[Sevrene]

I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.

Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.

If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.

[pizza]

The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.

[KaiserPro]

> rather than being penalized

The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.

If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.

People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.

Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.

The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.

Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.

[whimsicalism]

I'm glad when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought. Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.

[roguecoder]

Where did you grow up? Because America in the 80s was all about shutting teenagers out of violent video games and music with naughty words.

[whimsicalism]

I grew up in DC in the 21st century.

[ndriscoll]

Things used to be more scrutinized. e.g. look at the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and legal fallout over sexual content that existed in the game data files but could only be accessed by modding the game, at which point you could just mod the content in. Porn websites also used to generally put anything explicit behind a credit card barrier, and there was an attempt to require that that the supreme court struck down.

[Novosell]

Pretty sure the US has had things such as age ratings for movies, which are enforced when possible, and laws around advertising to children and false advertising for quite some time.

I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.

[lkramer]

Try go get a beer as an 18 year old then :)

[superxpro12]

It's not remotely the same thing. Social media apps are highly engineered addiction serotonin-drips.

You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.

It's not the same.

[9dev]

It’s not about wrongthought, but manipulation and deception, blended with advertisements exploiting child psychology, coupled with peer pressure.

[KaiserPro]

> when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought

V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)

All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.

The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.

[whimsicalism]

> All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.

None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.

The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.

[poolnoodle]

The parts of the internet that are now banned for Australian teenagers are unlikely to change their lives in a positive way and much more likely to lead them into mental illness.

[protocolture]

>All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.

I remember logging on to Microsoft Networks, clicking "Adult Chatroom" and saying "Hi adults, my name is <blah> and I am 12" and getting a bunch of very positive, thoughtful replies.

>Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.

Some of the people being banned include these nice kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_News_Australia

Their founder is now 18, but most of their research and social media people are 14 - 16.

I feel like these kids A, have developed the necessary skills to operate the internet, and B, have a human right to access and report on the information contained within.

>a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift

The grifting misanthropes are in my honest opinion the people trying to prevent kids from accessing information. The "grift" is that kids have political interests and rights to access information and community, especially vulnerable kids, and the grifters want to "return" to a state where parents were the only method via which kids can access information. The internet is there for among other things, censorship resistant access to other people. The cost of this bill, assuming kids don't just keep stepping over the barricade, is going to be tremendous in terms of suicide in LGBT and disabled areas.

So tell us, why do you hate kids so much?

[aeonfox]

It's not so much teenage credulity, or coddling parents. Teen suicide is the easily quantifiable tip of the iceberg when it comes to mental health outcomes. Conspicuously it started trended up after 2008, around the nascence of Facebook and smartphones:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)

[heavyset_go]

That's also when the Great Recession happened, giving young people bleak outlooks for their future, outlooks which never really recovered. Nothing was fixed, and things have only gotten worse since then.

[aeonfox]

The data doesn't bear that out. I remember the GFC well because my whole industry imploded during it. It certainly did recover by every measure.

US GDP: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

US unemployment: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...

S&P 500: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

US inflation rate: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

[roguecoder]

In America, we haven't made it illegal to assault children. We should, but we haven't.

[anonymous_sorry]

In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.

Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.

[ricardobeat]

Adults love 'garbage'. How do you define that?

There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.

[pizza]

I have no idea how to define it. I also don’t know if I’m personally convinced one way or another about the harms. Just think the platforms would probably have to be made to make more substantial changes were it the case.

[AlexandrB]

I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.

The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.

[dlisboa]

So, do absolutely nothing is your plan?

[frumplestlatz]

Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.

The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.

My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.

[behringer]

Yes. The internet is awesome and the government will destroy it.

[roguecoder]

Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_

[behringer]

genocides are happening online? That's pretty remarkable.

[heavyset_go]

The genocides would have happened with age verification or not, don't conflate the two.

Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".

Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.

Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.

[xethos]

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

I hope we can agree that allowing every social media site to devolve into the above is the bigger problem. There can be some places that are adults-only; just like reality though, the world is better when open-by-default, with some places gated to adults-only.

Shifting focus to "Why are we letting some of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen get away with being a cesspit?" lets us keep kids safe by default, doesn't attack E2EE, and doesn't default to the internet becoming a surveillance state.

If we start by getting Facebook and Twitter (et al.) to clean up their acts, we can all work, yell, and vote together, instead of some yelling about their kids being shown unexpected pornography, and others yelling about the internet becoming a surveillance state.

Because both can be real concerns - but a starter solution can get the vast majority of voters on-board, and garner real progress, instead of giving Facebook more data and control, or governments a turn-key dictatorship.

[roguecoder]

I don't think we've shown that that cleanup is possible.

Whenever platforms have taken even the smallest steps in that direction, the right-wing authoritarian political parties freak out and blackmail them into stopping, or in the case of Musk simply buy them out outright.

[makeitdouble]

If cleaning it isn't possible, getting kids to know it and navigate the filth is required. Same way we teach kids how to interact with people on the street and get a sense of who to trust when they're in trouble and how to avoid trouble in the first place.

[ratatougi]

I agree. However social media is so addictive that even if we are aware of its harm, we stil use it

[makeitdouble]

I wonder if the next generation will be facing this same sentiment.

For instance TV was basically a drug for the last generation, there was people watching near 8 to 10h of TV a day. It might have been replaced by something else, but I don't think our current generation has this specific issue.

From that POV, currently people in their 30~60s are the more stuck to social networks and raging against fake news all day, while younger generations tend to be on different services with potentially a lot more reduced circle of users.

Do we really know how the generation that is 5~6yo right now will react to our social media landscape ? (put another way, are we fighting the last war ?)

[plantain]

> These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.

From their users in Australia? Clearly not.

[protocolture]

>I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

The law could instead prohibit scams and violence?

>These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year.

Irrelevant.

>but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe)

Almost every other avenue, including doing nothing, has more merit than that which has been implemented.

>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.

Theres some basic negative freedom implications from those, but they dont intend to ban a class of person from accessing a mundane element of human society.

[paganel]

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation

Why not? Why won't you give political agency to young adults? I'm saying this as a kid who grew up in Romania, just after Ceausescu had been executed, so throughout the '90s, I do very well remember all the political news and commentary coming my way (I was a teen), but I can't say that it bothered, not at all, it made me more connected to the adult world and hence more prepared to tackle real life just a little bit later on.

I won't comment on the other stuff, because that would make me bring back memories of watching TV1000 (a Swedish TV satellite channel) late at night on Saturdays, also in the early '90s, I won't say for what but suffice is to say that I turned out ok.

[ricardobeat]

There's hardly any parallel between the type of political content (or corn) that was available on TV in the 90s, and what's found in today's social media. It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.

[tstrimple]

Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting in the 80's. Fox News in the 90's. Prior to that you had decades of propaganda against "communists" and anti-war protesters. Prior to that you had blatant lies about what would happen if black people got civil rights. Before that you had blatant lies about women's suffrage. The bullshit has always existed in very large quantities. The common uniting thread for the vast majority of the bullshit is conservative beliefs. They are always doing their most to make the world a worse place for some group or another.

[acdha]

> It's not political commentary, it's a constant stream of pure, unfiltered manipulation, lies, brainwashing, prejudice and antisocial behaviour.

This is exactly what conservative talk radio was like, and it radicalized a bunch of boomers – especially the ones with long car commutes who had limited counter examples. There’s a direct line between the guys joking about eating spotted owls or how feminists were too ugly to worry about rape to the modern environment, or saying that the government was discriminating against white men, but the difference now is scale and variety: now it reaches more people and there are more flavors available so the young woman who would’ve been turned off by Rush instead gets some wellness influencer talking about how birth control causes cancer.

[Sevrene]

Small things I want to add or say:

- It's not young adults, it's 15 and under. Personally I would classify 17-20something as young adult (it's a bit subjective isn't it).

- The younger children don't really care about politics honestly. Curious if you have an age that you're ok with only ensuring irl politics for children? I think age to vote is a much bigger concern for me here in terms of civil liberties.

- Parents can still make that choice for their child (unclear how this will work to me yet, to be fair).

- I've become convinced no one really practises 'politics' online. People barely even debate anymore. They argue, they perform activism, they aggitate, its what gets attention (thanks to social media). I'm worried people think this is normal, it's not- political discourse used to be much more productive. I remember when fallacies were actually brought up logically on the internet and people actually cared about the accusation.

- I did explicit rp with adults as 7 year old on MSN chatrooms back in the day :')

[andrewmutz]

Social media is full of extremist and untrue content of all types. Antivax or free birth content are just two small examples of viral content that is untrue and kills people. It has a very negative effect on adults, and adults at least have brains that are fully-developed.

Exposing kids to the firehose of misinformation on social media just poisons their brains. Political agitation is mostly political misinformation. Even among the causes online that I agree with, most of the content online is deeply biased, one-sided or inaccurate.

[nemomarx]

You can guess exactly how authorities would define "political agitation", though. dangerous things to allow them to ban.

[andrewmutz]

I don't think we should allow the government to ban political agitation, but I do think its fine to allow the government to ban children using social media

[stinkbeetle]

The most dangerous, untrue, and extremist content I've ever seen has come from governments.

Lies upon lies about WMDs and going to war for our freedoms and how we need to "liberate" Libya and fund and arm rebels and insurgents. Millions of people killed, trillions of dollars wasted and stolen.

Someone who is not completely trusting of politicians or pharmaceutical corporations, or who wants to give birth like 99.999% of humanity has, really are so far down the list of "dangerous misinformation" they don't even register.

[throwaway742]

Oh hey it's my favorite Romanian stupidpol poster. Didn't think I would run into you here.

[Hizonner]

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc.

You mean like the outside world?

What happens when these hot house flowers of yours reach whatever magic age and get dumped into all of that, still with no clue, but with more responsibilities and more to lose?

I haven't noticed a whole lot of governments, or even very many parents, worrying about doing much to actually prepare anybody for adulthood. It's always about protection, never about helping them become competent, independent human beings. Probably because protection is set-and-forget, or at least they think it is... whereas preparation requires actually spending time, and paying attention, and thinking, and communicating. Maybe even having to answer hard questions about your own ideas.

... and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".

[roguecoder]

If your children are being exposed to sexual and violent content in the real world, that is called an "Adverse Childhood Experience" and it is predictive of everything from poor adult earnings to heart disease: https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html

[lo_zamoyski]

I think you're taking things to an extreme.

Let's make some distinctions first.

On the one hand, you have violence and pornography, and also other crude content. There is nothing good about exposing children to these. It does not contribute to their growth or to their maturity as human beings and it is ridiculous to think it could. On the contrary, this content will cause psychological harm, causing distortions in their emotions, in their habituated appetites, in their self-understanding, and their understanding of normal relations. When deviance like that is tolerated, it shifts the Overton window. Children observe this tolerance and roll it into their sense of normality. Individuals suffer. The quality of society degrades substantially.

On the other hand, we have political agitation. This one is more difficult to define and handle, especially in a liberal democratic society. There are examples of obvious political agitation, of course, but children should generally not be exposed to political agitation at all, except as a subject matter at an age appropriate level and in an appropriate pedagogic setting. Children don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to examine such material in the wild on their own where they would be at the mercy of unscrupulous adult manipulators who couldn't care less about the well-being of children. (Ask yourself what kind of person would want to involve children in their political agitation to begin with.)

So, there's a big difference between common sense things like these and coddling children. We want to prepare children for life, not teach them adaptation to depravity. You throw them into the filth of social and psychological pathology. Neither violence nor pornography should be normalized even in the adult world - it is harmful to the adults who consume it as well - so the idea that we should prepare children for life in some violent and twisted pornland is preposterous. Nobody has to put up with that garbage, and the law should be making sure they don't.

[makeitdouble]

> and since when are kids supposed to be protected from politics? We used to call that "civics class".

The whole "don't talk about politics" is so toxic IMHO.

Sure you might not want to ruin your dinner with the family members you see a single day every year. But otherwise, making it sound like a taboo could be widening the tribalization and anchor the feeling deeper into people's identity. Let the people talk about what they care about, including when that affects who the next president is.

[jorblumesea]

yeah social media is proving itself to be a bad actor like big alcohol, big tobacco. No incentive to do the right thing or improve anything. ripping audiences away from them is the only way they'll understand.

[jfindper]

>If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar.

If you think the arguments are eerily similar, I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.

I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.

[Sevrene]

>I feel like you haven't really been listening to the arguments against these types of age-verification-for-websites laws.

Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you? Because I do care, I do try to listen to the arguments. I'm no stranger to advocacy for civil liberties, they are important to me. I think all else being equal, freedom should be valued more over harm prevention. So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.

> I mean, there's some similarities, of course. But I think there are some very stark differences.

Yep of course it's not a 1:1, I agree. I don't mean to imply that people saying the same arguments today are wrong simply because people in the past were, but it does make me think more about it when I spot the same rhetoric.

Often both sides have very reasonable concerns, as an example, the question isn't "should we have all or no freedom" Either extreme creates issues, yet both sides have valid arguments worth our time considering. We settle somewhere in the middle.

Here's one vox pop with the introduction of breathalizers in UK (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_tqQYmgMQg

[jfindper]

>"Or maybe I just have a different conclusion to you?"

Whatever your conclusion is, it’s sort of beside the point I was making, which is that the many of the arguments about mandated seatbelts (or smoking, alcohol) are meaningfully different than the arguments being made today about age verification for websites.

>“So if I'm for these laws, consider that a sign of how bad these sites have become, not how uninformed I am.”

This is kind of reinforcing what I said in my first comment. Most, if not all, of the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.

I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities. Which is why I thought your comment of “eerily similar” was off-base.

[Sevrene]

They are different laws with different contexts but the type of rhetoric and logic used to justify them are very similar, right? I already agreed they are not 1:1 nore was it meant to be. I agree with you there. If there's a more specific point you want to make, I'm keen to hear it!

> the arguments against these types of laws aren’t based on the premise that these sites aren’t bad. I haven’t seen anyone saying that TikTok is a societal good. Almost everyone agrees there.

There's people in this thread talking about jews being behind this ban to ensure zionism continues, using only a social media agitprop post to justify it. We are in the mud at the moment, so I'm sorry but I'm not taking that for granted, people have diverse views.

> I’m saying that the main arguments are different. I am suggesting that there are more differences between the seatbelt debate and the age-verification-for-websites debate than there are similarities.

Let me try explain this figuratively:

A doctor might give free care to someone in a medical emergency on a plane after all they have an ethical responsiblity to do so if they can, but that doesn't mean they're obliged to care about your canker sore.

Now imagine a doctor not treating one or the other because "It's not that serious". It's the extent of the harm or risk that actually indicates how insane or sane that doctor's response is, just as much as the doctors actually response to it is.

We can sit here and say "yeah it's not that serious" but one patient is dying and another basically fine. Just like those people that thought drink driving wasn't that big of a deal, people think social media "oh yeah that's bad but what you going to do", it's the same shrug and 'oh well' attitude. That's what I think is eerlie similar. Now whether or not that's appropiate or not depends on whether you think the patient is having a heart attack, or just has a sore lip.

I do agree people aren't generally saying TikTok is good, but people are saying TikTok isn't so bad as to regulate age verification. Do you see how these things play into each other?

[palata]

So you're using many, many words to say that you disagree, and none of them to explain how you disagree?

I (not the person you're disagreeing with, BTW) would be interested in your demonstration of how you disagree.

[shafoshaf]

My takeaway is that jfindper is saying that seatbelt laws had a justification that does not have a parallel with this action regarding social media.

IDK if this is how they would say it, but I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.

The idea that I have to give up privacy, expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged), increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud in order to get a solution that is not clear on how effective it will be makes the parallel a bit academic, if not an out right straw man.

[palata]

> I think argument for seatbelts is that there is minimum disruption to usage, there is limited revocation of other rights, and the societal benefit is large and pretty unambiguous.

Said like this, it looks to me that it has a parallel with social media.

> The idea that I have to give up privacy

You don't have to, though.

> expose myself to additional risk (by having my identity logged)

It doesn't have to be, we can have privacy-preserving age verification. Now we could discuss the specific implementation, but in general that's feasible.

> increase the chances that mentally susceptible people will have more exposure to fraud

It's not enough to say it: is it actually the case? You can already get phished by trying to access a social network, how does that make it worse? I don't think it's obvious. While the problem with kids and social media is, at this point, very well documented.

> if not an out right straw man.

I, for one, think it's an interesting experiment. All the arguments above could be used against making cigarettes illegal for children. Yet I am very convinced that making cigarettes illegal for children is the right choice.

[yfw]

If we are so concerned about the materials make the platforms moderate them like they used to do. Banning them reeks of favoring the murdoch outlets which are free to spread misinformation

[fizwidget]

The ban is being enacted by the Australian Labor Party, which the Murdoch media is certainly not friendly with. If it ends up favouring Murdoch, it won’t have been deliberate.

[joahua]

Murdoch media killed a story critical of Labor government member so there is not _no_ evidence of support here.

https://archive.is/Hlr4l

[yfw]

You mean this guy? https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/08/29/albanese-murdoch-meetin...

[biophysboy]

The traditional outlets you are referring to are now worse because of social media.

[bdangubic]

nothing is worse than social media - absolutely nothing

[Sevrene]

I bet you Sky news gets more views through social media than TV broadcast these days! Many of their hosts are all over X, spreading misinformation. They are downstream from social media now, not seperate from it I suspect.

Murdoch benefits from the political agitation that the landscape of social media provides.

I do agree on making platforms moderate themselves. This legsliation helps do this by creating a discussion about the harms, enforcing a culture of harm (this is not for all ages, not default for everyone). Saying to the companies: "Hey, if you don't want to be regulated, clean up your platform so it's safer". Will that happen? no idea, but if it doesn't, no children is still a good goal (it's how you get there that has the contention).

[colordrops]

> I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

This may be true but it has nothing to do with what the person you are replying to said.

[biophysboy]

The original comment suggests that the policy is politically motivated. The commenter replied with other reasons for the policy other than political agitation. I think its a valid response.

I also don't buy the implied claim from the original commenter that age-limits are paternalistic/suppressive with regard to political thought/speech. Large tech platforms control political thought/speech on a regular basis, a lot of which is executed by state actors. Even in the absence of devious actors, algorithms are editorial by nature; they are not neutral infrastructure by any means.

[colordrops]

No, sorry, it's orthogonal to the poster's comment, which states that, regardless of merit, the purpose of the ban is political. Arguing for or against it is beside the point.

Perhaps the original comment should have been more direct in and just said that Zionists are the ones pushing for these bans. The head of the ADL has made comments about this. A video by Sarah Hurwitz, Obama's speechwriter, went viral recently about how social media needs to be banned for young people because it's hurting the zionist movement.

https://x.com/jennineak/status/1992395176283922767

[biophysboy]

The head of the ADL is a firehose of stupidity; that does not mean he controls policy. I also reject the pretense that public opinion of Israel would be higher among teens without social media, given their actions over the past few years.

[Sevrene]

I think this is a bit of a conspiracy colordrops, honestly. It's the same sort of stuff as on Infowars.

[colordrops]

Is that all you got? Ad hominem?

[Sevrene]

No sorry it wasn't a dig at you: the video was posted by someone who appears on Alex Jones' Infowars, talks jewish conspiracies. I just don't take that stuff seriously, doesn't make it wrong and if there's an argument you want to make I'll listen.

[Sevrene]

> 1: "I get the feeling this has nothing to do with preventing harms"

> 2: "heres the harms and why I think we should prevent them"

Not trying to be rude here colordrops but I think you're being a too obtuse here, especially when the original person's comment was basically just "I don't trust them" (which is totally fair), I would rather engage in a good faith discussion of our opinions.

> This may be true

Do you think it's true?