As of Wednesday, all youth under 16 in Australia will be banned from major social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and X. For over a decade, whistleblowers, politicians, academics, and experts around the world have sounded the alarm about the online harms people of all ages are exposed to.
…
The ban does nothing to prepare teens to respond to digital harms. It makes no investments in education, community training, or parental support. Youth will not be magically prepared to address problematic online behaviours or content when they turn 16.
The time and resources spent on the ban could be better spent on things like providing education and support for digital citizenship, media literacy, privacy rights or resource centres.
If social media is problematic for a 13, 14 or 15 year old, it’s still likely to be problematic for a 16, 25, or 80 year old. There is no body of research that establishes 16 as a “safe threshold” for social media use and the age for healthy use can vary across genders.
…
Under the current model, companies will not be inclined to improve their reporting systems for harmful content. In fact, in response to the ban, YouTube is actually removing a feature that would allow teens to report content they find inappropriate.
Youth under 16 who find ways to use these platforms, despite the bans, will be unlikely to come forward and ask for help if things go wrong. After all, they weren’t supposed to be online in the first place.
The answer to mitigating online harms is not kicking teens offline.
…
Social media companies also need to be accountable to the ways the platforms are designed and run. These platforms are designed in ways that push certain content and elicit particular engagements.
…
Seeing the comments under every post about this kind of thing and I’m confused: when the fuck did lemmy become so anti- online privacy and pro- large-scale internet censorship???
Is this place being botted to hell already? Are you people actually just this stupid?? Or do all the bitter ancient fossbro fucks on here just hate young people and/or socialising that much that they’ll immediately abandon their principles because this is ostensibly targeted at them???
There are all kinds of ways we protect kids and many things we regulate their access to so we can protect them. I’m not a fan of the particular way Australia is approaching this, because I think it’s clumsy and not an ideal method, but protecting kids from toxic social media and predatory companies is a pretty sensible thing to do.
Believe it or not, column 2.
Speaking for myself, social media can go fuck itself. I wouldn’t shed a tear if all of this bullshit was banned entirely in Canada. Wishful thinking though.
Right, chalk one up in the third column.
Yup, the intelligent people, who need to parent the kids and old folks.
Believe it or not, column 2.
One part of the answer is imo that some tankies here want to campaign for less privacy, more surveillance as this helps to make China look better. Just look at the post histories of some commenters.
I am not saying that everyone with a different opinion is a tankie, but this is a major reason why you read this here imo.