The social media ban for younger kids in Australia is not a good thing. By requiring anyone who wants to access social platforms to provide government ID, you’re effectively eliminating online anonymity.
Sure, the justification today might be to “protect the kids”. But you’re slowly building the infrastructure of a surveillance state. All it’ll take is for an authoritarian party to win the next election and your privacy and freedom of expression is over.
The only way to protect children and protect our privacy is if the age verification software is publicly auditable and uses zero-knowledge proofs for age attestation. The website you’re accessing must never see anything about you aside from “This user is 16+.” And the age verification platform must never be able to keep a log of which websites you’ve accessed.
But that’s just a compromise. If I had the option to choose, I’d rather there be absolutely no age verification, ever.
EDIT: Fixed grammar.
Think of how many kids we could protect if we just locked up the entire adult population. Don’t you care about children?
This should really be done at the home network level, anything else is similar to someone coming into my own home and telling me how to raise my kids.
Routers have had parental controls for years, all it takes is designating a separate network for kids devices with a whitelist of approved websites.
Hell the government can even curate a list of approved websites for each age group and provide this list accessible in all routers.
Schools could even use these same curated whitelists to only make certain websites avaliable within a school.
Anything else is a governments and corporations overreach and borderline privacy invasive.
That’s pretty sensible. However, most people are not sensible.
Also, most people are only semi-literate. Even more people are technologically illiterate. Most people don’t know what a router is or how to configure it, and they don’t want to. It’s not just ignorance that’s a problem, it’s also the malign refusal to learn, or refusal to believe that one can learn.
it’s the magic box that the internet company gives you.
most people dont’ even change their network from factory/default settings. none of my relatives do, and when they come over to my place with my custom ssid and secure passwords, they tell me i’m a weirdo or asshole for my ssd not being comcast34343, and my password ‘password1234’.
Yeah it’s almost like they don’t care for children at all and the point is the invasion of privacy, control, and oppression…
back in my day we used to browse newgrounds on a school computer and grew up mostly normal lol
Age discrimination is garbage… But this is clearly just Reddit catering to its groomer base.
Here’s a thought: Did Aussie ban 16 and unders from Lemmy too?
I’m guessing we’re not a “major platform” as the rules define them.
Aussie Zone applied the law as required. They don’t agree with it either but yeah, not much option unfortunately.
As for other instances, I have no idea.
Theoretically they did. Lemmy not complying isn’t their problem. Lemmy does fit the definition they use.
According to the legal text, under Part 4A, Division 1, 63C, the requirements for a service to count as an age-restricted social media service are:
- the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‑users
- the service allows end‑users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‑users
- the service allows end‑users to post material on the service
Additionally, it’s specified that additional legislative rules can be defined by the minister. So there seems to be exceptions for certain types of services added here:
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to communicate by means of messaging, email, voice calling or video calling
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to play online games with other end‑users
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to share information (such as reviews, technical support or advice) about products or services
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to engage in professional networking or professional development
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the education of end‑users
- services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the health of end‑users
- services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between educational institutions and students or students’ families
- services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between providers of health care and people using those providers’ services
I don’t see an exclusion for small platforms or requirement for the platform to be major. So Lemmy definitely is affected by this too. Australia just can’t enforce it outside their country, so they can only go after Lemmy admins operating out of Australia. And they probably won’t unless someone reports the instance.
This shit is fucking weird “your honor they won’t let young and impressionable children sign up for our website.”
It is weird considering they are well aware that reddit has pedophiles actively preying on minors in their “ teen forms”. They rather keep anonymity, have lot traffic than to protect vulnerable people.
The weird part is the government are trying to get the children to stay away, rather than track down the pedophiles.
