Australia has just passed a law that will ban kids from social media online. How exactly? Well, through the amazing power of… shoosh.
They have legally banned them but they have not practically blocked them. They will still have the same amount of access they had previously, until Internet adapts to the new laws, and considering how small Australia is on the world stage. Compared with the EU with GDPR and the US with the DMCA, no-one is going to give a shit about the new laws.
What does mean that any local Internet providers will be held accountable, which means that the government has successfully destroyed any remaining chance for Australia to have any local technology industry.
I was about to suggest that this should only apply to people hosting web services with a social aspects like comment threads or multiplayer games, but I wonder if the definition might be loose enough to be applied to an ISP, or even a parent who is providing access to an ISP.
@Lodespawn @Salvo The definition is currently loose enough to apply to iMessage. That’ll be a fun discussion with Apple’s lawyers.
I’ll likely be setting my kids and their mates up some sort of server overseas, maybe a Mastodon instance. I want them to learn to be social online, with some education and moderation.
Yeah education is really where this effort should have gone, classic nanny state Australia. Sadly the law is coming from a generation who’s formative years was moulded by social interactions that were limited to post, rotary telephones, newspapers and school yard whispers. All of those things existed when they were born and were replaced by social media post midlife crisis. They have no concept of how to deal with something like social media. All they see is their friends getting scammed online and their newspapers talking about online child pornography. You’d think they’d realise from cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and old timey porn magazines that outright banning it does almost nothing to stop teenagers accessing it.
“Hey here’s an evolving disruptive technology that is becoming more integrated with our society than the newspaper or telephone ever could have dreamt. Quick let’s ban our kids from it until they are effectively adults so they only have as much understanding of it as me and maybe end up doing something dangerous with it because they have to treat it like a taboo”
IANAL, do you think it could be stretched to include SMS, MMS or RCS ? That would make Telstra, Optus and Vodafone liable too.
