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Australia is the first nation to ban social media for under-16s.
(globalvoices.org)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Now kids will be forced to hide being a victim of cyber-bullying from their parents. Great work!
If their parents are social media
If they don't have an online presence and neither do their peers, how would they be cyber bullied?
I'm sure bullying will go on, old school, in the streets, but cyber bullying is one of the things that will go away with this
I think this is great. There are about one or two generations worth of people that had social media while being kids and I think they should stop acting as if it's the end of the world if it would go away. I fully understand that you grew up with it and don't know any netter but believe you me: you can do without, you can survive without, you will be better without.
Go outside, touch grass, have fun, be a kid again.
If you think this is going to actually stop kids from getting on social media, I have a bridge to sell you.
All it's going to do is push kids to hide their social media apps, which they'll get either through a VPN or faking the ID check, which gives parents even less visibility into what's going on with their children online.
A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.
It's unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the "are you 18+" checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.
I'm an Australian, and I don't remember the 'firewall' that you're talking about. Do you have a link or something to remind me?
This is the first result from Google. It's I guess ancient history now being it was the labor rights push to (probably) unintentionally discredit kevin07, but internal politics aside Conroy (famous for his opposition to adult rating for videogames) was for aong time a candidate for 'biggest piece of shit in Australian politics'. Stephen Conroy was the face of it, so search for him and firewall to your hearts content. The Alana and Madeline foundation were involved in some of the testing that damned the project, if I remember right (as if common since hadn't already damned it with seconds of the sales pitch).