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Australia is banning social media for kids under 16.
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Surely this won't be used by the government to monitor internet usage!
Australia already has metadata tracking. This law is poorly implemented by a bunch of old fools who don't understand how the internet works. All it will achieve is training a generation to subvert the government's nonsense better.
If you have to use a government ID to access the internet I don't think there'll be a way to subvert it. The tech fixes like face recognition and age inference can probably be spoofed, but IDs seem rock solid unless you steal someone else's ID.
People will bypass any barrier they put in place. Hell, that's how I got into IT.
Somebody's IT department put up barriers, which you bypassed to force your way into the job? Is the willfully incorrect way I chose to read it.
"I hacked their system and put myself on payroll, issued myself an ID, and started showing up to work."
It'd be government ID to access sites hosted in Australia from Australia, but if the internet shows you accessing sites from say Vietnam, or accessing a site not hosted in Australia then what's the government going to do?
They could require an ID to connect to the internet.
That's not how the law is written, onus is on social media sites, they haven't banned under 16s from the internet, just from social media.
And the social media sites, in the interest of complying with the law, might make deals with the internet service providers to actually put an ID check on every internet connection. This isn't impossible.
Even if they don't, once legislators realize their law didn't fix the problem they can always pass new legislations.
My point is that this isn't impossible.
Service providers can't verify individual users, its arguably harder for them to do that than it is for social media site operators
They could, we'd just need to hand over even more of our privacy and rights.
Which was always the plan.
Not really.
This law draws a line in the sand indicating societal expectations.
It empowers parents to set and maintain appropriate boundaries without being influenced by what other parents allow their kids to do. Its a lot easier to maintain a "no social media" rule if other parents are doing the same.
Also I dont really have any faith at all in the young teenagers of today being able to circumvent anything. Sure. A few will... but certainly not most or even a significant portion.
If you cant install it from the app store then its out of reach.
That's not how the law works and it doesn't empower parents to do anything. It just makes social media sites check for age and deny under 16s. It only applies to sites hosted by companies or people with a presence in Australia, and it refers to methods of age verification that don't exist yet even though the law is now in force.
WDYM that's not how the law works? All laws are a statement of societal expectations.
Of course it does. Obviously, it's much easier to tell your kids they're not allowed to use facebook if most of their friends aren't using facebook.
So you mean, the vast majority of platforms on which children congregate?
It sounds like you haven't actually read it.
This law is a series of requirements on social media site operators and the definition of the fines they will receive if they don't comply. It doesn however define the actual methods those operators must use, only who will define them (they are still yet to be defined). They scale of what constitutes a social media site is wild.
Empowering parents would be helping them understand methods for combating toxic social media use or supporting them in improving their internet and cyber safety literacy. Implementing a law and providing limited narrative on its function through traditional mainstream media is not empowering parents. Do you think many parents understand their liability for the Minecraft server their kids will inevitably set up from what's been reported so far?
Circumventing this law is trivial. You wildly underestimate the ability for teenagers to get away with doing things they want.
It sounds like you don't know much about how Australia's legal system works, or parenting for that matter.
Laws are always broad and vague by intention. Courts interpret the law, and regulators investigate contraventions.
You seem to be wildly overestimating the level of interest most parents have in such things. Social media has become such a problem precisely because parents generally have given up on this particular battleground.