Age verification on Australian social media has loopholes. Underage influencers use an agency to manage their social media for them. So anyone with enough followers or money can continue using social media under the age of 16.
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
How could one protect the, call it one in 1 million… the speech of the (young) Greta Thunbergs, for example?
I bet there is a 15 year-old much smarter than me making political videos and I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be forced to stop. What if they’re on my “team”! ;) (I kid)
Recalling how we had lots of political debates in high school: if some of those kids made videos and got really popular, and the law made them stop, they would have been incentivized to vote $responsibleParty out.
(Socials bad for kids though maybe they could selfhost their monologues instead)
I believe every government disenfranchises young people because they are young.
Its not about intelligence. Else a whole lot of over-age-of-majority wouldn't pass either.
Theres also no old-age cutoff, when their mental faculties significantly decline.
Yeah, the voting majority keeps 'under age' from voting. But at least in the USA, we have children as young as 11 being tried as adults but with none of the benefits.
You’re right that it shouldn’t be about intelligence! Overall definitely unfair.
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After posting, I questioned whether political speech is special. Like should fifteen-year-olds who love film be able to make videos about them and get lots of followers… but I couldn’t be thought police. So maybe-
The platform just has to be designed non-addictively.
Is this accurate?: In reality, Facebook was so powerful the regulators could never make them stop at any turn. Now that they finally got sued big time, we finally educated ourselves enough as constituents to raise enough of a stink to trigger straight up bans. (educated ourselves, or politicians legislate based how bad headlines are, or it was so egregious it genuinely ticked them off… …)
Maybe it should be about intelligence. All kinds of people destroy ecosystem after ecosystem, simply by acting in stupid ways and thereby creating tons of bad incentives for businesses, who will stop at nothing to maximize their profits, zero ethics. The whole system is rigged up to trend towards supporting stupid behavior and attracting more of that, simply because there are so many people doing stupid things. Engagement and attention economy, no matter how stupid or rotten.
I'm curious how much of that will keep occurring though? These underage influencers I assume had a following that existed that they want to manage. But if you can't start one without an agency or an adult running things won't that dampen the amounts of them?
That's the legal loophole that I'm sure a tiny number of people are using. In the real world, reportedly around 3/4 of kids under 16 that were using social media still are by either having changed their age during the window and using a sibling or older friend to do face scans for age recognition, or by creating new accounts and again using an older friend/sibling/relative etc. for the age verification. I heard about the ways children of some of my cousins got around it at Christmas, and their parent's didn't care!
The most embarrassing thing is that our Government thought the idiotic idea was workable in the first place... But of course now they've gone and made things worse, because now kids' profiles pretend to be older, so more inappropriate stuff (like gambling ads for those who put an over-18 birthdate) can get targeted at them - great job, eSafety Commissioner!
The number of times I've had to lie to websites on my kid's behalf is horrendous. I resent governments and companies for putting me in that situation.
But it's a good lesson, I suppose. It changed the lesson to my kids about lying from "lying is bad", to a more sophisticated "lying is bad for these reasons, and so these lies are bad, but those lies are not."
Yeah, I think it's overall bad for society, but on an individual I'd definitely do it too (within reason) for certain services if I had kids that age.
But it feels like by making silly laws like this that aren't likely to be respected by much of the population is bad for the rule of law, which is bad for society. But fair enough, the rule of law is only a good thing as long as the laws are (on the whole) good.
We have a lot of this problem in Australia because as much as we pretend not to be, we're pretty authoritarian in regulating personal behaviour. For example in my state they're currently criminalising riding EN15194 compliant e-bikes above 10 km/h (literally 6 mph, slower than a jog) in my state on 90% of the bicycle path network (90% of the network are 'shared paths' so you'd only be allowed to ride at the bike's full 25 km/h (15 mph) motor limit on the small amount of dedicated bicycle paths). That and requiring anyone with any e-bike to have a drivers license - which cuts out people who can't have a license due to disability, medical issues but who could still ride a bike, or anyone under-16.
It's very silly, almost completely unenforceable and again just going to create huge non-compliance and further teach people that laws are silly things to be ignored... I really don't think that is good for society, and I've observed that the more Government has tried to regulate our behaviour, the less responsibility people seem to take, and the more the Government tries to further regulate.
So I think a big criteria of evaluating any new bill is "are most people actually going to respect this law", but all my experience with politicians is that they prefer magical thinking of believing that anything you make a law will immediately be fixed, even if it's impossible to adequately enforce or even technologically impossible to implement. Every time I've been involved in public consultation processes I'm constantly arguing practicality of the actual bill and they're arguing about the ideals that drove the poorly thought out laws...
>If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.
That just makes it even worse, why deprive the younger generation of one of the few remaining methods they have to make a decent income? We should be encouraging youth entrepreneurship, not making them spend even longer in classrooms learning things that LLMs will do better than them.
People under the age of 16 shouldn't be worried about "making a decent income". They should focus on school.
In the weekends they can stock shelves, deliver pizza, deliver newspapers, wash dishes, babysitting, feed animals or other typical jobs for children in the age range of 12 to 16.
Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years? The direction we give kids coming up always seems to lag behind reality by 10 or 20 years. Perhaps we shouldn't stand in the way of the new generation figuring things out for themselves in this brave new world. The old playbooks to a solid middle class life are increasingly outdated.
> Why? Presumably so they can go to college and get a high paying job that may not exist in 10 years?
Also so they don't end up stupid and useless like a potted plant. People with too little education are easy to manipulate and dim. They're perfect fodder for the propaganda machines.
It would be nice if we could just let kids loose like wild animals and they'd, somehow, figure everything out. But no, we actually have to try. Otherwise they end up illiterate and eating so much candy they throw up. Because they're kids.
None of your concerns are relevant. We're not talking about 6 year olds here but presumably 12-16 year olds. And the issue isn't whether they drop out of school, but whether school must be their sole focus.
12-16 year olds still do not have the restraint to be essentially self educating. I'm sorry, but this is a bad bad idea. The primary focus of children should be education.
They have their whole entire lives to be a cog in the capitalist machine. We don't need to speedrun children getting a soul crushing office job. They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical.
> They can spend time learning how to critically analyze text or how to learn choreography for a musical.
But to what end? There is zero value to many of these kids in learning to do these things. Again, we're pulling from a playbook on how to live a successful life that is decades out of date. A kid who has a potentially successful side hustle should be encouraged to follow it. And besides, we're only talking about a small number of kids here. Those that have shown aptitude and initiative for some alternate path. In many cases opportunity is fleeting and must be grasped when it appears. On the other hand, school will always be there.
How many skilled high school aged programmers in the late 90s were encouraged by their parents to stay in school and missed out on a decade head start on their careers? How many potential founders missed out on the golden era for computer startups? (Imagine if Bill Gates had followed his parents advice!) How many kids wasted years in college only to be saddled with a crushing debt burden and no relevant jobs to show for it? Those who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions. Not everyone must or should follow the same path. We as a society need to be more tolerant to experimentation and outliers.
There is a lot of value, it's just that children are very bad at estimating value. That's why they'd rather spend all their time eating candy and going to the skate park - they're children. Apparently some adults see it that way, too, which is shocking to me.
Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
I mean... I guess? But that's frankly one of the stupidest justifications for anything ever that I have ever heard. The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary. Most people are not going to be "entrepreneurs", and most "entrepreneurs" that I have met are not even entrepreneurs, they're scam artists. Which is a different thing, although you could say technically they're both self-made.
Look, it's a game of average. Are there SOME people out there who could benefit from less education? Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
> hose who have suffered for following the standard advice never seem to get a mention in these discussions.
No no, those people get WAY too much mention. What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable. Which is about 10,000x more common than the Bill Gates types. So, give me fucking break.
I know some people who didn't graduate high school, and I know a lot of people who opted to go straight into the workforce post highschool instead of getting a degree. None of those people are doing good.
>Again, kids do not need to speedrun being cogs in the machines. Could SOME of them hypothetically become millionaires like 5 years earlier?
It's not about speedrunning being cogs in the machine, its about finding their place in a world where nothing is guaranteed and there is no longer a "golden path" to a happy middle class life. Forcing everyone down the golden path that is guaranteed to not work for some sizeable percentage of kids is moral disaster. But it makes some of us adults feel good, so we encourage it regardless of the outcome.
>The reality is 99.9999% of people are destined for the same thing: a normal career, with a normal salary.
Of course. My argument is not that some small number of people will miss out on being millionaires. The argument is that parents don't know what the future looks like, yet they insist on forcing their children down paths that resemble their own success stories regardless of how much society has changed in the intervening decades. It's asinine.
>Sure. For the majority of people, education leads to higher lifetime income, and it's not even close. We have the statistics on this. We don't know ahead of time which one someone will be. So, we should optimize for the best odds.
It is exactly this thinking that has so utterly distorted the education market that it's now mostly worthless as a signal. Yes, high school education correlates with some amount of success. College education correlates with a lot more success. But it's not about having the piece of paper, it's about what the piece of paper signals about the person. But degrees now have little value as such signals because we've engineered society so that far more people go to college and get a degree, or graduate high school than are suited to it. To accomplish this we've had to dumb down both college and high school. We've created an education arms race where we need increasing years of education just to signal the same quality that many fewer years signaled in the past. We've done large scale damage to students and society with the kind of thinking you're exhibiting here.
>What actually doesn't get enough mention are the people who are forced into lifetime poverty because they never graduated high school and are therefore essentially unemployable.
Are they unemployable because they didn't graduate high school, or are they unemployable because they don't have the traits of someone who graduated high school? What's stopping them from getting a GED? The high school degree has little causal relevance here.
I don't think it truly is, but I do think that the younger generations think it is.
My nieces and nephews really don't know what they are going to do in their futures because so much is uncertain right now.
If it feels like a longshot to expect normal 9-5 office jobs to be around in 5 years, and it's also a longshot being an influencer, then why not go for the influencer thing?
If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.