reason I didn’t fall victim to those (as many of my friends did), is because I was educated, by my parents, from an early age, about addiction and these substances. I never even tried them, because I knew better, thus never got addicted.
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!
‘…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’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.
But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”
I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.
A blind spot i know i have is that i grew up without social media and the internet as it exists now, when i was a teen the internet was a place to spend some time playing goofy games on newgrounds or neopets, maybe downloading some movies or music from Limewire or Kazaaar.
I have no idea how i would have gone growing up with this insidiously tailored and hyper addictive environment, honestly it feels like giving every kid their first hit of heroin in high school and sending them on their way.So i get why kids might be both ‘thank you’ and ‘fuck you’ in equal measure, but just like heroin there will be plenty that never recover, and it all could just be resolved by reigning in the social media companies.
Kids will often just repeat what they’ve heard to adults.
But the largest problems to these laws is the way they affected minority groups. If followed, the law would disproportionately affect disabled and queer teens who may suddenly be unable to access help and community.
I suspect there’s some selection bias in the kids you’re speaking to.
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
Right it’s going to take longer than a few months to enforce properly and undo the damage and protect new generations from its negative effects.
At least it’s a start.
There is no “start” it has been an absolute failure.
Or maybe it’s never going to work because you can’t enforce it properly because the parents don’t want it to be enforced. And the damage you’re talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.
But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it’s better than nothing, and they’re wrong. If you don’t have a good plan, that doesn’t make your bad plan reasonable.
So your solution is to do nothing until there is a good plan. What is a good plan? How do we measure if something is a good plan before implementing it? Especially on the scale of moderating the internet… And what would your good plan be?
Children are the reponsability of parents. Enforcing parents control on device like it is in europe by exemple if far more useful than giving this responsibility to platform that have no financial interest of doing it. Also u can reasonably make internet education course the same way some do about drugs or sex.
Unfortunately, I think parents have by and large failed to parent this aspect of a child’s life. Do we continue to trust parents when they are so clearly failing? I suppose education is the long term answer but I rather just remove the ability for kids to access such harmful content.
But gouvernement isnt in mesure to apply this in any way. It wouldnt make it better for anybody. Do we have to learn parrent to control their kids action ? i thought they know but you got a point that a lot dont.
Speak for yourself. I find quite a bit of joy in “I told you so”.
