Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate Australia's Senate on Friday passed a law that will require some social media platforms to "take reasonable steps" to ensure that people under 16 can't use their services, and another that aims to safeguard a very successful sting that caught criminals with a fake messaging app. The social media ban came in the form of the …
New research shows a correlation between age and the spacing of taste buds on peoples' tongues. Accordingly, a new age-verification technology using this data and reading peoples' touch screens has been developed.
The bad news: users will have to touch their tongues to their touchscreens to be scanned.
The good news: at last, there is a good use-case for touchscreens.
All the people saying that it won't work are missing the point entirely. Its a start. People are slowing waking up to the fact that social media in its many forms has proven to be toxic and dangerous to children.
This law is the Australian Government's first attempt to address a real problem. It may fail but its at least a legal recognition is that action is required. In the long term doing nothing and saying its too hard is not an option.
A better start or first attempt would be to provide more funding for after school programs, sports and culture programs, more play grounds and facilities for kids and support for parents.
This law allows the politicians to say "look at me, I'm thinking of the children - vote for me again!" while they point at big evil foreign tech and the adults to feel all warm and fuzzy because "back in my day when the world was perfect..." and the kids don't care because they've already move on to the next thing (this law is already obsolete)! And the best part is banning things and blaming foreigners means you don't have to raise taxes or offend local employers!!!
"users will have to touch their tongues to their touchscreens"
I live in a barn, and quite frequently at the end of a day I'm covered in shit, so I'm hardly your typical mysophobia sufferer ... but this concept makes me nauseous. Have you seen how filthy most of those screens are? When was the last time you sneezed when using yours? Who else has been allowed to fondle your slab ... and who/what were they fondling since the last time they washed their hands?
"Boomers: Let’s go get some beers."
Which part of Oz were you in where the publican was troubled to ask? :)
Under age drinking wasn't considered seriously in these parts until I was significantly over age and then only after police corruption was considered an issue.
* nostalgia alert *
Reminds me of my youth where we'd research the laxity of all the local off-licenses and pubs and share the data - by word of mouth in those days of course.
I was buying beer & whisky at thirteen. It helped if I parked my bike out of sight but it was easy to forget to take my bike-clips off! Luckily that didn't always break the deal.
By fourteen I was regularly going to the pub sometimes with my brother-in-law who was a copper. I was actually small for my age at the time but most landlords didn't bat an eyelid. Probably helped that I was ordering bitter rather than the lager my friends tried to buy and sometimes got knocked back.
And it was my own father who turned me on to the bitter.
And I seem to remember that even supermarkets and big off-licences would let kids buy cider - two litre bottles of Strongbow or Woodpecker for thirty five pence or so. Can't stand cider these days - possibly related!
Ahh, happy days! ;-)
Really doesn't kick in for twelve months and the government will have to go to an election before March 2025 with some pundits putting up January as a possibility.
The PM is already spruiking "Parents we have your back."
Whether he retains government or not is an even money bet at the moment - not that too many voters are keen on the third rate Voldemort and his nuclear reactors on offer from the other side.
Either way by the end of of 2025 the parties are unlikely to have a workable age verification system and the whole shemozzle is likely to be quietly walked back by the government of the day.
If the big social media companies were to decide to take their bat and ball, and depart from the Australian market I for one wouldn't be too aggrieved.
I'm still waiting to see something that actually works.
In the absolute, it could, but at the condition that you have every birth recorded in a government-held database (that is inviolate), and that you are sure that the person requesting verification is the person who's record is in the database.
Good luck on that last part.
Exactly, by promising "that citizens will be able to use social media without having to show ID" IMHO law makers promise the only technical alternative that has at least a remote chance of achieving what was legislated, will not be implemented.
Occam's Razor and all that, but being _that_ stupid?
I'd expect that "promise" to be dropped right after the next election...
meanwhile...
Meta accuses Australian government of failing to consider young people’s voices with world-first social media ban
One independent MP calls bill – which passed on Thursday – a ‘1970 solution for a 2024 problem’
"Social media company Meta has accused the Australian government of rushing to introduce an under-16 social media ban without properly considering the evidence and voices of young people."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/nov/29/meta-australia-social-media-ban-response
"Guess what? Fifteen-year-olds-and-under don't get to vote, either."
True enough. Here in the US there is a rather elaborate procedure to make sure that only those eligible to vote are allowed to. Typically, it involves showing officials proof of residency, age, and citizenship. You seriously expect Social Media sites to somehow replicate that over a digital link. I'm no fan of Social Media and I think the world might be a better place without them, But many folks do seem to find some value there. Not mine to question why. Even though I dislike them, I have to think that laying a probably unworkable requirement on them is kinda dumb.
If you ask me, the world has a more than adequate supply of dumb already. It probably doesn't need more.
It should be possible to have a database that ONLY contains valid "keys" for people over some random age limit. User subscribes to a "social media" platform and provides their public key. "Social media" platform then sends that key to "The Database" and it replies yay or nay. In theory, the only write access to that database is from the system that confirms an individuals identity and creates the key pair. I'm sure people in digital security already have ideas on how this could happen and the likely pitfalls. I'm assuming a "perfect" world here that doesn't include politicians wanting some all-singing, all-dancing multi-purpose system full of holes because they had to prove how clever they were by insisting on extra bells and whistles. Just a relatively simple, single function system, no blockchain, no "AI", no "cloud" etc. I wonder how well Estonias Digital ID system is going? I don't recall hearing horror stories. Are there lessons to be learned from them?
I'm also fully aware that kids will find ways around it. Whether VPNs or "borrowed" ID tokens etc, but there's always been a market for "fake IDs"
All it takes is a single private key to become known and all the world including underage kids up to no good can use that key to "prove" they are old enough. Not worth building a system when any single parent can crash it by "leaking" credentials to the progeny.
"Really doesn't kick in for twelve months and the government will have to go to an election before March 2025 with some pundits putting up January as a possibility."
And at the election after that there'll be a cohort of kids who were under 16 for part of the next Parliament but now able to vote (I'm assuming the Oz voting age is 18). Pissing off your potential voters even before they're old enough to vote is an interesting electoral tactic.
Are you sure those kids will remember, and will care after two years? Might they not be distracted by the fashions worn by the new supermodel/celebrity, "Biscayne"? Won't they be busy watching videos by the new rapper star, "Chocolate Freeze"?
In all the years we've had representative government, legislators have universally ignored the demands of childeren to have ice cream for every meal, and an abolition of parent-mandated bedtimes. Those legislators haven't had their careers negatively impacted by ignoring those demands.
As for the youth denied access to social media, if they truly want to interact electronically with their peers (or whomever), they'll just have to buckle down, roll up their sleeves, and get their hands dirty making their own websites.
.
Bet it has been broken/worked around already (and it hasn't even come into existence yet). In my early years half the fun of programming was to get around the latest lame-brained rules/laws.
Note to govt: Don't make rules you can't or won't enforce - just makes you look like idiots.
Albanese : “…sending a message…” - usual weasel words when he already knows it is not going to work.
Actually it was Dutton that originally came up with under 16 laws and Albanese could see that any attempt to stop them would fail. That is why it passed as both major parties agreed on it.
My anti-social media app was a commercial failure.
It only ran on air-gapped devices with no physical connection ports.
Many beta-testers complained that it was difficult to install, the luddites.
Discouraged, the venture capalists refused to believe that an IPO would produce the market interest I had hoped for and didn't fund me further.
No, studies don't.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/10/the-social-media-moral-panic-is-all-about-confusing-risks-harms/
If you get all your information from legacy media you would think the harm is proven. If you get your information from scientific studies you should know better
Don't get me wrong, I dislike all the social meda platforms and don't use them myself - to paraphrase Shaparak Khorsandi, I'm never felt the need to ask people to come on MyFace or whatever it's called.
But finally, someone posts the elephant in the room. As sebroni points out, there is no credible scientific evidence that social media causes harm to under eighteens and for some it actually proivdes social space that they wouldn't otherwise have.
There is also no evidence that smartphones are reducing the time kids spend outdoors or exercising. That trend was well established long before smartphones were introduced and is more down to the media scaring parents into keeping kids close, forgetting that a child is far more likely to be harmed by family and friends than by total strangers, that speed limits in residential areas are going down and that road traffic in many cities is also in decline due to ULEZ, subsidized public transport and similar schemes.
Of course, the parents don't want to have to interact with the kids now underfoot so they expect the TV, games consoles & social media companies to keep them busy while simultaneously decrying the inappropriateness of the content.
Go figure!
Seems to be a quite a bit of denial going on here. Once upon a time there were stories on TV about this or that doctor (always old) who was still telling patients that it was ok to smoke cigarettes. No one recommends giving a pack of cigarettes to a kid these days because the dangers are well understood. So it will be with social media too. Its just that some people will take longer that others to see the danger.
Cite some peer reviewed scientific studies that demostrate actual harm to under eighteens.
All legitimate studies and meta-studies to date find no link. For example, try PubMed.
Twenty years ago, people were writing similar scare stories suggesting a link between video games, mental health and violent crime. Again, upon rigourous analysis no link was found.
I do not like social media and you may not like it either but those are our opinions and we don't get to assert that people of any age shouldn't be using it without actual evidence.
'The largest independent scientific study ever conducted investigating the spread of Facebook across the globe found no evidence that the social media platform’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.'
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-linking-facebook-adoption-and-negative-well-being-oxford-study/
Any ban will help bullies as much court evidence in juvenile bullying cases nowadays comes from social media posts.
MySpace launched 21 years ago. Kids started piling on there, aged, what? 10-12 year olds? They're are now in their early 30s and parents themselves now, possibly of 10-12 year olds :-)
There seems to be some sort of long running meme that parents just don't understand "the internet" or "computers" because they missed out on "the IT revolution". Parents of early teens today grew up in a world of computers and the internet. Parents of a teen nowadays is going to be mid-30's, early 40's at most, in most cases and left school maybe around 2005-2010. Odds are they did ICT classes.
Some of us are technically old enough to be the great grand parents of today's teens. And some of that "us" helped to build what we now know as "the internet", roughly just before and during the PC Revolution, long before some of today's teens parents were born ... and yes, the yoof of today insist that we don't know anything at all about computers and the 'net "because we're too old".
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" —Santayana
This site is mostly read by people in countries without licenses. A lot of the readers are in UK, Canada, or the US, none of which have an ID requirement. Many others are in European countries, several of which (E.G. Ireland, Netherlands, Denmark) don't have a requirement. Even Australia's closest neighbor, New Zealand, doesn't require it. So while you are right that a lot of other countries do require it, it's not that odd that most of the readers here have lived somewhere where getting a connection was as simple as paying the money.
I prefer it that way and don't see sufficient benefit to adding an extra verification and reporting step. If a country I was in wanted to institute one, I would oppose it and try to stop it. If a country I was in was considering removing their requirement, I would be happy. The fact that many countries have decided to do it doesn't change my mind.
Well in the UK you can buy a sim for cash in the supermarket, but to make calls on it you have to activate it, and for that you need a debit card or similar - which makes it linked to an identifiable person. (or a legal entity like a business, with identifiable owners or directors)
Unlike in the films, organizing a truly anonymous phone is quite convoluted, and also illegal, and its not really a problem.
Banks have successfully managed proof of IDs for a long time - and to open a child's account, needs a responsible adult to put their ID to it, usually a parent or legal guardian. I see no reason why getting a digital ID linked to a flesh and blood person who can be arrested if it is mis-used should be any more difficult than the opening of a bank account.
Then like a bank statement, or a phone bill ,the user (or the responsible adult) gets a monthly statement saying what sites have been registered to that ID.much as you see the phone bill on your bank statements.
At this point the responsible adult may look at that statement and query why Jimmy's junior digital ID has been used on some dodgy websites - and Jimmy is in much the same trouble he would have been if caught with a packet of ciggies or a pile of unsuitable illustrated literature ...
What happens next will be as sensible or not as the parents, but there is then at least an official audit trail of who permitted what - unlike now when there are lots of unconnected places holding information.
And that is probably how it will need to work.
Mike.
I can't speak for the UK, but in several countries without an ID requirement, you can buy prepaid cards that already have some credit amount on them. You activate that by entering an activation code that came with the card. It runs until the credit is exhausted or until the period on the original purchase expires. No payment information provided, possibly only an email address. For some of them, you can take the card ID to a store and put down some more cash to add credit. A lot of those are not the cheapest methods of having a phone line, but they are not explicitly connected to a person and it doesn't take a lot of complexity to set up. There are also prepaid debit cards that don't have an identity attached which can be used on some other methods.
These aren't very useful for the criminal that wants untraceable comms, since there is still a phone number that can be tracked and at least two companies that can report information on the user. However, in no part of the process do you have to show someone a thing with your legal name on it in order to get one.
I also remember a foolproof technology to determine whether someone was a witch, you strap them to a chair and hold them under water, etc.
I wonder what brilliant new technology the luddites will come up with this time?
(And I forgot to mention the porn age check where a popup dialogue box asks you whether you're over 18.)
Personally, I'm putting my money on the kids rather than the government this time.
everyone on Oz for stopping him from blasting his rightwing propaganda to them.
That will only be the start. Any government even thinking of doing the same will be pilloried on Twatter forever.
As 'First Buddy,' he seems to think that he can do whatever he wants anywhere in the world and his buddy trump will have his back.
Unless.... there is a few billion in it for No 45/47 then I don't think that he'll have Musk's back.
A safer solution would be to ban social media... all platforms until it cleans up its act.
Don't forget FaceBook.... Zuck didn't want to be left out and went on bended knee to Mar-a-LArdo and begged to a role in the government. If Elon can then so can I...
He'll team up with Mucky Musk to sue Oz into oblivion. Ban them all for good. They are highly addictive and the bullying has led to suicides.... just like a hard drug.
...considering my daughter once got handed a glass of wine when she was helping me get the order from the bar.
She was 13.
Seriously, all a girl has to do us put some slap on and they can look a lot older. Boys may have to wear a false beard.
Oh let's not forget, those did that do look older will have a nice little earner setting up accounts for the younger ones.
It'll be the new version of older kids buying fags and booze and reselling it at a huge mark to the younger ones.
Social media is the new moral panic, just like video gaming was Personally, I despise social media for various reasons, but lots of people find value in it.
What if you're 14 or 15 and live on a farm 200 or 300 miles from the nearest town?
What if you have autism or any other condition that makes it difficult to make friends? Kids in these sorts of situations do get real value from social media.
The list goes on.
We have a far bigger problem with gambling addiction, yet the government has totally caved in to the gambling lobby, which force feeds us TV ads during every single fucking ad break.
That's what should really be banned, because it is absolutely doing real,serious harm to people right now
This post has been deleted by its author
"Social media is the new moral panic,"
In late 1988 or early 1989 I was the proverbial fly on the wall when some "well meaning" idiot brought the existence of alt.sex.stories.* being available on the Stanford Usenet feed up to the Board of Trustees. Was pretty funny, in a sad kind of way. Cooler heads prevailed[0], and the well meaning idiot was sent on her way, threatening that she'd be back with lawyers ... To the best of my knowledge she never made good on the threat.
[0] Stanford's not in the business of censorship, slippery slope, etc.
Downvoted because you're whining about gambling, which, while a stupid and incredibly boring thing to do as far as I'm concerned, is something that people have been doing for the entire history of humanity and will keep right on doing no matter how much you try to stop them. And it's not your fucking business if somebody wants to gamble anyway. Gambling isn't the new moral panic, it's the old moral panic, and it's just as tiresome to hear whining about it as it is to hear the idiotic whining about social media.
You want to ban ALL ads? I'm all for it! Let's end capitalism! You want to ban specific ads because you think they're "bad" for people? Fuck right off!
I'm not Australian, But I am in favor of kids having unrestricted access to whatever social media they want, and I'm actually considering setting up a site to assist Australian kids get on social media by helping them with setting up accounts from outside the country while those of us helping them are safely out of reach of idiotic Australian law.
(The definition of an "age-restricted" platform covers services that allow users to post material, to interact with two or more people, and to interact with some or all other end-users)
I hope El Reg are getting ready to implement age checks then for their Aussie users, as surely any website with a comments section or forum allows users to do all of the things that the AU gov now deems to be age restricted?
(The definition of an "age-restricted" platform covers services that allow users to post material, to interact with two or more people, and to interact with some or all other end-users)
My thoughts were that it rules out any form of online classroom (like during covid lockdowns) unless they want to supply 1 teacher per pupil (can't have more than 1 pupil as the pupils would be able to interact with 2 or more people).
taking the wording literally it also rules out email providers as you can certainly "interact with two or more people, and to interact with some or all other end-users" over email (it's just a bit slower)
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