Australia proposes ban on social media for those under 16 (opens in new tab)

I am definitely not alone in submitting a report about a fake profile only for the system to nearly automatically deny it. Even when the real person being impersonated is literally sitting next to me asking me to help them submit the report. Even illegal drug dealers operate in the open on Meta properties with no recourse whatsoever.

The process of eliminating a huge swath of fake and harmful content could be implemented trivially, we have so many ways of muting or limiting the spread of information which is unvetted, dubious origin, has outlier qualities and so on - yet nothing of the type is engaged by these networks to obvious harmful consequences.

This is surely an important point. People often make the argument of individual freedom. But at the same time, evidently we are excellent at using those freedoms to screw ourselves over. Globally, we've been speedrunning fucking up society in critical areas for decades now. Could the solution be less freedom? Is there some hidden hook whereby more freedom can solve everything?

If such regulations come in to effect, I think those business / institutions will adapt (eventually) to cater to communicating via additional channels.

Solutions will appear naturally to fill the gaps. This is not rocket science.

Probably in a similar way to how they did prior to 2010

The government does not own the implementation.

As mentioned in another comment, simply making this illegal would create a significant incentive for soc media companies to implement the solution.

The onus is on them to respect the law.

They've been slapped in the face in EU court enough now that they'd think about it seriously.

I have never needed either of these so maybe those kids will manage too?

And especially in the public transport case that information should really be made available outside of private platforms in any case.

Here's a better solution option that is easier to implement; even adults can benefit, and I think it solves some of the problems:

1. Have an easy option to turn off feeds and enforce for non-adults. This would apply not just to meta, twitter, but also to Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.

2. Disable like display. The like counts are what hooks people and gives the dopamine kick. Add the ability to hide it and not show for under 18 easily.

3. Social and news sites should not be allowed to send notifications, period. Not on phones or browsers, at least not for those under 18.

Something along these lines would improve social media for everyone, not just kids. Parents' mental health affects kids the same. So blocking it just for kids only goes so far.

Impose an insanely steep tax (say, 10,000%) on all ads revenue tied to underage individuals.

Now it's possible to pursue the Al Capone prosecution: tax fraud.

SocMed cos. will avoid anyone underage like the plauge.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...>, discussed on HN at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601354> (17 Feb 2012).

It does not require this, and in fact the solution may be almost entirely outside of the technology realm.

Simply making it illegal would be enough to:

1. Deter a lot of people from enabling social media on the smartphone of their kids

2. Enable a lot of parents to tell their kids that what they are doing is illegal

3. Force BigTech to implement whatever solution fits best to control the age of the user before install. The onus to respect the law is on them.

It's Australia, who often rank very low for a western country on human rights.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...

Secret trials https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2023/4/19/secret-trials-have-no...

Secret laws https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/mar/28/more-than-800-se...

Secret ministries https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/19/scott...

Secret backdoors https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...

Introducing Digital ID system that may be enabler for this https://www.oaic.gov.au/digital-id

While trying to introduce laws to weaken encryption an ex Australia prime minister famously said:

> "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Malcolm Turnbull.

What's crazy the west look at places such as China as dystopian with the great firewall etc, it appears China was just ahead of the game.

Australia is probably the easiest place to introduce a system to block social media, a experimentation ground for five eyes. Easy to push things through, protesting isn't an Australian pass time, not that big of a country, not that small of a country.

In the US, children under 13 are usually forbidden from having online accounts. Do some kids lie? For sure, but the sites will try to ban those accounts.

In practice, this legislation would be very positive because it would establish the expectation that young teens _are not on social media_. This only works if it's national legislation: No kid will feel left out because his/her friends are on SnapGramTok. They are all banned. They can be mad at the unfair government/adults together.

I don’t understand what is dystopian about knowing where I left my keys, and seeing how my wife’s commute home is doing without phoning her while she is driving, assuming we always both have mobile phones.

Why not just (a) make it illegal so the parents and tech companies see it that way and (b) put some fines on the responsible adult parties if violations are found?

Sure enforcement would be spotty and loose, but tickets for parents and fines for tech companies would go a long way to establish the cultural change without the need for "verification"

nature-nurture x game-theory anxiety/thrill VS. consciousness & planetary/colony-wide awareness; and I'm not talking about some esoteric spirituality or whatever the fuck.

we are always in a natural balance, established by those who do and those who don't. all of us compartmentalise. and good/noble/grand people in law are rare and entirely absent in politics.

TV & the radio made a lot of destructive behaviours look cool (all that finboy shit) and so did feel-good literature like Siddharta.

and then there's the myth of "hard decisions" that can only be made by certain kinds of characters.

young ppl are easy to bend towards hierarchies that reward certain kinds of behaviour and convictions. makes em feel proud.

and in the end we are all just doin our job ^^

Am I correct in this assumption?

The slide to dystopia which is described or implied by countless fictional books is, in fact, really easy to pull off. It's death by a thousand socially convenient compromises.

I remember when a significant portion of people thought carrying phones around was creepy, or that spending your life looking at screens was antisocial, and these things were actively proclaimed. Contrary to popularly repeated historical revisionist tropes, lots of people had to be cajoled and prodded and pressured into the "digital revolution". Surely others remember that?

And now we're at a stage now where if you don't have something like whatsapp or facebook or instagram or whatever, depending on the culture and the age group, there's a real chance that you'll be socially confronted, and even belittled in some circumstances.

8 years old doom scrolling tiktok is a dystopia we are experiencing right now, pick your flavor

Huxley's "Brave New World" was published 1932

If say an adult is incapable to setup a phone/tablet, then a person at the store would help them set the initial part but skip the login with Google/Apple etc.

No idea why this was not tried and then see if it fails.

"...way to perfectly identify somebody on the internet..."

Nope, it does not require this.

What you can do is to construct a zero-knowledge proof of the age of the smartphone user. You can do this based on the certificate that is provisioned in modern electronic passports. The proof construction can choose to ignore expiry date, so the government can offer to issue expired passports with blank photos for the instances of people who should not have functioning passports.

Then you need the social media sites to agree on a common auth mechanism that uses the zero-knowledge proof, and if the same proof gets used on multiple devices, you log out the previously used device.

So even if a parent lets their kid use the parent's passport to generate the proof on the kids phone, every time the kid uses this proof, the parent gets logged out of Facebook and all other social media apps.

Then no parents are going to let the kids use their ID, because of the negative impact to themselves. And you have no more means of tracking than already exists today.

This also offers interesting possibilities for a startup! In the EU today, there are essentially zero legal ways for a 12-year-old to have a group chat with their friends, apart from RCS and iMessage, which then divides the friend group into two halves. Imagine then a chat app aimed specifically at group conversations for teens, where every user has a verified age. This type of app is something parents will pay good money for.

Location tracking is just another knife.

> What the hell is going on?

Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them?

What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing.

What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones.

Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example:

> My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.

Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere.

A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior.

I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously.

And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today.

So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies.

Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.

Social media now is a very different beast. It's designed to be addictive, and it generates engagement through polarization.

Is banning social media for children a punishment for the child? Some parents would argue the opposite, that it's a good thing that the child isn't developed enough to realise yet.

Wouldn't placing the limits on the social media companies potentially prevent them for operating at a profit? I don't think you're wrong, but I question if you're not removing social media for child and teenagers regardless, the difference is if there will be social media for them to use later in life.

Banning social media for those under 16 (or 18) or killing off social media in general do to restrictions in how they operate doesn't really matter to me, even if the latter seems like a bigger win for society in general.

Social media was an interesting and at times fun experiment, but it might be time accept that it's not working out as we had hoped.

I would have supported a ban when I was in highschool. I think a lot of teenagers would have.

Also I don't understand how a ban is punishing the victim anymore than banning drugs from high-schools is punishing any teenagers.

How many people do that becasue they have thought about what they perhaps look back on posting on MySpace or Bebo or whatever and think "thank god that's disappeared from the internet"?

Not... waves hands whatever the f*%k this is.

People in their early to mid 30s had Facebook come into popularity during high school. I’d wager the majority of that age group would happily ban social media for children having experienced youth both with and without modern social media.

Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.

Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).

In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.

[1] https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-readies-age-verification-...

[2] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202409/australia-launches-te...

This is not like porn which is a solitary activity: on social media you have to be social and let everyone know… at least for traditional actually-social media, not content-consuming apps like TikTok.

It's similar to alcohol usage: you can't stop it completely, but also you don't have 50% of kids bringing it to school.

Article states that sites must demonstrate they are taking reasonable measures to enforce this though - a lot will come down as to how courts interpret that. If they go to the extremes of the KYC laws in australia I imagine a significant fraction of adults will not want to verify their age.

Societal signaling is pretty powerful.

Request the social media platform to implement the restriction. The large social media platform have billions $ cash , so if that "really want to implement it" it should not be a problem.

However, I expect social media companies to "drag out every reason , why they can ot implement it..." - since it does not benefit the social media company. ... and would reduce its user base ...

That's exactly what they're aspiring to here, following on from a well-established pedigree of Australian lawmakers and their dysfunctional relationship with the Internet.

It might not even be the desired outcome to have identification, the better outcome could be to have feature Z stripped for all users (for example video feeds based on past watching behavior).

The real change though comes from parent's perceptions. Right now there's age limits of 14-years-old on most social media platforms, however most parents just see this as a ToS thing, and nobody cares about actually violating it. Once it becomes law, the parents are suddenly responsible (and liable) for ensuring their children are not breaking the law by accessing social media. It's not going to stop everybody, but it'll certainly move the needle on a lot of people who are currently apathetic to the ToS of social media platforms.

What's far more useful is to propose effective incentives and disincentives, and let the participants work this out for themselves. There are some useful principles and examples which come to mind:

- Business is profit-oriented. Attack the basis of profits, in a readily-identifiable and enforceable way, and activity which pursues those markets will tend to dry up.

- Business is profoundly risk-averse. Raise the risks of an activity, or remove protections or limitations on threads (e.g., Section 230 of the CDA in the US), and incentives to participate in that activity will be greatly reduced. Penetrating corporate and third-party veils would be particularly useful, in this case, of service providers (aiding and abetting in a proscripted commerce) and advertisers (profiting by same). Lifting any limitations on harms which might occur (bullying, induced suicides, addiction, or others) would similarly be crippling.

As to how age might be ascertained:

- Self-reporting. Not terribly reliable, but a decent first cut.

- Profiling. There are exceedingly strong indicia of age which can be made, including based on a particular account's social graph, interests, online activity, location data (is the profile spending ~6h daily at an elementary school, and not lunching in the teacher's lounge?), etc. One strong distinction is between legislation and regulation, where the latter is imposed (usually with rulemaking process) through the executive branch (SCOTUS's Loper v. Raimondo being a phenomenally stupid rejection of that principle). Such regulation could then on a more flexible basis identify specific technical means to be imposed, reviewed, and updated on a regular schedule.

- Access providers. Most people now access the Internet through either fixed-location (home, work, institutional) providers, or their own mobile access provider. Such accounts could well carry age (and other attestation) flags which online service providers could be obliged to respect as regards regulation.

Jumping in before a few obvious objections: no, these mechanisms are not perfect but I'll assert they can be practically effective; and yes, there are risks for authoritarian regimes to abuse such measures, but then, those are already abusing present mechanisms. I'd include extensive AdTech-based surveillance in that, which is itself ripe for abuse and has demonstrated much of this already.

(That said, I'd welcome rational "what could possibly go wrong" discussion.)

I think that introducing people to social media right when they'll be on the hook for all their bad decisions during the exploratory period is going to result in a lot of 18-20 year olds in a ton of debt + them being even more hooked on social media than kids are now because they'll also be away from adult supervision. Imagine the sports betting ads for the newly 18. The influencers puffing up the newly 18 about how adult and mature they are and all adults buy product X, etc. They'll have no way of knowing what's normal to share and will probably overshare, but unlike minors, they'll be legally able to torpedo the rest of their lives. Etc.

Making it 18 puts a target on their back for the ad and social media companies: Fresh meat that aren't entitled to any protection. That seems like a bad combination to me.

I’d argue, neither do the majority of adults.

I’m still for this ban because a young brain is so much more malleable and hence much more at risk.

"This is why we can't have nice things".

It's really not. Discord is very common too.

The problem is that a lot of democracies have a demography skewed towards old people and at the same time a simple majority can dictate over s.th. like a minority of 30% of the voters.

A 60 year old is expected to have the capacity to make informed choices. Whether they do is down to personal responsibility. Many of us will be 60 one day.

What do you think is wrong with people over 60?

https://www.nzz.ch/english/why-are-young-germans-voting-for-...

The most insane left culture warriors who wanted to relive a second spring on the other hand are indeed approaching or over 60. Fake culture warriors like Pelosi and Biden are over 80.

Fake culture warriors in software organizations like Python are approaching or over 60. You know, the exact same people who read Ayn Rand and supported ESR when it was politically expedient for their careers 20 years ago, because they always go with the herd, no matter how stupid it is.

These culture warriors, through their purges and insane statements, have so thoroughly destroyed any trust in the Democrats that there is a landslide victory for Trump now. It will take years to restore that confidence.

> Will this mean I will have to register as my real name on Hacker News?

First of all, age verification shouldn't mean the social media provider gets true identities. They shouldn't be trusted with that info. There needs to be services that allows verifying your age against one service, and the media service just getting the receipt of that verification. Whether such a service exists already or not shouldn't matter. The law should be written so that social media companies are restricted in what they can do when they can be sure someone isn't a minor, and when they are sure. For extra safety, perhaps it should say they can't be allowed to see for example physical ID:s. Because otherwise you'd risk privacy issues.

Second, I think it's better to formulate these laws the way the new york draft did: that specific features are restricted for minors. Such as: enless media feeds based on past behavior (such as any video "shorts" feeds in all the major platforms today).

You're damn right, same as the law enforcing seatbelts, cars head and brake lights, ABS, testing of tap water quality, testing of food quality, &c.

I want absolute freedom to get utterly fucked by the first mega corp or dumbass who want to do it !!!

I've fallen off a bike before and my helmet definitely saved me from a serious head injury. Would I have worn one if it was not compulsory and drilled into me as a child that's what you do when you ride one? Maybe not.

It saved me that day and I expect it saves many people in this country every day too.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/pedestrians-and-bicyclists/bicyc...

Kids also find alcohol. Can't supply as an adult or company.

The problem for the social media companies is that their recommendation algorithms and content make it very clear they know exactly what ages are watching and what they are showing them. They are multi-billion dollar multi-national operations and not some kid running an iffy image board. I usually hate the Australian government's dumb takes on anything tech or Internet (cryptography, internet filters) but in this case I think pushing regulatory compliance on large companies is what makes this doable.

For instance, it has always been possible for sufficiently motivated kids to acquire hard liquor. If nothing else they can steal it from their parents. To stop this you would need surveillance inside every home and extremely harsh punishments. But we don't actually need that, because an imperfect prohibition works reasonably well.

The whole premise that if a law isn't perfectly enforceable then it's a bad law is a weird thing that techies on the libertarian/autism spectrum come up with a lot, but it's not the way the world actually works.

https://www.smokefreetasmania.com/new-law/

Of course there are lots of caveats here -- e.g. in the US model, what if the executive branch, legislation and the court are controlled by one person (which we'll see very soon), and in the other hand, in China there is actually a parliament and a formal process for many of the legislations (even though that doesn't mean much). Still, at a very high level, there is a distinction.

How do you verify the age? Verifying ID? That seems like another route that could go wrong. Just having a checkbox to confirm the age? Do a poll on this website to see how many people have visited an adult website when they were not...

As long as you have internet access, there will be a way.

I don't have a good proposal, but I feel this is more like a cultural issue than something we can simply fix by implementing law.

I think the way the EU approached this with their "digital gatekeepers" is smart. Recognize that policing the entire internet isn't possible or even desirable. Focus on those few companies with the largest capacity for harm. Different criteria might be appropriate when focusing on potential harm for children (e.g. Roblox rather than Twitter) but besides a few changes you'll probably end up with roughly the same list.

I'm not sure I'd support an outright ban, but rather very strict monitoring and requirements around moderation, in app purchasing, gambling mechanics, and so on.

They sort of naturally do that if you have the appropriate challenges and opportunities around them.

> ancient pyramid aliens or discussions about how veganism will help your body.

There used to be a tabloid called "News of the Weird." This stuff just exists. You'll find it anywhere people gather. We're story tellers. When we don't have a compelling story we just make stuff up. It's identical to the point above.

> even all the adults can't come to a shared understanding of what is "good" or true.

It's not possible. If the children are intended to inherit the future then this is a flawed and reductive strategy. You will not achieve what you seek through parochial means.

Really.. I think your biggest problem should be advertising. It should be nowhere near children. Ban _that_ but keep the social media.

Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter are probably what's intended here, but what about Tumblr, DeviantArt or Discord? What about Reddit or a generic forum? What about VRChat or Webfishing?

If this is about protecting children from harmful depictions of body image or misogynistic content, then why not instead propose a law that states online services that allow children to join need to appropriately moderate the content that is shown to children or could face massive fines. I don't necessarily agree with that approach, but at least it would make sense with what their stated objectives are.

I think the real solution is banning under 18s from having smart phones period.

Methinks they're, again, using "think of the children" as a bulwark against the inevitability of their own waning power. The more things change...

Can we also prevent under 16s from being exposed to religious teachings?

When I have my masters degree finished I would like to live in your beautiful country where a lot of wonderful people live.

Little steps, get them young.

You should see the misinformation bill they are trying to pass.