https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-soci... (https://archive.ph/Ba2JR)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/world/asia/australia-soci... (https://archive.ph/Ba2JR)
....
But then also global measures?
> Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
As kids find alternative platforms, perhaps they will be vendor locked to them instead of the Meta empire.
How many alternative platforms are there really going to be that can afford to develope and operate the legally-mandated age-detection ML-models?
Especially after the bureaucrats see that the law isn't working and start looking for scapegoats without massive lawyer teams to make an example of
I'm very interested to see how their socializing evolves in response to such a shock. Do the social behaviors of pre-internet times re-emerge? "Third spaces" reappear overnight? We shall see!
They passed legislation, its not clear at all that they succeeded.
This is misinformation. The legislation does not specify a single particular implementation for age-based verification and there's absolutely no single "age verification service" that platforms are legislated to use. Instead they're required to verify users' ages based on several recommended methods, including age inference. https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2025/12/03/what-you-need-t...
Further, the Communications Minister herself regarding whether she's concerned about people bypassing authentication-based age verification checks: "If you’re an adult - you probably won’t need to do anything extra to prove your age, because like I said before, these platforms have plenty of data to infer your age." https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/speech/address-...
> Companies have told Canberra they will deploy a mix of age inference - estimating a user's age from their behaviour - and age estimation based on a selfie, alongside checks that could include uploaded identification documents.
It is still more ok then most of what any other todays tech provides. No matter how much geeks on HN hate it.
Whenever someone brings up this stuff, the politicians take the tone that "we won't let anyone get in the way of protecting children", and this is in response to people who in good faith think this can be done better. Media oligopolist love it because it regulates big tech, so they've been happy to platform supporters of the policy as well.
Third spaces won't reappear because the planning system in most cities shuts anything down the moment someone files a compliant. They get regulated out of existence the moment police express concern young people might gather there. The planning system (which in NSW/Sydney is the worse) has only gotten worse since the 80s after the green bans. It was largely put in place to allow for community say in how cities are shape, which sounds nice but it's mostly old people with free time participating who don't value 3rd spaces, even if they might end up liking them. They just want to keep things the same and avoid parking from getting overly complicated (and this is a stone throw away from train stations and the CBD).
Third places can be fixed by reforming planning which is slowly gaining momentum via YIMBY movements, but this social media ban is just not a serious contribution to changing that. If anything Social media phenomenon like Pokemon GO contributed more to these third places lighting up.
Governance in Australia is very paternalistic, it's a more high functioning version of the UK in that sense. I think it might be in part due to the voting system being a winner takes all single seat electorate preferential voting system which has a median voter bias for least controversial candidates.
As a kid I always felt being in Australia you missed out on a lot of things people got to do in America, that has slowly changed as media and technology has become less bound by borders but looks like that being undone.
The Seventies are BACK!
This article, also crucially, does not relate to America
My assumption is a lot of those people who proudly proclaim that lifestyle were raised in (segregated) suburbs and have rose tinted glasses. But I’m also making assumptions like them, so again I’m curious to find info on this.
And as far as the internet: I am part of the younger generation and I welcome this change. I see how it affects my generation every day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
This is more about criminalising poverty than anything about parenting. I live in a rich part of Wyoming. The kids are fucking feral.
I hope that's what will happen. That this is only really a problem for FANG, for the tech industry and doesn't actually prevent social media.
at some point, you just have to say that parents need to start parenting again. i'm a parent, and i can tell you it's not that bad.
How are you going to prevent kids and teens from joining everything that's bad for them online??? I think regulation is just band-aid.
the ideal solution would be to have parents say "No screens" until a certain age, unless it's supervised, or on a managed device that just lets them get their homework done.
This is absolutely true. However, when you do away with the kind of regulation a healthy society needs, you can't then blame everything on parents.
Regulation has been presented as a bad thing for a long time now, even though it's what cleaned up our rivers that used to catch on fire. Just like taxes have been presented as a bad thing, even though they paid for all the public infrastructure we use every day.
As a society, we've lost a vision for the middle ground. It sure feels like we need to find it again, and the sooner the better.
in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.
is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).
If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.
The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.
If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.
'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis
>the days leading to the ban, some teenagers said that they were prompted to verify their ages using a facial analysis feature, but that it gave inaccurate estimates. The law also states that companies cannot ask users to provide government-issued identification as the only way to prove their age because of privacy concerns.
You make them bleed money when you find they are in violation. They either figure it out or they go under as a company. There isn't a natural law saying companies have a right to exist.
They are everywhere, they can also be mobile and placed almost anywhere. These camera are mounted high so they can view down in through the windscreen.
They automatically issue a $1,251 for not wearing one to the license holder.
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-australian-state...
The company can't be found liable if they have put in reasonable age verification technology, particularly if the user lied about their age or found a way to circumvent the restrictions.
They clearly aren't going by just what the user says as the companies have implemented age verification tools that try to do that detection.
the law of unintended consequences looms large.
Kids not being able to do particular things until they're of age? That's much of an egregious violation of their civil rights.
I dunno if that'd fly in Australian courts though.
Interesting to frame this as a bad thing. As a parent, I would take that as a feature, not a bug. To me this is very suspicious why there seem to be so many people here, who I am assuming are mostly adults, advocating so strongly strongly for <16 olds told be on social media, as if it was something they need.
An under 16 year old not seeing the social media version of war crimes is a good thing. And that's the upper limit of the age range of this ban.
In football we call this an own goal
Pretty well executed - I'm impressed. Given how seamlessly this occurred, it will undoubtedly be rolled out in Europe next year, as the EU has expressed an interest in doing so, but was waiting to see how the implementation went in Australia.
She says only one of her friends has been challenged by a platform so far, and that was by Snapchat. That friend got another 14 year old friend to pass the facial age detection check on her behalf.
Are you kidding me? So the answer is let's let some random vendors used by said corporation scan her face? This feels like using DNA sequencing to confirm you're tall enough to ride the rollercoaster.
They’re trying to guess the age of someone who could pass for 11 or for 22, and who with careful use of makeup could push that figure in either direction.
It seems like a handful of sites havent even switched over. Most are just estimating. Theres no clear indication that the execution has been anything but botched, unless convenience for older people was the only metric.
If you try searching them in Facebook, you get a message telling you your search has been stopped and you should seek help you sicko, searching for... "Age abuse material" maybe? I don't know why it freaks out on those three letters, but it does.
This was in the news a year ago, and they still haven't changed it. Go and try if you want.
So allow me to doubt that the implementation is going to be smooth. For you maybe. If you instead end up in some algorithmic Kafka nightmare, don't count on your social media friends to notice.
With snap and others, I would expect them to focus on reducing false negatives and give the benefit of the doubt to the kid who is under 16. Worst case, you say "Mea Culpa" and update your algorithm accordingly to any cases that you missed but the state has found.
Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.
Great, another Oprah's book club book that assures parents that there's just one easy trick to saving your children.
First of all, Australia has proven nothing, kids are stepping politely over this barrier without issue.
Second we are already hearing from disabled teens losing their only social lifeline.
Congratulations, you have isolated and disenfranchised a bunch of kids.
The whole ‘anxious generation’ isn’t because of social media, it’s because the new generations are hopeless and helpless (incl genz and millennials too), wherever you look in any domain, it’s bleak times waiting ahead for them, boomers fucked them up severely and now want to suppress them with laws and bills and control them because they know for a fact something will snap at this current rate.
Most kids don't really have such a choice when it comes to school or their family.
Also, dont buy the this is the slippery slope to more authoritarianism etc. as an argument against it because if they're going to go down that path they would anyway whether they did this or not frankly
Anyway, it might not work 100% of the time, hell maybe even <10% but any additional friction to knock this kind of social media from being so ubiquitous is a small victory in my eyes
Like do warnings on cigarettes work? I definitely saw a guy move cigs to older pack he had from china because he didn't like ugly warning picture on the new pack. Do mandatory id checks work? If I saw some kids get their hands on smokes does it mean "it doesn't work" and therefore there should be no limits on big tobacco?
is a start
The UK government wishes to police social media more heavily, and has been using internet porn and illegal immigration (two unrelated issues) to push through digital ID. The exact same mentality - controversy, panic, dubious solution...
In this case, we have a genuine issue and a dubious solution.
The answer: meet in person. Talk to people offline.
I remember when social media was sane 15+ years ago. The problem is the business model, not socializing. It's crazy to ban it when being a teen is the beginning of socializing!
The algorithms create the engagement, the engagement lures in the ads, not the other way around, at least that's what I think right now.
And in fairness, dosage is the difference between a painkiller an a heroin addiction.
So why are we surprised that when we put a TV in the kids' hands things got even worse? Meta testified on the stand recently that they're not a social media company anymore, they're now all about video. Tiktok is the new TV. Every app wants to Tiktokify. The money from TV, just pushing an endless stream of video to someone, is very good.
Same shit, new generation.
Well, there's at least a few reasons this is different than the current situation.
1) It's expensive to make a TV show, it's free to do a fortnite dance or eat a tide pod and post it to several websites. The amount of low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful content on TikTok or whatever is exponentially more than low-effort, low-quality, probably-harmful TV shows/ads.
2) The availability is on completely different scales. TVs are (basically) fixed in a specific place. Phones are, for most people, within arms reach 24/7.
3) What can be shown on TV is significantly more regulated in most parts of the world, and control mechanisms by governments are more robust (pull a broadcast license, etc.). It's harder to take a website (or TikTok, whatever) offline than it is to pull a harmful show/advert off of HGTV or whatever your favorite channel is.
4) TV is not specifically tailored to the viewer to produce the most amount of happy chemical.
Australians are very aware that it destroys people’s brains.
Then we got the one-two punch of social media apps on phones, and everywhere we saw these get adopted, we saw depression and anxiety increase en masse.
My own theory is that if you have to pick one thing it's the phone, because screen time/attention skyrockets when you get one of those, and they can have you freaking out about whatever clickbait they're feeding you pretty much 24/7. When I grew up there was just a computer in the den and when I wasn't in the den, whatever I'd viewed on it was out of sight, mostly out of mind.
Also, what's an 'ad' is an extreme spectrum nowadays with free stuff given out in exchange for a post, people trying to act like paid influencers to fake it until they make it, paid influencers, and listicle affiliate link slop.
But you can’t solve that issue with policy. It’s a cultural issue. People are not willing to pay for the content they consume (with money).
Not to mention you would collapse the US economy (I’m not sure if you’re US based, just speaking from my perspective), and likely others, if you applied a blanket ban on ad-supported media.
Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
Alright Australian lawmakers, you heard the man, chop chop!
Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?
-> Scenario
Want to use cash for lunch or parking? Sorry, no, you must be banked, and have an app.
Want to use a bank? You must use an app.
How do you get an app? You must have a phone and an ID.
Want to buy a phone? Whoops, conundrum encountered.
(And don't even think of wanting to get an ID.)
-> In summary
This further disenfranchises the extremely poor, and takes power and freedom away from everyone who isn't a billionaire.
Libertarianism really does hit a wall when it comes to kids, in so many ways, doesn't it?
https://www.wionews.com/trending/australian-teens-defy-under...
As we go down this road platforms will need to be banned for everyone. For example VK wasn't on the list and they won't implement age checks. They and many other sites will need to be banned until you are left with a white list of acceptance sites. Add in age verification on those sites for everyone.
Kids will learn how to overcome the ban. VPNs will become the standard.
This gives governments an excuse to ban VPNs in the name of 'thinking of the children'. That might be the point though.
> Users confirmed to be under 16 will have their accounts suspended under the new Australian minimum age law. While we disagree with the Government's assessment of Reddit as being within the scope of the law, we need to take steps to comply. This means anyone in Australia with a Reddit account confirmed to be under 16 will be blocked from accessing their account or creating a new one. Note that as an open platform, Reddit is still available to browse without an account.
“Confirmed to be under 16” sounds like they’re not trying very hard to identify them. But maybe I’m just spared any attempt at checking since my account is 12 years old.
I wonder if allowing browsing without an account is compliant with the letter or the spirit of the law—an account is not required for at least some forms of damage. But I’ve paid no attention to this law since I live in India now.
In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email?
I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
JSR_FDED•1d ago
Imagine a whole generation of teens with attention spans longer than 15 seconds…they might actually realize their incredible potential!
lm28469•6m ago