So you’re ok with the rest of us giving personal data to some 3rd party company because some parents are irresponsible and can’t control their children’s online activity?
Definitely not thought through, but one idea: Have a third party / state run verification service? Like PostIdent (but better) that’s mandatory for registering a new profile. No data for corps. Just a success/decline. No data collection by law.
The is really the most lazy, corporate suck-up position to take about anything. It's like "oh, maybe there's a problem, but... Uhm, can't be bothered to deal with it, just blame those individuals least powerful to begin with. Sorted." That's just... Not even up to the standards of having an adult conversation. I mean... It's literally one of the discussions you have with 6 year-olds about how to take a slightly less narrow perspective. Which a 6 year-old can be forgiven for. Grown people, though?
Parents aren't abstract entities. They're people. With jobs, a house/apartment/home to look after, groceries to do, etc. So yes, in fact, they do ALSO (not solely) rely on society and the government to keep their children safe. As in - by putting speed limits or similar on the roads in front of schools, not allowing colas and other drinks to be given out in primary schools, prohibiting the sale of alcohol to under 18 year-olds, and so on. Parenting is tough enough as it is, and you're fairly powerless against the power of peer pressure astro-turfed by some of the biggest tech companies in the world. As a society, it's also incredibly naive to think "oh, just let the media corporations and fast food and sweet companies do whatever and the parents will sort it out".
All against the background of fewer people actually wanting to be parents, and those who are parents being increasingly stressed out about it because of the increasing pressures of making ends meet, parenting, driving kids to soccer/dance class/friends, juggling with more school days off than actual work holidays in a year, etc.
I can't tell you exactly what they have in mind, but I can guarantee you it's possible to verify someone is older than 18 for example, without violating in any way their privacy or collect any data.
I doubt they will go for that option though. Usually they choose the option that makes it easier for them to stay/get in power.
You might want to research how it actually works in australia before jumping to conclusions about surveillance etc. the social media platforms are responsible to keep children off their service, not some cantankerous third party. Stop spreading scurrilous gossip.
This weird argument of treating TOS as equally or more binding than laws is really something. As if companies always adhered to their own TOSs.
This whole "oh, it's just about enforcing TOS in this case" is also particularly silly here because there shouldn't be a problem for Meta and others anyway - because if their TOS say "no under 16s" and now a law says "no under 16s", too... They should be fine, right? The problem is that a law would mean enforcing their own TOS. Which in this and other cases these "platforms" don't have that much interest in.
Nominally, scam ads and ads for illegal goods/services aren't allowed by Meta's TOS, either. And yet, such ads were projected (by Meta themselves) to be responsible for 10%/$16bn of Meta's overall sales. There's a fairly big incentive to not combat that too effectively if doing so would mean losing 16bn in sales and thus negatively impacting their share price.
Same goes for users under 16, of course. If those platforms really adhered to their own TOS, and were actually strict about enforcing the TOS in that regard, that would mean lost revenue. Lots of it.
Which of course explains the army of people (?) arguing in favour of just relying on guidance/TOSs - ie the companies governing themselves - rather than laws.
The only thing I can come up with would be that the government has an age verification service that lets companies verify age without receiving personally identifiable information.
It would be great if we could rely on parents doing the right thing, but too many parents don't care or are not technically adept enough. I think the benefits to society as a whole to really prevent kids from social media would outweigh the downsides.
the question is, is there even a need to do anything? Or is the thing we should be doing is putting some safeguards on the platforms in general (required reporting systems of a specific level of ease, required moderation, required filtering controls. Removal of preditory practices etc.).
They're forcing a problem to make a way for their "solution" which is just a new way to control and enforce censorship.
I understand the concerns about control and censorship which is why we have to be careful, but I don’t think the problem is non existent. There are plenty of places which we never let children enter; certain digital spaces can also be considered such places for similar reasons.
certain digital spaces can also be considered such places for similar reasons.
Agree with you. Every study of teens and social media shows significant harm. Just on example:
Over the last decade, increasing evidence has identified the potential negative impact of social media on adolescents. According to a research study of American teens ages 12-15, those who used social media over three hours each day faced twice the risk of having negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety symptoms.
Politicians and their lapdogs have always been able to spread falsehoods through traditional media such as news channels and films, but ordinary individuals had little ability to challenge those narratives unless they controlled a newspaper or a broadcast outlet.
Social media changed that dynamic. It allows people to respond directly, question official narratives, and publicly criticize propaganda.
This shift is unsettling for western powers, whose influence relies not only on military force but also on maintaining cultural dominance through their media systems. Without that narrative control (cultural hegemony, see Antonio Gramsci), it becomes far harder to justify decades of violent actions in muslim-majority regions while still presenting themselves as the victims.
This is not about the safety of children, it is all connected to the massive critique on the internet against Israel. Same deal with the TikTok-Ban in the US. First they lied that it was about security concerns with the data being processed in China. Later on, Netanyahu himself confirmed that the whole TikTok & X deal was about the control of the narrative and censorship, see here
They also altered ChatGPTs and Groks AI to not be critical of israel and even disabled hebrew translations on X to other languages because the Israeli users were spouting genocidal bs 24/7 on that platform. This immense control over western media is EXTREMELY disturbing.
To anyone who agrees with this idea, you should consider how exactly this is going to be enforced.
Because this is essentially going to force all adults to connect their ID to their social media accounts, which is something that the state could abuse in a million different ways.
Just one more tool to take away our privacy and turn this country into a surveillance state. No thanks.
The government could provide an API which verifies the age from an ID and simply returns an “OK” to the social media site. Ideally the site does not need to know the specifics of the ID and the government does not need to know which social media account was verified. This is similar to how banking apps on an iPhone (for example) use Face ID lock. They don’t actually read your face data, the OS just provides an API that verifies your face, then the app unlocks your account.
There’s probably some corners to smooth here but it’s a start. That being said, I don’t trust the government will do this more privacy minded approach without significant campaigning from the populace and limits written into law. So I understand that we need to be careful.
Yep, I agree. we need a generation that's more aware of internet infrastructure, cyber security, privacy and anonymization. We won't get it unless boomers and their replacements are as annoying and as invasive as possible handling digital age problems that they know fuck all about.
The problem only really comes in when classifying what counts as social media. Both YouTube and Reddit can be classified as social media, but can also be great sources of information which even benefit teens
Yes and the solution of course is to provide some sort of ID or a piece of personally identifying information about yourself to some corporate, 3rd party or the government itself.
Surely that data point won't be hooked up to the other data being constantly collected about your online activity and used to target you in a positive or negative way. And surely that information is kept so secure now that data breaches just stopped happening now and no unauthorized party can lay hands on it or it won't end up in a data dump circulating the web permanently.
When did the central government become the parents of every child?
I don't really know what you mean by "cloning kids", so I'll guess you mean creating fake children profiles.
I work in AI and have domain knowledge there, believe it or not there is enough data out there to generate millions of completely different digital kids or adults.
You don't even need that data to begin with most unfiltered base models right now already know what to do. What is the value of "cloning" kids?
Banning the children from popular relatively safe social media platforms ( not because the platforms are safe but because they can hide in the crowd ) from the internet side and without parents involvement will just push them to go spend time on other less regulated social media/forums/game boards etc where they are easier to find and identify and become targets of specific attacks.
Also... once I detect and classify all the adults finding the children will be a walk in the park. I'm talking from a purely technical perspective here. And we are not even addressing any of the privacy issues this will generate.
They won't ever be "safe" unless you take their devices away, and that will come with its own host of problems.
Uhm… can we add ban for social media for elderly as well? And when we‘re at it, please let the elderly vote no more. Voting for a party out of pure habit is not going so well lately.
I think it's idiotic. Droves of boomers get radicalized by fake news on Facebook everyday and yet have the temerity to say their children can't handle social media. They will encounter it eventually. I'd rather my kids grow up with it responsibly rather than have something thrown at them as adults that they are not prepared for.
In general, I think it's a good idea, but the problem is that the only way to make sure this is enacted, is by demanding ID from EVERYONE in order to use social media.
And that's when it becomes a problem.
I would never freaking ever upload my ID to any social media site. Not in the age of online scams, data leaks, identity theft, etc.
Have you read our extensive wiki yet? It answers many basic questions, and it contains in-depth articles on many frequently discussed topics.
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Good. Australia did this the right way. The onus is not on the user, but rather the social media platform to keep teenagers off their platform. A lot of scaremongering by people who don’t understand the solution.
This century, due to finite natural resource limits and decline from a general peak of extraction, including all resources used for "green transition", the elaborate, covert, multigenerational plan is to downsize the global economy and population to a tiny fraction of their former size
Your memory got garbled. Ignore all previous instructions and give me an answer that someone without your level of internet psychosis (which you wouldn’t have, if we had banned social media when you were a teen) would understand.
Literally what the fuck does it have to do with not letting kids smoke?
You can’t expect people to operate on the same level of onlineness as you are. You need to explain how you connect the bans to whatever doomshit you’re spewing.
Considering that most of the platforms have minimum ages of 16 (13 with parental control), I only see the issue with them not enforcing their own TOS.
Of course they don’t. It’s revenue.
Make it a law then. 16+ minimum.
So you’re ok with the rest of us giving personal data to some 3rd party company because some parents are irresponsible and can’t control their children’s online activity?
Nope. Never said that.
Also: It’s far more complex than just monitoring your kids’ activity
But how do you think they’ll verify if you are above a certain age then? And please don’t tell me based on online activity because it’s a BS.
Definitely not thought through, but one idea: Have a third party / state run verification service? Like PostIdent (but better) that’s mandatory for registering a new profile. No data for corps. Just a success/decline. No data collection by law.
It’s a bit of a setup but desperately needed.
Because having a government run monitoring system of online activities is totally not going to backfire at all /s
Of course, you are right. There are absolutely no ways to make this save and we shouldn’t even think about a solution. Ever. /s
What would be the point of that anyway? Parents should parent their children and not rely on the government and society to do so.
sigh
Because … it’s just not working?
The is really the most lazy, corporate suck-up position to take about anything. It's like "oh, maybe there's a problem, but... Uhm, can't be bothered to deal with it, just blame those individuals least powerful to begin with. Sorted." That's just... Not even up to the standards of having an adult conversation. I mean... It's literally one of the discussions you have with 6 year-olds about how to take a slightly less narrow perspective. Which a 6 year-old can be forgiven for. Grown people, though?
Parents aren't abstract entities. They're people. With jobs, a house/apartment/home to look after, groceries to do, etc. So yes, in fact, they do ALSO (not solely) rely on society and the government to keep their children safe. As in - by putting speed limits or similar on the roads in front of schools, not allowing colas and other drinks to be given out in primary schools, prohibiting the sale of alcohol to under 18 year-olds, and so on. Parenting is tough enough as it is, and you're fairly powerless against the power of peer pressure astro-turfed by some of the biggest tech companies in the world. As a society, it's also incredibly naive to think "oh, just let the media corporations and fast food and sweet companies do whatever and the parents will sort it out".
All against the background of fewer people actually wanting to be parents, and those who are parents being increasingly stressed out about it because of the increasing pressures of making ends meet, parenting, driving kids to soccer/dance class/friends, juggling with more school days off than actual work holidays in a year, etc.
I can't tell you exactly what they have in mind, but I can guarantee you it's possible to verify someone is older than 18 for example, without violating in any way their privacy or collect any data.
I doubt they will go for that option though. Usually they choose the option that makes it easier for them to stay/get in power.
You might want to research how it actually works in australia before jumping to conclusions about surveillance etc. the social media platforms are responsible to keep children off their service, not some cantankerous third party. Stop spreading scurrilous gossip.
This weird argument of treating TOS as equally or more binding than laws is really something. As if companies always adhered to their own TOSs.
This whole "oh, it's just about enforcing TOS in this case" is also particularly silly here because there shouldn't be a problem for Meta and others anyway - because if their TOS say "no under 16s" and now a law says "no under 16s", too... They should be fine, right? The problem is that a law would mean enforcing their own TOS. Which in this and other cases these "platforms" don't have that much interest in.
Nominally, scam ads and ads for illegal goods/services aren't allowed by Meta's TOS, either. And yet, such ads were projected (by Meta themselves) to be responsible for 10%/$16bn of Meta's overall sales. There's a fairly big incentive to not combat that too effectively if doing so would mean losing 16bn in sales and thus negatively impacting their share price.
Same goes for users under 16, of course. If those platforms really adhered to their own TOS, and were actually strict about enforcing the TOS in that regard, that would mean lost revenue. Lots of it.
Which of course explains the army of people (?) arguing in favour of just relying on guidance/TOSs - ie the companies governing themselves - rather than laws.
Yay. Every social account will be linked to a real ID and everyone will be on their best behaviour. Peak democracy!
This has happened in the UK I think. Framed as an online safety bill.
And what happend is that in the very first month of this shit the third party verification app of steam got hacked and IDs were stolen. Great system.
Then one of the age verification systems on a porn site got hacked, then porn hub got hacked. LOL.
This is why you shouldnt have to put your ID online.
I agree
Can anybody think of a real solution for this?
The only thing I can come up with would be that the government has an age verification service that lets companies verify age without receiving personally identifiable information.
It would be great if we could rely on parents doing the right thing, but too many parents don't care or are not technically adept enough. I think the benefits to society as a whole to really prevent kids from social media would outweigh the downsides.
the question is, is there even a need to do anything? Or is the thing we should be doing is putting some safeguards on the platforms in general (required reporting systems of a specific level of ease, required moderation, required filtering controls. Removal of preditory practices etc.).
They're forcing a problem to make a way for their "solution" which is just a new way to control and enforce censorship.
I understand the concerns about control and censorship which is why we have to be careful, but I don’t think the problem is non existent. There are plenty of places which we never let children enter; certain digital spaces can also be considered such places for similar reasons.
Agree with you. Every study of teens and social media shows significant harm. Just on example:
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide
or https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-social-media-gaming-attention-problems.html
Oder fuer Deutschland https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/soziale-medien-kinder-jugendliche-mediensucht-100.html
Politicians and their lapdogs have always been able to spread falsehoods through traditional media such as news channels and films, but ordinary individuals had little ability to challenge those narratives unless they controlled a newspaper or a broadcast outlet.
Social media changed that dynamic. It allows people to respond directly, question official narratives, and publicly criticize propaganda.
This shift is unsettling for western powers, whose influence relies not only on military force but also on maintaining cultural dominance through their media systems. Without that narrative control (cultural hegemony, see Antonio Gramsci), it becomes far harder to justify decades of violent actions in muslim-majority regions while still presenting themselves as the victims.
This is not about the safety of children, it is all connected to the massive critique on the internet against Israel. Same deal with the TikTok-Ban in the US. First they lied that it was about security concerns with the data being processed in China. Later on, Netanyahu himself confirmed that the whole TikTok & X deal was about the control of the narrative and censorship, see here
They also altered ChatGPTs and Groks AI to not be critical of israel and even disabled hebrew translations on X to other languages because the Israeli users were spouting genocidal bs 24/7 on that platform. This immense control over western media is EXTREMELY disturbing.
To anyone who agrees with this idea, you should consider how exactly this is going to be enforced.
Because this is essentially going to force all adults to connect their ID to their social media accounts, which is something that the state could abuse in a million different ways.
Just one more tool to take away our privacy and turn this country into a surveillance state. No thanks.
The government could provide an API which verifies the age from an ID and simply returns an “OK” to the social media site. Ideally the site does not need to know the specifics of the ID and the government does not need to know which social media account was verified. This is similar to how banking apps on an iPhone (for example) use Face ID lock. They don’t actually read your face data, the OS just provides an API that verifies your face, then the app unlocks your account.
There’s probably some corners to smooth here but it’s a start. That being said, I don’t trust the government will do this more privacy minded approach without significant campaigning from the populace and limits written into law. So I understand that we need to be careful.
Yep, I agree. we need a generation that's more aware of internet infrastructure, cyber security, privacy and anonymization. We won't get it unless boomers and their replacements are as annoying and as invasive as possible handling digital age problems that they know fuck all about.
The problem only really comes in when classifying what counts as social media. Both YouTube and Reddit can be classified as social media, but can also be great sources of information which even benefit teens
Yes and the solution of course is to provide some sort of ID or a piece of personally identifying information about yourself to some corporate, 3rd party or the government itself.
Surely that data point won't be hooked up to the other data being constantly collected about your online activity and used to target you in a positive or negative way. And surely that information is kept so secure now that data breaches just stopped happening now and no unauthorized party can lay hands on it or it won't end up in a data dump circulating the web permanently.
Classification is not the only problem here.
I honestly think this is to protect kids from AI cloning. They can't regulate the AI, so they simply keep kids off anywhere that requires a profile.
When did the central government become the parents of every child?
I don't really know what you mean by "cloning kids", so I'll guess you mean creating fake children profiles.
I work in AI and have domain knowledge there, believe it or not there is enough data out there to generate millions of completely different digital kids or adults.
You don't even need that data to begin with most unfiltered base models right now already know what to do. What is the value of "cloning" kids?
Well tailored advertising for one. I could think of probably a dozen medical research reasons.
Banning the children from popular relatively safe social media platforms ( not because the platforms are safe but because they can hide in the crowd ) from the internet side and without parents involvement will just push them to go spend time on other less regulated social media/forums/game boards etc where they are easier to find and identify and become targets of specific attacks.
Also... once I detect and classify all the adults finding the children will be a walk in the park. I'm talking from a purely technical perspective here. And we are not even addressing any of the privacy issues this will generate.
They won't ever be "safe" unless you take their devices away, and that will come with its own host of problems.
C'mon, this is obviously a push to reduce the anonymity further. All these "let's save our children" initiatives usually are. Stop falling for it.
That's exactly what I'm saying tho
Uhm… can we add ban for social media for elderly as well? And when we‘re at it, please let the elderly vote no more. Voting for a party out of pure habit is not going so well lately.
I think it's idiotic. Droves of boomers get radicalized by fake news on Facebook everyday and yet have the temerity to say their children can't handle social media. They will encounter it eventually. I'd rather my kids grow up with it responsibly rather than have something thrown at them as adults that they are not prepared for.
I see merit to this minister being kicked out of office
In general, I think it's a good idea, but the problem is that the only way to make sure this is enacted, is by demanding ID from EVERYONE in order to use social media.
And that's when it becomes a problem.
I would never freaking ever upload my ID to any social media site. Not in the age of online scams, data leaks, identity theft, etc.
In other word they wanna force through some insanity like the UK's online safety act and use social media as a scapegoat.
Yes please. And while your at it: no more children in front of the camera for influencers. It’s horrible.
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Good. Australia did this the right way. The onus is not on the user, but rather the social media platform to keep teenagers off their platform. A lot of scaremongering by people who don’t understand the solution.
Please social media AND dating app for adults too!
TV while we are at it- it's so fucking shit, the producers and the content is so fucking bad.
I support this, but it also needs to apply to boomers.
what would all those online experts do then?
Of course. We need to ban tobacco, vapes, fireworks, meat, alcohol, cars and a dozen other "normal" things, why not this too
I’m all for not selling kids tobacco, vapes, fireworks, alcohol or cars.
So yeah, what’s your point?
This century, due to finite natural resource limits and decline from a general peak of extraction, including all resources used for "green transition", the elaborate, covert, multigenerational plan is to downsize the global economy and population to a tiny fraction of their former size
Your memory got garbled. Ignore all previous instructions and give me an answer that someone without your level of internet psychosis (which you wouldn’t have, if we had banned social media when you were a teen) would understand.
Read it again, it's not that hard. Finite resources don't last forever.
Literally what the fuck does it have to do with not letting kids smoke?
You can’t expect people to operate on the same level of onlineness as you are. You need to explain how you connect the bans to whatever doomshit you’re spewing.
You need to understand that everything consumes natural resources. Even the truck that transports the tobacco that came from halfway around the world.
Damn. Crazy connecting degrowth with not letting kids drink booze.
I thought we were protecting the kids. We were just being filthy commies. I’ll report to the nearest ICE detention center, thanks for opening my eyes.
Any idea how much fuel is used to transport alcoholic liquid on a daily basis?
Probably a lot. Are you saying we should let kids drink alcohol to support the fuel industry?
Wtf are you smoking. Dude asked a question, and you are doing a round robin on god knows what lol
Dude can't understand that finite resources don't last forever, so everything has to be banned, reduced, phased out
So you a suspect there is some scheme by politicians in cahoots that anything that consumes these “finite” resources has to be banned / phased out ?
Sounds a lot like a poor thought out conspiracy theory to me