• @Juigi@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

    What they consider as “social media”? Is it every site where you can communicate with others?

    This seems fucked if its so.

    • @Ihnivid@feddit.org
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      11 hour ago

      While specific platforms haven’t been named in the law, the rules are expected to apply to the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, per the Prime Minister. Sites used for education, including YouTube, would be exempt, as are messaging apps like WhatsApp.

  • @daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    185 hours ago

    This is technically feasible, and bussiness don’t need to know your id. If anonymous government certificates are issued.

    But I’m morally against it. We need to both educate on the dangers of internet and truly control harmful platforms.

    But just locking it is bad for ociety. What happens with kids in shitty families that find in social media (not Facebook, think prime time Tumblr) a way to scape and find that there are people out there not as shitty as their family. Now they are just completely locked to their shitty family until it’s too late.

    • @Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      22 hours ago

      I think that the chances of a kid from a broken home finding an exploiter online is much more likely than that kid finding a helpful, supportive community.

    • Cethin
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      85 hours ago

      I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it, we need better terms than “social media.” Tumblr, Reddit, and Lemmy I don’t think should be in the same group as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media that uses your real life information should be separate from basically forums that use an online persona.

      I don’t know what this legislation says, but I agree with you. It should be limited to restricting the “personal social media,” not glorified internet forums.

  • Dr. Moose
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    148 hours ago

    The fact that people even considered this with a straight face, discussed it and passed it is just indicative how tech illiterate we’ve become.

    • @daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      17 hours ago

      I don’t know how they are going to do over there.

      Here the plan for the same goal is force any social media company to request a digital certificate when entering, or directly overtaking the ip of the social media and force a certificate check to let the user through. This certificates would be expedited by the government to people over certain age.

      The haven’t implemented yet, as they were going to start using the system to ban porn for minors and got a lot of backslash.

      It’s technologically doable, some kid will always find a way to enter but vast majority will not (next to a bunch of adults that will stop using them because they cannot be bothered with the same system). Moral considerations aside.

      • Dr. Moose
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        55 hours ago

        It’s technologically doable

        I’d disagree here. Sure in theory you could design some system that authenticates every user on every connection but in practice it would be impossible to maintain without complete authoritarian oversight like North Korea. Even closed authoritarian countries fail to achieve this (like Iran or China).

        This would cost billions of not trillions in implementation, oversight overhead and economic product loss. That money would be much more effective in carrot approach of supporting mental health institutions and promoting wholesome shared culture, anti bullying campaigns etc.

        It’s not a new problem either. We know for a fact that the latter is the better solution and yet here we are…

        • @glassware@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          Come on, this is silly. You can disagree with it politically but technically it would work fine. I already have a digital ID issued by the government for doing online tax returns. Validating a social media account against that ID would be no more difficult than letting people sign in with Google or whatever. There will always technically be a way to get around it but 99% of people won’t bother.

          • Dr. Moose
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            -22 hours ago

            Nah not a good comparison. Once there’s market people will find a way to easily corrupt this. Remember that this is a 3 way interaction: government, private company and private citizen - the opportunities for bypass are basically endless here. You are comparing it with a 2 way market between government and private citizen which has no incentive to break the system.

  • @BMTea@lemmy.world
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    3011 hours ago

    I support this move. Some here are delusionally arguing that this impacts privacy - the sort of data social media firms collect on teenagers is egregiously extensive regardless. This is good support for their mental health and development.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed
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      2610 hours ago

      This ban does nothing.

      Anything that does not force ID verification is useless.

      Anything that does verify ID would mean that adults also have to upload their IDs to the website.

      What will happen is either this becomes another toothless joke. Or the government say “okay this isn’t working, lets implement ID checks”, and when that law passes Lemmy Instance Admins would be required to verify ID of any user from an Australia IP.

      Y’all want that to happen?

      So what hapoens if other countries start catching on and also pass such law?

      Eventually the all internet accounts would be tied to IDs. Anonymity is dead.

      • @PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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        108 hours ago

        Government provided open id service which guarantees age. Website gets trusted authority signed token witch contains just the age. We can do this safely. We have the technology. They could even do it only once on registration.

        Digital id’s exist already in the EU, and many countries run a sign on service already. We aren’t far from this.

        • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed
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          7 hours ago

          Depending on what the token contains.

          There are two implementations I could think of:

          “This user has been verified to be at least [Age]. Sincerely, [Government Authority]” Assuming this is an identical token thats the same for everyone? Sure. I’m not opposed to this.

          “This user has been verified to be at least [Age]. Unique Token ID: 23456” Hell No. When the government eventually wants to deanonymize someone, they could ask the website: “What was the token ID that was used to verify the user?” then if the website provides it, now the government can just check the database to see who the token belongs to. And this could also lead to the government mandating the unique token id to be stored.

          • @BMTea@lemmy.world
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            33 hours ago

            Why not just look up how it actually works in the real world instead of hypotheticals

      • @lemba@discuss.tchncs.de
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        48 hours ago

        This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry to implement and enforce rules against hate speech, grooming, fake news, etc. They surely cannot verify the age of a human without any official ID made in the real world. This leads to other problems but that’s not the concern of the government! Social Media wants it’s users, not the government.

        • Dr. Moose
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          28 hours ago

          This ban is a wake up call to Tech Industry

          what? Why would tech industry care? If anything it’ll have the reverse effect and dimiss tech role in brain rott because “see, kids are not on it! It’s all good here”

    • @daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 hours ago

      In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.

      The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.

      Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.

      So the bussiness won’t have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.

  • katy ✨
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    1211 hours ago

    performative nonsense which does nothing for kids or their mental health and harms queer kids who lose one of the first places they can find community.

    • @TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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      11 hours ago

      Then it seems there is something other to fix in society than making sure facebook knows anything about that kid.

      The Zuckerbergers of the world aren’t the ones to trust with that.

  • JoYo
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    7016 hours ago

    Now ban parents posting pictures of their children under 16.

    I DGAF about your kids.

    • @remon@ani.social
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      I DGAF about your kids.

      Preach!

      One of the craziest wtf moment of my life resulted from an oversharing parent.

      At a hot summer day a few years back someone posted a picture of them barbequing in their backyard to our company’s “off topic” teams chat. Nothing unusual. I was over at a friends place so I send back a picture of us sitting in lawnchairs having a beer. In comes the third colleague, first time father with a roughly 1.5 year old at the time. So he posts a picture of his kid running around in his backyard. Completly naked, full frontanl nudity.

      It took me a minute to recollect and I messaged him to please take down the picture. I know he didn’t mean any harm and was just sharing his hot-summer-weekend expirence … and he did realise his blunder and took it down. But wtf mate?

      After that I immediately googled how to clear my teams’ app image cache …

    • @Eezyville@sh.itjust.works
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      812 hours ago

      Yeah I agree with you on this. It’ll protect them from the being de-clothed using AI as well. I understand wanting to share moments with your family because kids grow up fast but sharing it with these companies as an intermediary is not a good idea. Sadly I don’t have a solution for them aside from setting up a decentralized social network like Pixelfed or Frendica but that requires skill and patience.

      • Madis
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        48 hours ago

        Frankly, decentralized networks make it even harder to take content down.

        • @Eezyville@sh.itjust.works
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          2 hours ago

          Wouldn’t it be easier to take content down if the app was not federated? I don’t know for sure but couldn’t you have a completely private instance only for the people you know?

      • @baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
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        02 hours ago

        The difference being you can’t stop a federated protocol. I was being cheeky, but banning or at least regulating algorithm-based social media would do nothing but good for society. User engagement and user safety are directly at odds in a for-profit model.

    • @Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      711 hours ago

      People should be allowed to do as they please. I think, however, people should be presented with all the potential risks in very clear language if they’re going to, in the same way a pack of cigarettes has a warning, access to social media should present similar disclaimers.

  • @rcbrk@lemmy.ml
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    16 hours ago

    The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.

    There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.

    It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.

    From 63C (1) of the legislation:

    For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:

    • a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
      • i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
      • ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
      • iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
      • iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
    • b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).

    Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.

    • Dragon Rider (drag)
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      814 hours ago

      It’s a good thing we wiped out covid and will never need students to use Zoom again!

      Oh, wait

      • @Grimy@lemmy.world
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        2417 hours ago

        I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.

        • @General_Effort@lemmy.world
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          814 hours ago

          Facebook/Meta has developed software to estimate the age from a video.

          I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.

          Comes with the territory. The point is to control who has access to what information so that they don’t get wrong ideas.

          • @EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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            12 hours ago

            Trusting your face to Facebook is just as terrifying, thanks.

            (Plus I have concerns as someone who still looks teenage in her 20s)

          • Dr. Moose
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            38 hours ago

            if you think AI software will be able to differentiate between a 15 year old and 16 year old then I have this cool bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.

            This is delusional to the point where it feels like we’re literally devolving.

        • @JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world
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          111 hours ago

          I don’t see many options between asking for a birthdate and asking for ID for this problem. I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.

          The senate inquiry outlined the two likely solutions :

          1. Uploading ID to the website.

          2. 3D face scanning. This will include continual monitoring so if another person comes into view they will have to face scan in. Remember, its prohibited for chidren to even watch prohibited content with their parents.

          • @copd@lemmy.world
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            110 hours ago

            How can it possibly be legal to 3D face scan a child, especially if it needs to be authenticated by a remote server somewhere.

            I can only ever see option 1 working

        • @Wooki@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          A large part of this will help maintain liability for harm to young people. How ages is verified is irrelevant

        • @Clanket@lemmy.world
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          014 hours ago

          Problematic for who, the tech companies? They’re practically printing money. Let them spend it on actual solutions to issues that are causing problems for the World.

          • @Grimy@lemmy.world
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            614 hours ago

            It forces them to implement solutions that make having anonymous accounts impossible.

          • Dragon Rider (drag)
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            114 hours ago

            Problematic for the children who are having their rights taken away. This change bans children from connecting with their friends in other countries, other states, and even other cities.

            Even something as simple as hopping in a voice call with your squad to play Deep Rock Galactic is now illegal for 15 year olds. That’s ridiculous. The fact that they can break the law is great, but they shouldn’t have to break the law in order to do something so harmless.

            What about using Zoom to speak to a doctor or therapist? What about contacting queer support resources through social media? What about using a text based suicide hotline? According to the law, that’s social media.

  • Queen HawlSera
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    9 hours ago

    Not a bad idea all things considered

    Edit: Save for the “Showing your ID” part, anonymity is healthy for the net and far too rare these days