Australia plans a minimum age limit for social media use
Australia plans a minimum age limit for social media use
Australia intends to set a minimum age limit for children to use social media, citing concerns about mental and physical health. The plan has sparked backlash from digital rights advocates who warn the measure could drive dangerous online activity underground.
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I can appreciate the argument that's being made to counter this. That enacting such rulings would drive the affected children to lesser known pockets of the internet. However I think that's a red herring by the industry, since that always happens anyway.
A new platform pops up and people go try it. It's only a matter of time before there's a new Tiktok in town. They will spin up and die off faster than legislation can keep up. Seems to me the industry wants to keep the children for the data, and the revenue that comes with it.
Something does need to be done though. Our minds are becoming mushy tomatoes and social media is partly to blame. A better solution might be education of course, but I'm not sure what that would look like, or if it would be effective unless integrated into curriculums quite early on.
This one is insidious. Pretty much everyone agrees that social media is addictive and repetitive exposure at a young age has a startling negative effect on mental health.
The downsides of this come mostly from the infrastructure that will be used to control access. If there suddenly exists a collective database that contains age and identity information for every citizen that is accessible online in some capacity to verify ID, that's a really juicy target for online criminals and a huge blow to online privacy.
The effects of the recent SSN hack are still to be seen, but that was a release of identification information for up to 2.9 billion people. It's insane that people aren't making a bigger deal of that.
I was thinking the same.
If the age verification responsibility lies with the companies, it would mean each one spends as little as possible and we end up with a dozen poorly implemented databases, all ripe for a breach. If the government handles it, that's better I suppose because one system could be made more robust, but that's a big expense.
I suppose the companies that would need it could be taxed to cover the costs of this system, but you know how companies love being taxed. I'm sure smarter people than me are working on it though.
Pretty sure it’d be government, next to the single patient digital record. Put a nice big bow on it in a government data centre we can fund short term with all the savings from aged care and disability supports 💪🏻