This is an interesting development:
Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, prime minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and ‘onto the footy fields’.
Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, he said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a ‘scourge’.
The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.
The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.
Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the centre-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.
Loath as I am to give any kind of credit to the OzGov, foul totalitarian nanny bastards that they are, I can’t help but wonder whether a) this can work and b) if it does work, will it benefit teens in any way? Given that teens nowadays appear to have absolutely no problem in accessing porn — even porn sites protected by “age walls” — I’m somewhat skeptical about it all.
It’s probably just the usual “We have to do something!” posturing so common among all politicians.
(Just an aside: Albanese’s “center-left” philosophy is somewhere around that of Bernie Sanders, politically speaking.)
1. Albasleazy is “centre left”; well, centre left between Marx and Lenin.
2. The aim is to “protect” children from violence (real, not fictional) as much as from porn.
3. Kids will find a way around anything!
4. There are a huge number of hand-wringing, pants-wetting “do-gooders” pushing very, very hard for this.
5. Albasleazy’s govt is failing badly; he desperately needs some sort of “success” to point to.
“Are you 16? Click Y for Yes and N for No”
If that doesn’t work we’ll have to go to RFID tags.
That’s a role for parents.
+1
Yes, you are correct.
So, if a parent allows their child to access social media ….
LOCK UP THE PARENT!
The selling of torches, pitchforks, tar, and feathers, will explode.
Sounds unenforceable to me.
Whenever the Aussie government comes across any issue whatsoever, its first instinct is to act autocratically
It bans guns, it jails people for not wearing masks and now it bans young people from the internet
In our country, by contrast, we pay internet providers to do “work “ for our government if they agree to suppress the speech of political adversaries
I don’t believe that there is truly a way to provide security to the websites without making the situation far more worse and intrusive. What will be suitable security, scan a government ID such as a driver’s license and then use the computer’s camera to verify who is looking at the website? That is an emphatic hard no.
Putting the computer in a common room of the house worked decades ago because the computer, monitor and keyboard took up quite a bit of desk space. Now smart phones have all of that access and more.
Yet again we see government cures are worse than the disease
Right — Good luck with that. You intend to take away something that 12 to 16 year olds see as their entire existence, and you expect that there won’t be any push back from parents who suddenly have to deal with unhappy and unreasonable children. Children may not be able to vote ( yet ) but they will be able to soon. Parents of thoose kids DO Vote. They may agree in principle but once enforcement begins …….. Wait one ……. How do they intend to do this???
Points awarded to Kim for correctly using loath not loathe.
Impossible to enforce, kids are very tech savvy and if not, their school friends have the answers. Or are they going down the Brazil rabbit hole and ban VPN’s too?