24
They did well with this one
But at least we’re doing something. Just not the things that would start to fix all that
Gold
Not a single government today is beholden to its citizens.
We are all cattle and donkeys so people richer than us can live like gods.
Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?
EDIT: the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by AI bots and foreign disinformation. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections should experiment with this sort of thing.
the verification process. you could be 42 and never signed up for social media and now you decide you want to post comments on tiktok. Welp now you gotta verify that you're not a teenager. So provide your ID, provide a photo of yourself holding your ID, and hope some company that is obtaining that information either doesn't sell it or doesn't have a security breach. and a bonus to all that is the potential to further track all activities you do online. they can now easily build a profile of you via the social networks you sign up for.
that's the problem.
Would you upload your government ID just to access the web? Would you be content knowing that a leak at a social media company could lead to your identity being stolen just because your government wants to keep under 16s off of mainstream social media. Would you be happy with your child using 4chan because they are banned from using safer social media websites? I personally know several people who would not be around today if online safe spaces didn't exist to give them an escape from bullying, queerphobia or domestic violence. I can understand why someone might agree with the sentiment "people under 16 shouldn't be on social media", but I cannot understand why someone would be okay with the specifics of this legislation. People are going to have their lives ruined because of this new law and it doesn't even succeed in what it sets out to do (nominally) in the first place. The true reason for this bill is not to "protect children from radicalisation", but to drive viewer/readership of Murdoch media, if it were about protecting children from radicalisation and bullying, why are the worst of these social media sites not included in the ban?
The problem isnt the idea of preventing people under 16 from getting on social media, but how you enforce that.
The only real way is to make every user submit a government ID, which becomes a massive privacy AND security issue with how often every online service gets compromised or leaks user data
If a banks suddenly and frequently lost data on all their users people wouldn't be screaming that banks should be completely anonymous. The banks would have fines and need to meet high standards to keep doing business
We have lots of societal issues that are made worse with the internet being a wild west and founding logical arguments on the premise that it is insecure also has issues. If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn't be in common use
If a website is so questionable it might leak, it probably shouldn’t be in common use
Tell me you know nothing about software without telling me you know nothing about software.
Yeah, it was a bit ill thought out but I'd argue its more idealistically unrealistic
We could live in a world something along the lines of websites sending HTTPS certs based on users location with the cert granted by those governments and if you sell or store customers data then you need a security audit for the code.
That would obviously need tweaking and is a long way away from where the world is today, but a world where any website could be malicious is about as necessary as a country where walking into any restaurant has a probable chance of you being shot. A nice part of that analogy is that the main thing holding both together is strong trustworthy institutions. But the web is that way more from history rather than a deep technical issue that forces the internet to be that way. Also probably time, that sort of audit is probably prohibitively expensive, but that could be considered part of the true cost to society that we're ignoring
Cybersecurity: where defenders have to win every day and attackers only have to win once.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you're older than X true / false) from an authoritative source like say the people who give out IDs (because if they're broken into everyone's screwed anyway). Instead OzGov has dumped it in the laps of the corpos, who will hoover up pictures of IDs or faces instead. As of a couple of days beforehand there's still no actual information on these age verification protocols to my knowledge, very untransparent, very disturbing. Corpos being required to moderate their platforms would be good, this is not that.
Anything like age verification should probably be handled with absolute minimum identifiable information (i.e. you're older than X true / false)
Ahh... thats not age verification. And yes verification is one of the hard parts with problems but this isn't even an attempt at age verification
Oh, you're not saying the user answers this question. You're saying someone like the Department of Licensing does?
Pretty much that government API you mentioned, rather than the platform self regulating. Fox guarding the hen house and all...
Yeah and when your government is experiencing some troubles themselves the whole shit comes down. We’ve experienced a little downtime here for regional government and it lasted quite a while. Centralisation introduces its own weaknesses. Additionally, at some point, we could address this by just having parents accountable in this specific use case. Wtf do we need a technological solution to address parenting? This small subset thereof.
Exactly! Parents should be in charge of child not smoking or drinking! What sort of countries would also hold stores accountable... wait up...
I’ll also add that, contrary to shop surveillance, parents have physical control of their kids devices to a large extent. And most OSes comes with features allowing parental controls. So yeah we have the tools for enforcing our accountability as parent on the internet.
Do you realize that lemmy is also social media? I wouldn't be here posting if I had to verify my ID, which is what all these age verification measures do instead of just checking age.
Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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