does not surprise me
Kinda interesting that, if you think about it, every one of the villains win - politics look like they did something useful; gambling continues to show ads everywhere; big tech “loses” the more heavily regulated population of its services while gaining a free pass to implement whatever sort of real age verification they want, the same kind that porn sites are being forced to use on UK
It just goes to show how out of touch politicians are.
As a parent of two primary schoolers. (Yeah yeah cliché qualifier) Things I’m more concerned about than social media:
- Them never being able to buy a fucking house or afford any kind of living standard because apparently property market must go brrr. Everything they do is about propping up established home owners ensuring profits for the banks.
- Corruption and lobbying
- Doing fuck all about climate change and environmental destruction. Stop.fucking.clearing.vegetation.
- Alcohol and gambling adds
- Air quality / emissions from transport. Fuck Albo’s watered down vehicle emissions rules that are going to encourage more diesel SUV use. Diesel is next in line after pdfiles and religion for things I don’t want near kids.
Social media isn’t a problem.
The incentives in our social and economic systems are the problem.
The rich want you to focus on anything besides the wealth inequality that causes almost all other problems
Everything the federal government does is to the benefit of either Murdoch Media, the gambling empire, landlords or the mining industry.
I could also suggest that this ban was effected so Rupert could drive traffic to his news websites.
Seriously. Every law always benefits one of them.
Do you think many 12 year olds are visiting Rupert’s news sites ?
No, and Rupert wants to change that.
Nah, they’re watching Sky News on YouTube and tiktok. They don’t even need an account on YouTube!
Very true
2.5 years since the gambling report was handed down.
6 months is how long Parliamentary rules say Government has to respond to a report.
Still no response to any of its recommendations.
Wasn’t their response to disregard it? I recall seeing Labor ball suckers on Reddit saying they’re keeping the ads because of possible job losses.
‘w3 n33d 2 w3@n tHeM oFf AdZ’ was one classic I saw.
No, there hasn’t even been that, officially. There’s been no response at all. A response of “thanks but no thanks” would at least put it on the record, but they haven’t gone that far.
Yeah they’re fucking disappointing. The position that it will cost jobs is bullshit.
Labor gonna labe.
It’s not actually related to the review into online gambling from 2023, but your comment reminds me of the pokies issue. We’re constantly told that pubs and clubs have to be allowed to have pokies, because otherwise they’d go out of business and lose jobs! Never mind the fact that things seem to work completely fine in Western Australia. They worked fine in Queensland (with the exception of some people nipping over the border to Tweed) until 1992. And they work fine in the entire rest of the world that largely don’t permit rampant pokies in non-gambling venues.
Sure, it would be a problem to remove something they’ve been reliant on for so long overnight. But a gradual, phased reduction of pokies in pubs and clubs on a clear timetable would certainly not be harmful.
Exactly, their PR people ran the same line they run on poker machines. In fact a couple of them folded the two together with the rationale of ‘people going to the local pub to watch the races and have a bit of a punt’, you know the shit they trot out.
As I mentioned before the best one I heard was ‘they have to be weaned off’. This is companies like Sportsbet, as if they need legislative backing to profit.
Yes gambling gets a pass every time in this country. The only state where Greyhound racing is banned is ACT. Tas plans to phase it out by 2029
The SA premier (SDA supported ofcourse) was apparently influential in the push for national social media laws. He recently emailed parents of school kids to promote waitmate who are like a purity ring thing for mobile phones. Abstinence but for phones instead of sex.
Apparently they are based on a similar US org. Does anyone know who is behind it? I looked at the committee and it looks like two couples, one with a law firm connections and another in PR and someone else. Wonder if they are foreign backed or backed by religion, gambling etc. SA taxpayers are going to be contributing $6.5million dollars to this orgs campaign here. It’s not like we have any homelessness or cost of living issues to spend the money on.
Just bought my tween a phone, locked down ofcourse. I control the apps and contacts and content. I don’t know what these people are on. I swear it is another satanic panic.
Edit: waitmate appears to be a near clone of waituntil8th (8th grade) a US org founded by Brooke Shannon. It is hard to dig further. I have seen glowing discussions about it on US social conservative websites and Catholic websites which I guess is how it got to the attention of our Premier. It looks to me like phones might be the new rock’n’roll. Banning them could be a moral crusade it seems. After the ACL and Greens tried to restrict NSW pokies who knows who the gambling industry might align with if it preserves their business.
Pretty sure you still see ads on YouTube when logged out. And maybe even less personalisation makes it default more to alcohol and gambling ads
They’re just as personalized. Google knows everything.
Indulge in neither… I wish it would advertise things I actually want and am looking for /hj
And it all clicks into place.
‘Social Media Account Ban’ kids can still browse and share a lot of harmful content on youtube etc.
Oh please. Just because some assholes decided that the ban might be tangentially good for their business does not mean that the ban is not good.
This is exactly the false sense of security many ban critics warned about. Politicians and parents now think kids are magically “safe,” even though kids are trivially bypassing the ban. Meanwhile, the adults who might have educated those kids about online gambling risks—a problem that heavily targets teenage boys—now assume the government has handled it. Gambling ads stay up, kids stay online, and everyone pretends the problem is solved.
This assertion is completely unsupported. If this then that then that then that.
“Oh we couldn’t possibly do anything about the problems caused by social media because gambling ads are also a whole other problem which has not been addressed”.
But everyone with half a brain will acknowledge that it was very poorly implemented.
I reckon the Gambling Ads should still be banned.
Children are still hurt when mummy and daddy donate their entire paycheck to the Lloyd Williams retirement fund.
The implementation has been complained about ad nauseum. No need to re-hash the tired old arguments here. In 10 years time we’ll see how it’s worked out.
Of course gambling ads should be banned, but that’s not a reason not to ban social for kids.
The ban is not good though, any means of enforcing it completely undermines the concepts of online privacy and an open internet.
I couldn’t care less.
The war for an open internet and online privacy has been lost a long time ago.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is an imperfect solution to a huge problem, and if it mitigates the impact on the kids of today and tomorrow then so be it.
I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of the good, but I’ll always be an enemy to evil, which this ban clearly is.
This sort of thing is so clearly motivated by the frustration of the powers that be over having lost control of the narrative over the genocide in Gaza, and a bunch of cantankerous cretins from the Cretaceous who can’t cope coexisting with kids in their communities are all too happy to sacrifice basic civil liberties over it for some reason.This is so fucking stupid.
Not to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it’s going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn’t misguided, it’s a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.
You have opened my eyes to some important issues I had not considered before.
This law actually hurts parents who have actively looked out for their kids. They’ve been nurturing them, showing them the bad things that are on social media. Teaching them about critical thinking, how to spot bias. How to be aware of algorithms leading you down a path.
Is this the new age prohibition? We all know how that went.
But instead of banning it for everyone, we ban it for those who are youngest, most susceptible, and most unaware of the dangers? Does this put those children who would have been mentored and instructed by good parents and guided over years and throw them to the wolves? And prevent good, active parenting ?
What a silly thing to say. This law doesn’t stop parents teaching their kids they evils of social media.
No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren’t capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn’t require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?
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Parental controls on most devices will allow you to monitor and regulate your kid’s youtube usage, and block alternative platforms.
Having to provide ID to access services isn’t ideal, but in the context of everything else people provide to social media it doesn’t seem very significant to me?
Suggesting that this is some kind of “betrayal” is overly dramatic, sorry.
The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft’s virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?
Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through… We are getting it anyway.
We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of “terrorism” and “protecting the children” but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?
Sorry chief this is just plain nutty.
I cant really respond to that.
By all means continue believing that wanting to reduce the impact of corporate profiteering on children is “evil”.
