• ouch@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I don’t think there is a technical way to implement this without privacy issues and potential for future misuse and scope creep.

    Government doing parenting instead of the parents never works.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I mean, yeah. But also, this isn’t really any different from kids not being allowed to drink alcohol before a specific age, movies and video games having age minima, etc etc.

      And I would surmise the same reasoning applies: On average, someone so young has neither the mental development nor the life experience to be able to judge well what they are doing with their own information and how to judge/process the information they get shown.

      Of course, this should happen in conjunction with actual education, like I at least had for alcohol and stuff. But it’s an entirely normal thing if it happens as part of a multi-step process (and I am not australian enough to judge how well those things work out in australia in general).

      • ouch@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        But it IS different. If you compare to alcohol for example, age checks are performed in shops. No record of those is made or available to anyone. There is no centralized infrastructure related to age checks that could be abused in the future to track everyone who buys alhocol.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Yeah but if you think about to, from a law perspective that’s an implementation detail. Sure, from our perspective it’s a really important one, but from the perspective of a lawmaker it’s about whether it should be done, not how it’ll be done in execution (different branches of state, basically).

          • ouch@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            You are correct that from juridical point of view the difference does not seem great.

            Hopefully politicians listen to experts of different fields.

  • Chick3nDinn3r@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    What the government should be doing is mandating that a social media/drugs literacy course is taught in schools. Kids should fundamentally understand that things are not black or white, good or bad; things are grey. They have upsides and downsides; risks and rewards. Kids should be taught that Social media is a great way to connect with your friends, but you are also susceptible to being influenced/manipulated/addicted in X, Y, Z ways.

    • Moghie@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      100% agree. I think it’s a good space for libraries to enter too. Internet literacy, media literacy and critical thinking skills are sorely needed to be taught today.

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      6 days ago

      As if those drug literacy courses helped anyone. We were taught about it aged 12 or something, when nobody really had a clue what drugs are. Around the age where it matters, it was all but forgotten.

    • kava@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      i don’t think the always thrown around “more education” is an effective answer to everything

      you can educate kids up and down about the harms of smoking- if smoking is advertised as cool in popular media, there are cigarettes with colorful and fruity flavors, and it’s easy for the kids to obtain then they will inevitably smoke cigarettes. everybody has known smoking causes cancer for a half century know.

      if you don’t want kids smoking, then you must act with force to restrict something. whether it’s the restriction on subliminal advertising, the ban on colorful cigarettes, or prohibition of selling to underage smokers- you need some sort of ban.

      i firmly believe in the near future we will view social media as we know it similar to how we see smoking. addictive little dopamine hits that will over time change the structure of your brain. we look back at the 50s and think it was crazy how they smoked cigarettes on airplanes, drank whiskey at work, and everyone bathed in lead and asbestos. they’re going to look back at our time period and see us similarly

      so if I were to say “should kids be using social media?” I wholeheartedly believe they should not be using it until their brains are developed. much like I don’t think kids should be smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or smoking weed

      but the ultimate question is- what are the potential harms of a government ban and are those potential harms worth it?

      that’s where I am conflicted. a minor not being able to buy cigarettes is something that I don’t really think hurts society very much.

      but a ban on a minor accessing certain online spaces… how do you accomplish that? well, you will need to track people’s identities online somehow. this is the part where I think maybe the harms of kids using social media is not worth giving the government power to monitor and regulate social media websites.

    • s08nlql9@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      thats a lot of work for the government dude, let them take the easy path

  • Sixty@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    Ah fuck. Canada is likely to copycat this, we love copying Australia’s homework. NDP and Cons BOTH already favor this idea except it’s also all 18+ websites. Gov ID to wack off. Puritans are on every wing and I wish we could shake them off.

  • Tregetour@lemdro.id
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    6 days ago

    What I find intriguing is the potential for fediverse/decentralized service uptake amongst Australians, should the corporate providers decide it’s too much bother implementing an identity solution for 26m people and simply rangebans them.

    In an alternate universe, parents are devoting 10 per cent of their doomscrolling time to studying their router manuals and determining access windows for social media on their LAN. But why obtain a gram of education to address a serious parenting issue when a ton of democracy-threatening legislation driven by politics will achieve a quarter of the same thing?

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      6 days ago

      I’d assume the law would include federated social media. And while that wouldn’t prevent underage Australians to sign up with instances hosted elsewhere, it will impose restrictions on local ones, thus hurting the federation effort.