This is the opposite of democracy - a group imposing rules "for their own good" on people it doesn't represent who have no recourse. If they had any integrity they'd be banning it for adults not children.
Save your breath, Australians don't have the same views on government or individual rights as America (or even Canada!).
I lived in Singapore for a while and it's a "flawed democracy" where the government has stacked the deck against any opposition party to a degree that's breathtaking.
But a poll in Singapore showed that 70% felt that "social harmony is more important than democracy". Even if Singaporeans knew how undemocratic the government was, they wouldn't care.
None of these sound like they are a very big problem compared to many alternative things people do. People talk about social media as though it's lead paint.
I particularly liked that one Facebook study that is usually taken out of context.
> young men having porn addition and having no ambition to interact with real women
this made me lol so much. porn addition is not the cause, but the consequence.
do you have any idea how hard it is for males to find a willing mate nowadays?
most females have men fighting over them, while most men must always do the fighting to get even one low-quality female in their entire life.
just because thing A was (unjustly) demonized doesn't mean demonizing thing B is without merit, even more so when thing A and thing B are completely unrelated.
I agree with the OP that the ban is woefully undemocratic, and that banning it for children only is a grave misstep.
I think what they should ban instead is recommendation algorithms. If I subscribe to a source, and explicitly unsubscribe from another, it should be illegal to withhold some of the first’s postings and shove the second’s in my face. This should be a no-brainer and has nothing to do with the age of the user; but it's easier to just ban the people who, as OP correctly noted, have no representation and no recourse.
Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption? Do you feel the same way about those prohibitions too?
> Does your reasoning also apply for laws which ban underage smoking or underage alcohol consumption?
Up to a point, but AIUI there is credible medical evidence for those being disproportionately harmful (in physical, objectively verifiable ways) to the young. I think setting the same standard of harm and applying it to all ages is reasonable; maybe this law is based on some claim that social media harms children in a way it doesn't harm adults, but bluntly given how much the topic is biased and politicised I just don't trust today's social science establishment enough to justify this kind of law.
They are already mostly segmented off from their friends after school hours. They have killed off one of the final mediums for interaction and are preventing interaction with the rest of their generation's culture. They're also narrowing their world view to be more controlled by the state.
Hasn't that been the case for thousands of years? It's not like they can't see each other after school hours... I know i used to. And i still see my friends after my workday. I have much deeper connections with the 20 people i see in real life than the 1000 people on my linkedin profile.
Do people thrive more in their mental health when they are supposedly 24/7 accessible? Is it necessary? Is it wanted?
Actually this is a separate problem. If you look at the work of Jon Haidt who promotes the kinds of measures we're talking about here, it's only half the story. The other half is that we have become ridiculously overprotective in parenting in recent decades. Kids need independence and the ability to hang out and play with their peers away from direct adult supervision. The goal isn't to take away the internet and leave kids with nothing, it's to bring back the real-world contact and relationship-building.
No, we need to turn it WAY up. We circumcise AKA male genital mutilation to hundreds of millions of male children all across the world, including much of the USA and Australian populations.
That’s just one tiny example, and no one is calling for circumcison bans simultaneously.
Letting the mutilated children have some social media is the least the state can do for them. Australia is a tyrannical hellscape.
You missed the point. Tyranny of the majority is one thing if the minority can at least vote and participate in the political process. Shutting the minority out entirely is quite different.
We do have recourse. What you'll see is more independent candidates get voted in to overturn the law. Once the government of the day starts badly implementing it the conservatives who voted with the center left party will split off and start attacking for it's repeal.
It's a nothing burger law designed to look tough and do nothing.
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Is it? Last time I checked I thought that was only when parents or legal guardians do it to a small number of children in their care, not when politicians do it to all children in an entire country.
But even if I accept your premise, your comment makes me wonder if you've never heard of people who are bad at parenting, or who are downright abusive to the children in their care.
Let me ask you something: Do you support removing liquor laws banning underage people from being sold alcohol? Or removing laws that ban the sale of cigarettes to children? How about gambling or buying lotto tickets for childrenm
I think it's clear that as a society we have already decided that government has a role in establishing legal protections to prevent children from falling afoul of systems that are designed to be predatory
This is just another layer of that
Which also establishes a social norm that letting children drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or gamble is not a good thing, so people who are bad parents know at least some baseline of what they should not be doing
Who defines what a child is? Who defines what a elderly person is? Are these questions also jokes to you? You seem pretty flippant about deciding which groups shouldn't have political power.
Many countries already tried using objective criteria to decide who gets to vote, and this always results in policy that screws nonvoters at the benefit of voters. Do you think the housing crisis all around the western world is an accident? It's not. The electorate chose this because it benefits them. Is it an accident that the last 2 US presidents are pedophiles? Probably, but that would be much less likely with a younger electorate.
A decision was made about how children's lives should function without their input. Right now do you believe that the class of parent voters votes as representatives of the interests of their children and their future? Or do you believe that all persons under 16 have no concept of time or political interests and couldn't even understand if a politician was making them a good deal through a political ad?
Children understand brand new toys better than anyone; by high school, pretty much all of them understand that they get better teachers if you pay more. Are students not interested in getting better grades for "free"?
The government is not anyone's parent, it doesn't give a lick if your kid dies tomorrow, cause kids don't vote.
Hey, didn't you get the memo that teenagers know everything, have the simple & straightforward solutions to all of life's problems, and are never wrong?? ;)
> When adults make decisions for children it's called "parenting"
Children issue is just the excuse for government to get people obey. Sadly but "kids protecting" propaganda is one of two the most effective ones, works great and there are lots of alternatively gifted persons that do not get the real attitude.
> Acting like we should be seriously treating children and teens as an equal political group is a joke
Yeah this thread is wild, maybe because those speaking “on behalf” of children here are actually all children?
Age restrictions for social media are as logical and necessary as they are for driving, drinking, etc. It isn’t just a concern about self-harm. The general public has a stake in this too in the long run, and it’s a safety and security issue for them as well. (If you don’t believe this is true, just think about how much power Facebook already has over elections, and how much more they will have if literally everyone alive grows up on Facebook and doesn’t think that power is worth questioning)
Years from now we’ll all be surprised we didn’t arrive at this conclusion sooner.