Now do 16+
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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In case you forgot, Lemmy is social media
Old people can use Tor
antisocial media
Let's ban centralized for profit social media.
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(13 replies)
I’d prefer 17+. I think it would be fun to have only 1 year on social media.
Right as they reach peak awkward jagoff.
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(3 replies)
Based on what I've seen over the last few years, it's the over-16s that should probably be banned from social media.
Problem: Higher childhood depression rates linked to social media usage, social media caused disruption in education (like usage in schools), privacy violation of minors, etc.
An enforceable, common sense solution: Very strict privacy protection laws, that would end up protecting everybody, including minors. Better, kid friendly urban infrastructure like dedicated bike paths protected from car traffic, better pedestrian areas, parks and so on. Kids will get outside their house if there is a kid friendly outside. A greener, more human friendly outside where you can socialize with other humans would always be preferred over doom scrolling online. For the disruption in education issue, it is very education system dependent.
What solution these people came up with: Make it illegal for individuals under the age of 16 to create social media accounts. How do they enforce this? No idea. Does this solve any of the above problems? No. Is this performative? Yes.
Speaking from personal experience, social media was one of the most liberating tools for me as a kid. I lived in a shitty, conservative country and was gay. Social media told me that I wasn't disgusting. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, so I thankfully didn't really experience being contacted by groomers and so on. However, many of my friends who posted their images and stuff almost always got pedos in their DMs, so that's a very real issue.
I could ask my silly little questions related to astrophysics on Reddit and get really good answers. Noone around me irl was ever interested/able to talk about stuff like this. I could explore different political ideologies, get into related servers on Discord and learn more about this. None of this was possible without social media.
Banning social media outright is such a boomer move lol. Doing so isn't going to solve any real problems associated with childhood social media usage. It's just going to give the jackass parents complaining about this a false sense of security, when the kids still end up suffering.
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(4 replies)
What happens if an Australian kid starts running their own Pixelfed or Lemmy site?
My instance is in Australia, and the new laws affect social media like Lemmy. The hard part is that there apparently isn't much guidance on how to follow the law. Do you have to use ID? Is a location-specific popup making you state that you're 16+ enough? Nobody knows.
If you are the sole user on your own ActivityPub site running on your own server, can it even be called a social media site?
I think a mastodon instance started asking aussies to send a pic of them with a bottle of vodka or a pack of smokes.
We are yet to see. My guess is they charge the kid for providing social media to an underaged user (themselves). Will be very interesting to watch ngl. Also idk how they gonna implement it cos i sure as shit aint handing over my id to the social media companies.
I'm not sure that a self hosted ActivityPub site with a single user could reasonably be called a social media site. I wonder how the law defines a social media site.
Absolute stupidity and a waste of taxpayers' money spending so much time on this nonsense.
These incompetent morons are pretty much guaranteeing that they will lose the next election. In the middle of a housing and inflation crisis this is what these fuckheads decided was important.
I loathe the opposition, but it's hard to defend the sheer incompetence the Labor Party has displayed their entire term.
With great sadness I have to agree with you.
It's just one shit show after another. Voice to parliament, live export ban, and now this. Meanwhile Australians are being ground into the dust by price gouging corporations and interest rate hikes.
That said I am in support of this legislation, but it's just not enough.
The Australian government is to cowardly to regulate social media to be healthy for all ages.
Yes.