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A comment on Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws.

Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by llui85 on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:40AM (#42264797)
Some notes:

* It is illegal for a platform to provide children with a social media account, not for the child to create an account. Circumvention of this by the child is not illegal.

* No grandfathering - all accounts under 16 once this takes effect (which won't be until this time next year at earliest) must be deactivated.

* Maximum fine (per instance?) is 50 million AUD (about 32 million USD)

* The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by LinuxBender on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:47AM (#42264839)
I don't have a horse in this race but in my opinion a more graceful way to deal with this is to freeze the account until the under-16 is over-16 so they don't lose their friend connections, history, etc... The under 16 should have time to add a comment saying how to contact them otherwise. Discord group, etc... There must be a reason to remove the account that I can not see.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by dyauspitr on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:50AM (#42264857)
Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by dec0dedab0de on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:15AM (#42265025)
I thought the problem was the addictive nature of the feed
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by aleph_minus_one on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:53AM (#42264885)
> Ideally they do lose all of that. That’s the root of the problem.

Where is the problem with this?

The problem rather is that the user did not create a private backup of the data that he wants to keep.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by kranner on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:58AM (#42264911)
Possible contact with pedophiles, groomers, etc.

Once the child is over 16, they can add all their real-world friends again.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by LinuxBender on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:23AM (#42265077)
Could a possible solution there be to use the same language detection platforms used for detecting terrorist activity to also flag possible grooming for human moderator review? Or might that be too subjective for current language models leading to many false positives?
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by Hizonner on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:48AM (#42265223)
AKA stupid paranoia.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by acdha on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:50AM (#42265237)
This is far too pat a dismissal of something which happens regularly. You can argue that it’s not frequent enough to justify this action or would happen anyway through other means but it’s a real problem which isn’t so freakishly rare that we can dismiss it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by johnisgood on Thursday November 28, 2024 @09:06AM (#42265342)
Discord is for people over 13 years of age in many countries, yet there are many minors there. It is not working.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by acdha on Thursday November 28, 2024 @11:13AM (#42266349)
I’m not saying anything about specific services, only that there is a legitimate concern which can’t simply be dismissed without reason.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by johnisgood on Thursday November 28, 2024 @01:07PM (#42267355)
I am not sure I meant to reply to you, to be honest. It is an issue but so far the solutions are terrible. Outsourcing parenting to the Government or companies is also meh. I am sure there are parents who know of ways to reduce screen time for their children, it ranges from installing a program that does not let you on a website or start another program until and unless this and that, or take the phone from the kid's hand and go for a walk or study, whatever.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by gus_massa on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:05AM (#42264960)
It may include all my friends from primary school and a photos of my late granda.

(Disclaimer: I'm so old that at 16 I didn't ever had email. Please don't delete all my old stuff.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by guidedlight on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:46AM (#42264832)
Leisure Suit Larry was ahead of its time with its age verification system.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by elros on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:12AM (#42264999)
For those of us who weren’t around at the time, could you d on what made it good? Thanks!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by rlv-dan on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:21AM (#42265061)
They asked questions grown ups would know but likely not kids. I remember one questions about The Beatles for example.

https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

Edit: Added link

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by dagw on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:29AM (#42265109)
what made it good?

Less good, more fun. To 'prove' that you were over 18 you had answer a series of multiple choice questions [1] about pop culture that most kids almost certainly wouldn't know. Pre internet, finding the answer was surprisingly hard without asking an adult. The main result was that 10 year old me knew a surprisingly large number of obscure facts of about US culture, like who Spiro Agnew was and that Ronald Reagan once starred in a movie with a monkey.

Eventually we found out that you could press some magic key combination to skip the question all together.

[1] https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by johnisgood on Thursday November 28, 2024 @09:08AM (#42265354)
LLM knows, thus the children know. Parents know, thus the children may easily know. It sounds fun but its practical value is questionable.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by dyauspitr on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:49AM (#42264849)
How do they plan on verifying age without using a government id?
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by xienze on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:53AM (#42264880)
They have something called “myID” (a digital ID), which is available to anyone 15 or older.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by llui85 on Thursday November 28, 2024 @07:55AM (#42264898)
I believe that myID is also explicitly excluded as part of the bill.
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by plagiarist on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:18AM (#42265042)
> The legislation is vague on the technical details, although it does specifically mandate that platforms cannot use government-issued ID of any kind (including digital ID).

That's unexpectedly sane from a law like this. Hopefully they can figure out some zero-knowledge proof of age. (But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by stephen_g on Thursday November 28, 2024 @08:31AM (#42265126)
That wasn't in the original bill and it was only amended to add that yesterday, because it wouldn't get past the Conservative (Liberal/National Party) whose votes they needed to ram it through Parliament with almost no scrutiny otherwise (the hastily drafted bill only having been introduced the Friday before the final sitting week of the year).
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Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by plagiarist on Thursday November 28, 2024 @10:15AM (#42265800)
That's more of the sort of behavior one expects from legislators making broad surveillance apparatuses under guise of protecting children on the internet.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media a... by triceratops on Thursday November 28, 2024 @10:16AM (#42265806)
> But then there's nothing stopping adults from creating and selling proof values to kids

That's also true for alcohol and tobacco.

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