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The problem with AU's U16 ban is that it's going to end up being a de facto real ID requirement for any Australian to communicate online. And also, how many of

The problem with AU's U16 ban is that it's going to end up being a de facto real ID requirement for any Australian to communicate online. And also, how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things? It would have been much, much better to regulate out the worst features of social media platforms for everyone than to pass a Bill that nobody knows how to implement, with a timeline of "well, you've got a year to figure it out".

OhioMan2943 2y ago
I'm hoping it's a government or licensed third party provided anonymous token login system, or an email with a protected top level domain like anonymous@citizenverification.au or something. De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't, but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  lol… you must be new here. When has ANY digital initiative gone right the first time from any Australian government. The last time they tried censorship (aka Stephen Conroy) it was thwarted by a 15 year old and abandoned. Let’s not even talk about their current piracy website ban where all you need to do is point DNS to someone non-Australian.
  - OhioMan2943 2y ago
    I'm pretty aware of how inept our government is at these policies, and their surveillance state tendencies (eg undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station). But at this point i think a malicious australian government is less of a threat to the public and our way of life and emotional prosperity than social media.
    - 0xy 2y ago
      The Australian Government has been hacked repeatedly, including the time Centrelink was hacked and they didn't even know they had been infiltrated (and attempted to cover it up). Not to mention their KYC regulations led to the Optus disaster, by forcing telecoms to store PII longer than necessary. Your position is that everyone in Australia should have their PII exposed because parental responsibility belongs with the state, as parents shouldn't be trusted to parent. It is an absolute CERTAINTY that the ID mandate will be mismanaged and be a security catastrophe. Don't forget Australian Parliament House was hacked as well. But this time it'll be different, right? Your position is especially egregious because it is a global ID mandate (and it'll be totally ineffective as a 10 year old can figure out a VPN).
      - OhioMan2943 2y ago
        My point is that social media is an active threat to society that is doing vast magnitudes of harm right now, where as authoritarian creep is also a great threat, but it isn't currently eroding our self of self and the sanctity of the individual, and deliberately de-training us to be reactionary animals with no regard for emotional intimacy or others, and nosediving our quality of public discourse. I'm worried of a world where people raised on social media their entire lives that teaches them to think a certain way win their careers through what are increasingly popularity contests in the 21stc, run our institutions and have their hand on our metaphorical red buttons. I don't think our society will have the discipline or the patience or maturity to stay out of unnecessary conflicts or make decisions that are in our long term interests if we keep social media as a formative part of peoples youth. ID's can be reissued like we saw with optus and while there's a lot of pain and misfortune from insecurity of assets etc we can reverse that, mostly. You can't reverse the childhood of an entire guinea pig generation once you find out that social media mentally broke them. Obviously, assets and security aren't a concern at my age so my perspective might be a little different. If you have anything about a global ID mandate i'd be interested, because it definitely hasn't been publicised in the media, though that doesn't always count for much. I have a lot of conflicting views on this, but I think overall we are better off addressing the threat from social media right now. You might view the current generation of younger people with the notion of at least a warm childhood like your own, and regular life milestones and rite of passages behind whatever struggle they're currently facing as slightly older people. That's increasingly not the case.
- shakna 2y ago
  They have multiple times deployed not just insecure versions, but insecure protocols, for the system now known as myID. And when people have reported it as insecure - they did their best to ruin the person's life. Getting them fired, blacklisted, and worse. In no possible future, do I foresee our government managing this as a "good thing".
- rdm_blackhole 2y ago
  > De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't Ah, yes, I too trust government to keep their words. Pinky promises and all that. > but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media This is your opinion. You use of "reactionary" in this context implies that whatever views are being shared, you are against them. Instead of winning over people, you prefer the easy solution which is to silence them. That is not very democratic of you. Finally if you think that the "division" that most western societies are experiencing currently is only due to social media, then you haven't bothered researching theses topics. These problems that are coming to light now have been a long time in the making. In reality decades, but before the governing powers could simply pretend that they did not exist whereas now, it is plain sight. Silencing opposing voices is not moral and it is delusional to think that this will fix the broken state of western democracies just like sweeping the dust under the carpet doesn't mean that your apartment is clean.
intended 2y ago
The success rates for MOOCs is usually lower than 5%. MOOCs were the holy grail - free, Quality, any time, education. And it still had single digit pass rates. ———- The people who are self motivated to learn, are probably people who move entire fields forward. They are likely very happy while learning. It’s an important part of human survival and existence. We can and should optimize for it. We are going to waste energy, if we argue that we should optimize for possibly 5% of the population. Disregarding what 95% want, is a losing battle.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think the GP was talking about MOOCs, but self-directed, unstructured learning. My teenage years on the internet before MOOCs were a thing, and I learned plenty.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    While there's a lot of good learning material on the web, MOOC and other, I'm not sure it's an improvement over the alternatives — my mostly-pre-internet teenage years had me learn a lot from stuff I got from the library. And sure, even just Wikipedia alone is bigger than most libraries, but as both are too large for one person, I'm just not convinced.
  - intended 2y ago
    > … how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things MOOCs represent a cohort of self identified, motivated students, with highly flexible and quality learning material. Completion rates act as a proxy, to estimate how many people will actually avail of the freedoms they have to learn.
- roenxi 2y ago
  5% is huge, that is 1 person in 20. 5% of the population having a bachelor's degree was enough to run an advanced society back in the 50s. For a free and easily available good that is quite a significant rate.
mupuff1234 2y ago
You're acting as if they're banning the Internet for U16, they're not, it's just social media (and not even YouTube, and probably not something like reddit either, at least for viewing). How many things did you actually learn from Facebook? I'm guessing not a lot. The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce.
- endgame 2y ago
  > The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce. I invite you to read the Bill^WAct and look at how it defines an "age-restricted social media platform".
  - mupuff1234 2y ago
    Not thrilled by the definition, but still think a more general ban is better than trying to ban specific features, but I would probably just ban account creation for U16 - seems like the "cleanest" solution. I think it will also bring major positive side effects to the web - social media sites will be forced to open up their walled gardens and smaller sites might thrive again.
andrepd 2y ago
Internet != social media. The former is likely a net good, the latter is definitely a net negative.
pmontra 2y ago
> how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things A huge majority, but it's not necessary as demonstrated by the ones like me that learned things as a teenager without "online" being a thing yet. Well, there were BBSes for the ones that had access to them, but they were pretty niche. We had books and monthly magazines. It was enough to bootstrap the 90s and people before us had even less and nevertheless they bootstrapped us. The real concern is the differential between the have and the have nots. Probably lacking TikTok will have an almost zero effect because what's there will be replaced by the same things on a different platform. If a country should ever go offline and revert to books, which are out of date at the date of printing and more so every day after then, that would be a problem.
- guappa 2y ago
  I learnt english on IRC. Sure most of the girls I met there weren't real girls. But I did meet one of my gfs on IRC (and she was a real girl).

OhioMan2943 2y ago

I'm hoping it's a government or licensed third party provided anonymous token login system, or an email with a protected top level domain like anonymous@citizenverification.au or something. De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't, but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media

alfiedotwtf 2y ago
lol… you must be new here. When has ANY digital initiative gone right the first time from any Australian government. The last time they tried censorship (aka Stephen Conroy) it was thwarted by a 15 year old and abandoned. Let’s not even talk about their current piracy website ban where all you need to do is point DNS to someone non-Australian.
- OhioMan2943 2y ago
  I'm pretty aware of how inept our government is at these policies, and their surveillance state tendencies (eg undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station). But at this point i think a malicious australian government is less of a threat to the public and our way of life and emotional prosperity than social media.
  - 0xy 2y ago
    The Australian Government has been hacked repeatedly, including the time Centrelink was hacked and they didn't even know they had been infiltrated (and attempted to cover it up). Not to mention their KYC regulations led to the Optus disaster, by forcing telecoms to store PII longer than necessary. Your position is that everyone in Australia should have their PII exposed because parental responsibility belongs with the state, as parents shouldn't be trusted to parent. It is an absolute CERTAINTY that the ID mandate will be mismanaged and be a security catastrophe. Don't forget Australian Parliament House was hacked as well. But this time it'll be different, right? Your position is especially egregious because it is a global ID mandate (and it'll be totally ineffective as a 10 year old can figure out a VPN).
    - OhioMan2943 2y ago
      My point is that social media is an active threat to society that is doing vast magnitudes of harm right now, where as authoritarian creep is also a great threat, but it isn't currently eroding our self of self and the sanctity of the individual, and deliberately de-training us to be reactionary animals with no regard for emotional intimacy or others, and nosediving our quality of public discourse. I'm worried of a world where people raised on social media their entire lives that teaches them to think a certain way win their careers through what are increasingly popularity contests in the 21stc, run our institutions and have their hand on our metaphorical red buttons. I don't think our society will have the discipline or the patience or maturity to stay out of unnecessary conflicts or make decisions that are in our long term interests if we keep social media as a formative part of peoples youth. ID's can be reissued like we saw with optus and while there's a lot of pain and misfortune from insecurity of assets etc we can reverse that, mostly. You can't reverse the childhood of an entire guinea pig generation once you find out that social media mentally broke them. Obviously, assets and security aren't a concern at my age so my perspective might be a little different. If you have anything about a global ID mandate i'd be interested, because it definitely hasn't been publicised in the media, though that doesn't always count for much. I have a lot of conflicting views on this, but I think overall we are better off addressing the threat from social media right now. You might view the current generation of younger people with the notion of at least a warm childhood like your own, and regular life milestones and rite of passages behind whatever struggle they're currently facing as slightly older people. That's increasingly not the case.
shakna 2y ago
They have multiple times deployed not just insecure versions, but insecure protocols, for the system now known as myID. And when people have reported it as insecure - they did their best to ruin the person's life. Getting them fired, blacklisted, and worse. In no possible future, do I foresee our government managing this as a "good thing".
rdm_blackhole 2y ago
> De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't Ah, yes, I too trust government to keep their words. Pinky promises and all that. > but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media This is your opinion. You use of "reactionary" in this context implies that whatever views are being shared, you are against them. Instead of winning over people, you prefer the easy solution which is to silence them. That is not very democratic of you. Finally if you think that the "division" that most western societies are experiencing currently is only due to social media, then you haven't bothered researching theses topics. These problems that are coming to light now have been a long time in the making. In reality decades, but before the governing powers could simply pretend that they did not exist whereas now, it is plain sight. Silencing opposing voices is not moral and it is delusional to think that this will fix the broken state of western democracies just like sweeping the dust under the carpet doesn't mean that your apartment is clean.

intended 2y ago

The success rates for MOOCs is usually lower than 5%. MOOCs were the holy grail - free, Quality, any time, education. And it still had single digit pass rates. ———- The people who are self motivated to learn, are probably people who move entire fields forward. They are likely very happy while learning. It’s an important part of human survival and existence. We can and should optimize for it. We are going to waste energy, if we argue that we should optimize for possibly 5% of the population. Disregarding what 95% want, is a losing battle.

kelnos 2y ago
I don't think the GP was talking about MOOCs, but self-directed, unstructured learning. My teenage years on the internet before MOOCs were a thing, and I learned plenty.
- ben_w 2y ago
  While there's a lot of good learning material on the web, MOOC and other, I'm not sure it's an improvement over the alternatives — my mostly-pre-internet teenage years had me learn a lot from stuff I got from the library. And sure, even just Wikipedia alone is bigger than most libraries, but as both are too large for one person, I'm just not convinced.
- intended 2y ago
  > … how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things MOOCs represent a cohort of self identified, motivated students, with highly flexible and quality learning material. Completion rates act as a proxy, to estimate how many people will actually avail of the freedoms they have to learn.
roenxi 2y ago
5% is huge, that is 1 person in 20. 5% of the population having a bachelor's degree was enough to run an advanced society back in the 50s. For a free and easily available good that is quite a significant rate.

mupuff1234 2y ago

You're acting as if they're banning the Internet for U16, they're not, it's just social media (and not even YouTube, and probably not something like reddit either, at least for viewing). How many things did you actually learn from Facebook? I'm guessing not a lot. The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce.

endgame 2y ago
> The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce. I invite you to read the Bill^WAct and look at how it defines an "age-restricted social media platform".
- mupuff1234 2y ago
  Not thrilled by the definition, but still think a more general ban is better than trying to ban specific features, but I would probably just ban account creation for U16 - seems like the "cleanest" solution. I think it will also bring major positive side effects to the web - social media sites will be forced to open up their walled gardens and smaller sites might thrive again.

andrepd 2y ago

Internet != social media. The former is likely a net good, the latter is definitely a net negative.

pmontra 2y ago

> how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things A huge majority, but it's not necessary as demonstrated by the ones like me that learned things as a teenager without "online" being a thing yet. Well, there were BBSes for the ones that had access to them, but they were pretty niche. We had books and monthly magazines. It was enough to bootstrap the 90s and people before us had even less and nevertheless they bootstrapped us. The real concern is the differential between the have and the have nots. Probably lacking TikTok will have an almost zero effect because what's there will be replaced by the same things on a different platform. If a country should ever go offline and revert to books, which are out of date at the date of printing and more so every day after then, that would be a problem.

guappa 2y ago
I learnt english on IRC. Sure most of the girls I met there weren't real girls. But I did meet one of my gfs on IRC (and she was a real girl).