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Re; token system, I don't know anything about tech, but would a system like this not be essentially DDOS attacked by millions of Australians constantly flitting about on social media? Like the census debacle where everyone in the country was directed to use the same website at the same time, wouldn't everyone constantly logging into their social media potentially crash the system?

Will the government trial be able to accurately simulate the sheer volume of people logging into social media in Australia at virtually all times?
 

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Pakenhamsaint said:
There is. But this is the government we are talking about
Click to expand...
They will just give Bill Gates a billion dollars to fail to implement it properly, then abandon it but leave the laws in place which conveniently let them look at anyone's DMs.
 
I work in schools and my views on this have flipped 180 degrees in the past 18 months or so. At one point I would have been vociferously opposed. I've gone from that to 'geez, this is getting a bit out of hand' to thinking regulation inevitable, and faster that everyone thought. And here we are.

I think the key thing most adults don't understand is that the social media experience your kids have isn't the same as yours.

Some of the key things that shock me are:

- the average 13 year old self-reports 3-4 hours social media use per day. Actually checking their phone logs - it is closer to 6 hours per day (as a median). Note phones are banned in school hours - do the maths from there, layer in activities like sport/music where they aren't on phones and... sheesh

- the content they are engaging with is almost all short-form video and image scanning. There's no websites with text to read- just 15 second tiktoks, youtube clips, snaps and reels, messages and maybe discord chat. Scrolling and scanning for dopamine hit after dopamine hit (drive by algorithms that target human psychology to maximise engagement), hours and hours...

- and of course the volume of messaging. I've confiscated a phone and had more than 100 messages received during school hours. The social pressures is enormous and unrelenting - to respond, engage, be always available. Reinforced by things like snapchat streaks, the pressure to 'like' images that others post within minutes...

- and when that goes bad, the bullying and harassment. All online - i would now say the average time we see between bullying starting and anything coming to the school is 3-4 weeks of online harassment (why would bullies do anything in person?). We had a recent instance where a teenage girl received more than 900 messages in two hours (9pm-11pm). The horror stories are immense. Parents blame the school. The school says 'we didn't even know'. The parents didn't even know...

- and everything is online. Literally everything gets filmed - good, bad, indifferent, it is all on camera. Kids have public social media accounts showing everything they do out of school. IF there's a fight or crazy event, it gets filmed by 50 people (who all stand there and do nothing but film). Everything is permanent, always. No room to be young and silly

- and when I say permanent, I mean it. It is literally impossible to get social media sites to remove anything outside of extreme pornography and overt racism. I say this from experience - targeting bullying and harassment, mocking or humiliating people, inappropriate content posted from anonymous accounts - you can report it until the cows come home, and instagram, facebook, tiktok will leave it there (who is going to force them?). What is there, is permanent unless the person that put it there wants to remove it.

I could go on, but that's the start. The sheer impacts are just... well, we don't know, but it isn't good. Amongst Year 8 girls, the % that report being happy with their life is less than 10%. These are girls that have all the usual markers for happiness - good family, good school attendance, success in school and extracurricular, a number of reported friends, well-off financially... and utterly, utterly miserable.

And it just feels like one great bit experiment in human psychology on a scale we have never seen before. The number of kids with ADHD is just exploding; but they aren't the ADHD kids of old (twitching in the corner and flipping chairs). It's pretty normal kids who are losing the ability to regulate between attention modes - between hyperfocus and scanning modes, for example. Anxiety is off the charts. Teenagers are also delaying adulthood - not getting drivers licences, not drinking alcohol, not dating or having relationships in the way we would understand. Almost every year 12 wants to take a gap year and talks about 'burnout' after doing something relatively normal, really (studying for a year then doing exams - we've been doing this for 50 years).

Again, my first position was just one of despair - watching this all happen, there is utterly no way that if someone went back to 2004 and said this is where we would be with mobile devices and social media, that we would have allowed it.

And really, it should be parents doing this, but they aren't. I have an early primary daughter - she has multiple friends under age 10 with mobile phones, social media.

I don't trust the government much, and expect it'll be a complete and utter balls-up at first. They'll over-reach, stretch into the wrong areas, get sidelined into irrelevant discussion (photo id? wtf?). But it'll work. It'll send a message to parents that children shouldn't be using this until at least 16 (and probably 18). Just like with alcohol, some kids will find a way around it. But it'll be harder to do, parents will be more aware of it, schools and society in general wilil tolerate it less (uncles and aunts and people on the bus will be more inclined to just say 'hey, you shouldn't be doing that') and it will REDUCE the impact. And as time goes on we'll start to understand it more, and get a better sense of what works and what doesn't, and the social media companies will adjust and offer products that fit the regulations and are less harmful... and it'll help, just a bit.

So basically, I think it's inevitable, it's necessary, and it will help
 
Chief said:
They will just give Bill Gates a billion dollars to fail to implement it properly, then abandon it but leave the laws in place which conveniently let them look at anyone's DMs.
Click to expand...
I have full confidence the government will **** this up
 
btdg said:
I work in schools and my views on this have flipped 180 degrees in the past 18 months or so. At one point I would have been vociferously opposed. I've gone from that to 'geez, this is getting a bit out of hand' to thinking regulation inevitable, and faster that everyone thought. And here we are.

I think the key thing most adults don't understand is that the social media experience your kids have isn't the same as yours.

Some of the key things that shock me are:

- the average 13 year old self-reports 3-4 hours social media use per day. Actually checking their phone logs - it is closer to 6 hours per day (as a median). Note phones are banned in school hours - do the maths from there, layer in activities like sport/music where they aren't on phones and... sheesh

- the content they are engaging with is almost all short-form video and image scanning. There's no websites with text to read- just 15 second tiktoks, youtube clips, snaps and reels, messages and maybe discord chat. Scrolling and scanning for dopamine hit after dopamine hit (drive by algorithms that target human psychology to maximise engagement), hours and hours...

- and of course the volume of messaging. I've confiscated a phone and had more than 100 messages received during school hours. The social pressures is enormous and unrelenting - to respond, engage, be always available. Reinforced by things like snapchat streaks, the pressure to 'like' images that others post within minutes...

- and when that goes bad, the bullying and harassment. All online - i would now say the average time we see between bullying starting and anything coming to the school is 3-4 weeks of online harassment (why would bullies do anything in person?). We had a recent instance where a teenage girl received more than 900 messages in two hours (9pm-11pm). The horror stories are immense. Parents blame the school. The school says 'we didn't even know'. The parents didn't even know...

- and everything is online. Literally everything gets filmed - good, bad, indifferent, it is all on camera. Kids have public social media accounts showing everything they do out of school. IF there's a fight or crazy event, it gets filmed by 50 people (who all stand there and do nothing but film). Everything is permanent, always. No room to be young and silly

- and when I say permanent, I mean it. It is literally impossible to get social media sites to remove anything outside of extreme pornography and overt racism. I say this from experience - targeting bullying and harassment, mocking or humiliating people, inappropriate content posted from anonymous accounts - you can report it until the cows come home, and instagram, facebook, tiktok will leave it there (who is going to force them?). What is there, is permanent unless the person that put it there wants to remove it.

I could go on, but that's the start. The sheer impacts are just... well, we don't know, but it isn't good. Amongst Year 8 girls, the % that report being happy with their life is less than 10%. These are girls that have all the usual markers for happiness - good family, good school attendance, success in school and extracurricular, a number of reported friends, well-off financially... and utterly, utterly miserable.

And it just feels like one great bit experiment in human psychology on a scale we have never seen before. The number of kids with ADHD is just exploding; but they aren't the ADHD kids of old (twitching in the corner and flipping chairs). It's pretty normal kids who are losing the ability to regulate between attention modes - between hyperfocus and scanning modes, for example. Anxiety is off the charts. Teenagers are also delaying adulthood - not getting drivers licences, not drinking alcohol, not dating or having relationships in the way we would understand. Almost every year 12 wants to take a gap year and talks about 'burnout' after doing something relatively normal, really (studying for a year then doing exams - we've been doing this for 50 years).

Again, my first position was just one of despair - watching this all happen, there is utterly no way that if someone went back to 2004 and said this is where we would be with mobile devices and social media, that we would have allowed it.

And really, it should be parents doing this, but they aren't. I have an early primary daughter - she has multiple friends under age 10 with mobile phones, social media.

I don't trust the government much, and expect it'll be a complete and utter balls-up at first. They'll over-reach, stretch into the wrong areas, get sidelined into irrelevant discussion (photo id? wtf?). But it'll work. It'll send a message to parents that children shouldn't be using this until at least 16 (and probably 18). Just like with alcohol, some kids will find a way around it. But it'll be harder to do, parents will be more aware of it, schools and society in general wilil tolerate it less (uncles and aunts and people on the bus will be more inclined to just say 'hey, you shouldn't be doing that') and it will REDUCE the impact. And as time goes on we'll start to understand it more, and get a better sense of what works and what doesn't, and the social media companies will adjust and offer products that fit the regulations and are less harmful... and it'll help, just a bit.

So basically, I think it's inevitable, it's necessary, and it will help
Click to expand...
Awesome post. My child won't be on socials until 16 anyway so I think a large part of this is just parenting.

Schools need to do more also in educating regarding social media literacy, which they may already be doing to an extent.

The social media companies though should be doing much more.
 
btdg said:
I work in schools and my views on this have flipped 180 degrees in the past 18 months or so. At one point I would have been vociferously opposed. I've gone from that to 'geez, this is getting a bit out of hand' to thinking regulation inevitable, and faster that everyone thought. And here we are.

I think the key thing most adults don't understand is that the social media experience your kids have isn't the same as yours.

Some of the key things that shock me are:

- the average 13 year old self-reports 3-4 hours social media use per day. Actually checking their phone logs - it is closer to 6 hours per day (as a median). Note phones are banned in school hours - do the maths from there, layer in activities like sport/music where they aren't on phones and... sheesh

- the content they are engaging with is almost all short-form video and image scanning. There's no websites with text to read- just 15 second tiktoks, youtube clips, snaps and reels, messages and maybe discord chat. Scrolling and scanning for dopamine hit after dopamine hit (drive by algorithms that target human psychology to maximise engagement), hours and hours...

- and of course the volume of messaging. I've confiscated a phone and had more than 100 messages received during school hours. The social pressures is enormous and unrelenting - to respond, engage, be always available. Reinforced by things like snapchat streaks, the pressure to 'like' images that others post within minutes...

- and when that goes bad, the bullying and harassment. All online - i would now say the average time we see between bullying starting and anything coming to the school is 3-4 weeks of online harassment (why would bullies do anything in person?). We had a recent instance where a teenage girl received more than 900 messages in two hours (9pm-11pm). The horror stories are immense. Parents blame the school. The school says 'we didn't even know'. The parents didn't even know...

- and everything is online. Literally everything gets filmed - good, bad, indifferent, it is all on camera. Kids have public social media accounts showing everything they do out of school. IF there's a fight or crazy event, it gets filmed by 50 people (who all stand there and do nothing but film). Everything is permanent, always. No room to be young and silly

- and when I say permanent, I mean it. It is literally impossible to get social media sites to remove anything outside of extreme pornography and overt racism. I say this from experience - targeting bullying and harassment, mocking or humiliating people, inappropriate content posted from anonymous accounts - you can report it until the cows come home, and instagram, facebook, tiktok will leave it there (who is going to force them?). What is there, is permanent unless the person that put it there wants to remove it.

I could go on, but that's the start. The sheer impacts are just... well, we don't know, but it isn't good. Amongst Year 8 girls, the % that report being happy with their life is less than 10%. These are girls that have all the usual markers for happiness - good family, good school attendance, success in school and extracurricular, a number of reported friends, well-off financially... and utterly, utterly miserable.

And it just feels like one great bit experiment in human psychology on a scale we have never seen before. The number of kids with ADHD is just exploding; but they aren't the ADHD kids of old (twitching in the corner and flipping chairs). It's pretty normal kids who are losing the ability to regulate between attention modes - between hyperfocus and scanning modes, for example. Anxiety is off the charts. Teenagers are also delaying adulthood - not getting drivers licences, not drinking alcohol, not dating or having relationships in the way we would understand. Almost every year 12 wants to take a gap year and talks about 'burnout' after doing something relatively normal, really (studying for a year then doing exams - we've been doing this for 50 years).

Again, my first position was just one of despair - watching this all happen, there is utterly no way that if someone went back to 2004 and said this is where we would be with mobile devices and social media, that we would have allowed it.

And really, it should be parents doing this, but they aren't. I have an early primary daughter - she has multiple friends under age 10 with mobile phones, social media.

I don't trust the government much, and expect it'll be a complete and utter balls-up at first. They'll over-reach, stretch into the wrong areas, get sidelined into irrelevant discussion (photo id? wtf?). But it'll work. It'll send a message to parents that children shouldn't be using this until at least 16 (and probably 18). Just like with alcohol, some kids will find a way around it. But it'll be harder to do, parents will be more aware of it, schools and society in general wilil tolerate it less (uncles and aunts and people on the bus will be more inclined to just say 'hey, you shouldn't be doing that') and it will REDUCE the impact. And as time goes on we'll start to understand it more, and get a better sense of what works and what doesn't, and the social media companies will adjust and offer products that fit the regulations and are less harmful... and it'll help, just a bit.

So basically, I think it's inevitable, it's necessary, and it will help
Click to expand...

But isn't that just like the adult experience. Apart from the volume of messaging?

Ever been bullied by corporate email?


But great points though
 
peetoo said:
But isn't that just like the adult experience. Apart from the volume of messaging?

Ever been bullied by corporate email?


But great points though
Click to expand...

I don't necessarily disagree, although I do think adults use it differently (and honestly, 18 year olds use it differently to 13 years olds - things are changing very fast). The main differences I'd see to adult usage are:

  • volume (as you note)
  • content. Adults are still often engaging with news, twitter (text-based), forums, or just navigating shopping etc. Teens it is mostly social or short-form video (tiktok)
  • how much spare time they have (and thus, how much the balance of time can shift towards it); and then the types of other interaction expected (adults are working productively... children are focusing on 'learning' - there's a bigger impact on learning than there is on largely routine adult work, I think)
  • the importance of social stuff to their lives. I think it's easy to forget how IMPORTANT social issues are when you are 14. And all of that is now happening online, from 3pm-midnight, and never, ever stops (rather than being a school/in person thing you could break from)
  • conversely, adults tend to have core, stable relationships established. Teenagers are still navigating this, often don't have the fully developed skills (and conflict resolution skills) to do so. And now it is happening online, every mistake is magnified and permanent...
  • adults have fully developed brains, better ability to make judgments and set boundaries, etc.

I do see issues for adults as well, though. One analogy I think helps might be to see it not as technology, but imagine that a new drug was invented that:

  • provided a very mild but short-lasting 'high' requiring on-going usage, but allowing mostly normal functioning alongside
  • had almost 100% addiction rate
  • teenage users spent almost all of their spare time 'high'
  • effects were unknown, but there were pretty clear links to higher rates of depression, anxiety, lower social function, ADHD and general distress amongst users, with a small number crossing over into complete inability to function

As a society, we MIGHT be ok with this drug being in use for adults, but would probably have some worries, or at least some discussion about it. But then imagine:
  • usage rates for this drug peaked at age 13;
  • parents were typically giving their children an unlimited supply of this drug, often starting at age 9, but right through their teenage years, and allowing them unsupervised use in their bedrooms (often while the parents were downstairs getting 'high' themselves, but on a different and weaker dose of the drug).

What would our response be? Would 'more education in schools' be the answer? Of course not - it's pissing in the wind to give kids an unlimited supply of an addictive drug, then try to educate them on the harmful side effects.

'Parents should take more responsibility' - perhaps, but they are addicts too, and don't see the harm (and like all addicts, want to blame everyone else when it all goes wrong... 'the school hasn't done anything about this bullying that happened online, outside school hours, while my daughter was upstairs in her bedroom').

'Social media companies should do more' - right, lets ask the dealers nicely to change. Of course, they have every incentive to get their users hooked, and that's their core business. But maybe if we ask really nicely, the drug dealers will make it less harmful?

If this was the case, we'd expect the government to intervene and restrict its usage, as we have with alcohol

(and I should add - like alcohol, I think it has lots of good points, and generally that people should be free to make their own choices. But allowing unrestricted access to children is a dumb idea).
 
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zumahawk said:
Awesome post. My child won't be on socials until 16 anyway so I think a large part of this is just parenting.

Schools need to do more also in educating regarding social media literacy, which they may already be doing to an extent.

The social media companies though should be doing much more.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I appreciate you doing your part as a parent and wish more did the same.

Schools can try, but (see my comments about drug use above) the issue is that
a) we aren't very good at this. We're good at reading and maths, and science and art, and... that's already a lot.
b) it's a losing battle. I probably (arrogantly?) thought schools could educate our way to anything, but I don't think this is education. The social media companies are too good at what they do - they are better, and faster, and... I mean we all use it ourselves, we know how compelling it is...

Believe it or not, I've had a huge number of kids THANK us for banning phones at school. They say things like 'I hate how much it dominates my life' and how much they appreciate being free during school hours.

Then there's other kids doing things like literally hiding in toilets or closets to access their phone, others who will willingly get in trouble, cop suspensions rather than hand their phone over, etc. Irrational, uncontrolled behaviour = problematic addiction IMO.

I'm highlighting the negatives here, of course, and there are very strong positives that I haven't talked about too. But like I said, my perspective has flipped 180 degrees in 18 months. I suspect you and more parents will do the same in coming years as well.
 
btdg said:
  • how much spare time they have (and thus, how much the balance of time can shift towards it); and then the types of other interaction expected (adults are working productively... children are focusing on 'learning' - there's a bigger impact on learning than there is on largely routine adult work, I think)
Click to expand...
Would have a massive impact on kids ability to study and complete homework in their own time.
 
Kram said:
Would have a massive impact on kids ability to study and complete homework in their own time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, some. My perception is homework is more 'all or nothing' than before. I also think teachers are better and more 'efficient' than before and don't rely on homework as much too.

My bigger concern here is around reading.

I used to give kids a survey about what they read when I started with a new english class... As much as anything to prove how much they did read and how important it was. And they ALL used to read something - magazines, comics, newspapers, websites, forums. The 'sporty boys who hated novels' used to read heaps and quite widely, for example.

Now, half the kids are very qvid readers with more (mostly teen genre fiction) available than ever. And about half the kids literally never read anything outside of what is set at school. Like - nothing longer than a text message, ever. Secondary Schools are doing a heap more reading works generally to counter this and having to fill in so many more blanks (it's amazing how much general knowledge teens used to get from reading a newspaper, watching the news at 6pm, even flicking through Cosmopolitan magazine, etc. that's disappeared for a lot of kids)

And a recent observation is about a quarter don't regularly (once a month or less) even WATCH a narrative movie/tv series. As in, despite all this online time they never go beyond short-form YouTube and Tiktok reels. I had to explain narrative structures like 'twist endings' to a recent year 9 class in a way that felt almost condescending but they genuinely didn't get it (without an annoyingly loud tiktoker screaming 'oh my God' in the background, anyway)
 

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btdg said:
Thanks. I appreciate you doing your part as a parent and wish more did the same.

Schools can try, but (see my comments about drug use above) the issue is that
a) we aren't very good at this. We're good at reading and maths, and science and art, and... that's already a lot.
b) it's a losing battle. I probably (arrogantly?) thought schools could educate our way to anything, but I don't think this is education. The social media companies are too good at what they do - they are better, and faster, and... I mean we all use it ourselves, we know how compelling it is...

Believe it or not, I've had a huge number of kids THANK us for banning phones at school. They say things like 'I hate how much it dominates my life' and how much they appreciate being free during school hours.

Then there's other kids doing things like literally hiding in toilets or closets to access their phone, others who will willingly get in trouble, cop suspensions rather than hand their phone over, etc. Irrational, uncontrolled behaviour = problematic addiction IMO.

I'm highlighting the negatives here, of course, and there are very strong positives that I haven't talked about too. But like I said, my perspective has flipped 180 degrees in 18 months. I suspect you and more parents will do the same in coming years as well.
Click to expand...
100%. As a teacher I get it. A ban on under 16s is currently the only way forward as the social media companies live off trying to addict children into their toxic world.
 
btdg said:
I work in schools and my views on this have flipped 180 degrees in the past 18 months or so. At one point I would have been vociferously opposed. I've gone from that to 'geez, this is getting a bit out of hand' to thinking regulation inevitable, and faster that everyone thought. And here we are.

I think the key thing most adults don't understand is that the social media experience your kids have isn't the same as yours.

Some of the key things that shock me are:

- the average 13 year old self-reports 3-4 hours social media use per day. Actually checking their phone logs - it is closer to 6 hours per day (as a median). Note phones are banned in school hours - do the maths from there, layer in activities like sport/music where they aren't on phones and... sheesh

- the content they are engaging with is almost all short-form video and image scanning. There's no websites with text to read- just 15 second tiktoks, youtube clips, snaps and reels, messages and maybe discord chat. Scrolling and scanning for dopamine hit after dopamine hit (drive by algorithms that target human psychology to maximise engagement), hours and hours...

- and of course the volume of messaging. I've confiscated a phone and had more than 100 messages received during school hours. The social pressures is enormous and unrelenting - to respond, engage, be always available. Reinforced by things like snapchat streaks, the pressure to 'like' images that others post within minutes...

- and when that goes bad, the bullying and harassment. All online - i would now say the average time we see between bullying starting and anything coming to the school is 3-4 weeks of online harassment (why would bullies do anything in person?). We had a recent instance where a teenage girl received more than 900 messages in two hours (9pm-11pm). The horror stories are immense. Parents blame the school. The school says 'we didn't even know'. The parents didn't even know...

- and everything is online. Literally everything gets filmed - good, bad, indifferent, it is all on camera. Kids have public social media accounts showing everything they do out of school. IF there's a fight or crazy event, it gets filmed by 50 people (who all stand there and do nothing but film). Everything is permanent, always. No room to be young and silly

- and when I say permanent, I mean it. It is literally impossible to get social media sites to remove anything outside of extreme pornography and overt racism. I say this from experience - targeting bullying and harassment, mocking or humiliating people, inappropriate content posted from anonymous accounts - you can report it until the cows come home, and instagram, facebook, tiktok will leave it there (who is going to force them?). What is there, is permanent unless the person that put it there wants to remove it.

I could go on, but that's the start. The sheer impacts are just... well, we don't know, but it isn't good. Amongst Year 8 girls, the % that report being happy with their life is less than 10%. These are girls that have all the usual markers for happiness - good family, good school attendance, success in school and extracurricular, a number of reported friends, well-off financially... and utterly, utterly miserable.

And it just feels like one great bit experiment in human psychology on a scale we have never seen before. The number of kids with ADHD is just exploding; but they aren't the ADHD kids of old (twitching in the corner and flipping chairs). It's pretty normal kids who are losing the ability to regulate between attention modes - between hyperfocus and scanning modes, for example. Anxiety is off the charts. Teenagers are also delaying adulthood - not getting drivers licences, not drinking alcohol, not dating or having relationships in the way we would understand. Almost every year 12 wants to take a gap year and talks about 'burnout' after doing something relatively normal, really (studying for a year then doing exams - we've been doing this for 50 years).

Again, my first position was just one of despair - watching this all happen, there is utterly no way that if someone went back to 2004 and said this is where we would be with mobile devices and social media, that we would have allowed it.

And really, it should be parents doing this, but they aren't. I have an early primary daughter - she has multiple friends under age 10 with mobile phones, social media.

I don't trust the government much, and expect it'll be a complete and utter balls-up at first. They'll over-reach, stretch into the wrong areas, get sidelined into irrelevant discussion (photo id? wtf?). But it'll work. It'll send a message to parents that children shouldn't be using this until at least 16 (and probably 18). Just like with alcohol, some kids will find a way around it. But it'll be harder to do, parents will be more aware of it, schools and society in general wilil tolerate it less (uncles and aunts and people on the bus will be more inclined to just say 'hey, you shouldn't be doing that') and it will REDUCE the impact. And as time goes on we'll start to understand it more, and get a better sense of what works and what doesn't, and the social media companies will adjust and offer products that fit the regulations and are less harmful... and it'll help, just a bit.

So basically, I think it's inevitable, it's necessary, and it will help
Click to expand...

How can you know all this and parents don’t?

They can’t all be deadbeats. Or maybe they can.
 
Bunk Moreland said:
How can you know all this and parents don’t?

They can’t all be deadbeats. Or maybe they can.
Click to expand...

I don't think parents 'get it' (yet).

They mostly see one or two kids, very personal (obviously) and not much to compare.

And it's all ok... But then their teenager is struggling at school, so it's off to the paediatrician for the ADHD diagnosis. Or they get bullied online in their bedroom and it's up to school to complain. Or their kid gets depressed and they see a psych or counsellor.

Or, their kid is completely fine - it's not all of them (just like there is a huge number of people who use alcohol without it affecting their life, including teens). And everyone else's kids are the same, and no one says otherwise, and they use it themself so how bad can it be? It is very understandable and for good (great by the standards I have seen) parents too.

Like I said, this emerged for me over time - we see hundreds of kids, different patterns. For a long time I was ok with it, had faith, saw the benefits outweigh the negatives. That's flipped... first on a personal level, and now it seems to be at government level too...
 
btdg said:
I don't think parents 'get it' (yet).

They mostly see one or two kids, very personal (obviously) and not much to compare.

And it's all ok... But then their teenager is struggling at school, so it's off to the paediatrician for the ADHD diagnosis. Or they get bullied online in their bedroom and it's up to school to complain. Or their kid gets depressed and they see a psych or counsellor.

Or, their kid is completely fine - it's not all of them (just like there is a huge number of people who use alcohol without it affecting their life, including teens). And everyone else's kids are the same, and no one says otherwise, and they use it themself so how bad can it be? It is very understandable and for good (great by the standards I have seen) parents too.

Like I said, this emerged for me over time - we see hundreds of kids, different patterns. For a long time I was ok with it, had faith, saw the benefits outweigh the negatives. That's flipped... first on a personal level, and now it seems to be at government level too...
Click to expand...

Probably impractical but I think there’s something to be said for making bullying a legal issue.

And making parents legally responsible for bullying perpetrated by their children.

I’d then prefer bullying was done online - great evidence.
 
There is a real problem on our hands, if people don't get that yet then you need to read a bit more about it.

I'm not so sure that banning social media (how that is defined?) for U16s is the way to go about it. It can do a lot of good for kids, they can probably get around bans anyway, and how the hell do we define social media.

But we have to try something - perhaps tinker as we go - we can't just do nothing.


The best quote/phrase I saw was that "it's not so much about giving children access to social media, it's about giving social media access to our children".
 
The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 is now law after Labor and the Coalition did a deal to ram it through the Senate with minimal opportunity for debate. It's not clear why it was rushed through when many of the details have to be worked out in the 12 months until the social media minimum age obligation commencement begins.

It remains unclear which social media platforms will be subject to the ban, but if the unspecified companies get it wrong they will be subject to fines of up to A$50 million.

It's unclear how Australian legislation applies to overseas based platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and BigFooty.

It's unclear how the legislation will prevent under 16s using VPNs to get around the rules.

It's unclear how the age verification will work. But it is clear that for it to work, everyone who uses social media will have provide proof of their age. Tech companies can collect government-issued identification such as passports and drivers licenses after alternative age assurance methods have been provided to users. That's all very vague in legal terms.

Tech companies will have to take 'reasonable steps' to stop under 16s from having accounts. Reasonable is not defined.

Good legislation is quite precise about what the lawmakers intended. This bill puts the power in the hands of a government appointed 'eSafety commissioner', and no doubt the interpretations in Federal court when this is challenged.
 

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