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It has been banned for a few months. Hardly a failure.
It will be a failure if 10 year olds continue to join social media at the rate they have done so in the past.
It’s not likely to get 15 year olds who have been addicted for 5 years off it, anymore than smoking bans have any impact on teens who have been smoking or vaping for years.
There is some effect however. Many kids including mine used to have there first phone around their 10th birthday. Now I see parents around me waiting longer due to the ban.
Sure if you are 15 you can get a phone yourself, but for younger kids the ban has a positive effect.
Exactly. This is a pathetic excuse of “journalism”
Here in Australia, every parent I have spoken to is happy about the ban.
The media is predictably unhappy since they lose eyeballs, advertising revenue and money.
Previous approaches like expecting parents to educate children failed miserably.
Most parents lacked at least one or more of motivation, time or knowledge.
Exactly. This is a propaganda piece from the social media platforms
> The media is predictably unhappy
this is an article by reuters, they are not affected by the ban.
> Previous approaches like expecting parents to educate children failed miserably.
Did you read what the article said?
> parental awareness of their [children] online habits had actually declined.
From that perspective, it's even worse now.
I've said this to every single person who pushed for this.
"Imagine you're a teenager, and your parents and government tell you to not do something... What will happen?"
The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.
As an Aussie, and a parent. What I wanted was that the government mandate that in order for your website or app to launch in Australia, that if you want to allow kids between certain ages on the website/app. Then you need to have robust parental controls. Create family accounts where you can link parents and children, share whatever tracking/tracing you have with said parents and make it as good as you can. Mandate specific minimum controls based on what kind of type of app/website it is.
Put the control in the hands of the parents, and not this stupid one size fits all approach.
Here some types of small motorize vehicles can be used by persons under 16. Of course, they have built-in speed limiters.
What if we had this kind of distinction for mobile devices with Internet access? Adult's smartphone vs kid's smartphone?
It could be some sort of combo of a specific "for kids" SIM card (with, say, DNS blocking at ISP level and/or date of birth of the user) and a "kids hardened" OS that prevent bypasses and the parental monitoring tools you mention. The OS (in a wide sense, that could extend to the browser and other mission-critical programs) could be certified by some national agency; commercial products have to pay for the test, FLOSS projects could tested for free on request.
You’re probably too young to remember when anti smoking laws were introduced to Australia. It took decades to change behaviours and attitudes. The cigarette industry did everything in their powers to undermine the laws. The social media giants are playing the same game.
Won’t kids just make a new secret account that doesn’t belong to the family? Like you said, they will do it anyway
We just need to go back to telling kids they cant go outside and cant have sex.
> The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.
Not only hide it, but develop a (suddenly healthy) contempt for the rule of law.
Nice idea but how are you going to prevent the kids from creating their own parent accounts while preserving people's privacy and without being too invasive?
What if that's the point? What if having to hide it means you do it less?
They're providing for lowest common denominator.
You already said you've got your own solution.
Banning social media for kids before banning junk food for kids when you have a childhood obesity/health crisis just shows which companies greased the hands that made the laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_obesity_in_Australia
Well, they have been trying to fight childhood obesity. It's just that as usual that's difficult too. Ultimately the failures will continue unless parents are the ones implementing meaningful change at home.
Of course it is going to fail especially if the social media networks are incentivized to make sure that it fails. The penalties should have been set at a per user basis.
The smoking laws took a long time to break through, this is the same.
I wish I can promote this to the whole internet. this is not the way to control the internet :)
Anecdotally, all the parents I know and have discussed this with are desperate for this to work.
How it should work I'm unsure in the big scheme of it, but we limit access to various things until age 18 here in Australia, and I think this is one long term battle that I believe the tech sector will lose.
So we should just allowed big tech to do whatever they want because they can?
Are you confusing some apps with the internet?
When we give everyone a computer and want to restrict a group of people from some of its capabilities (for their own good), the consequence is a restricted computer. Not giving everyone that computer in the first place could help ensure it stays a true general purpose computer.
Wow. Banning things actually doesn’t work and only makes everyone more secretive. What a surprise!
So banning CFCs didn’t work?
What about the FDA‘s bans on food ingredients?
They don’t work, companies just become more secretive?
Did you ever hear of anti smoking laws? They took decades but have been extremely effective in Australia.
Perhaps one can dream that we have a social media ban that affects HN and bans 35 and below. One can imagine if a ban is successful on one site then the kids flood another. It’ll be some kind of Thundering Herd Eternal September.
Parent of a Year 7 kid here (that's the first year of high school and a very common age at which all kids have phones).
The social media ban has been a wild success in preventing 11-year-olds having their social connections locked into the major social media platforms. Prior to the ban, if you weren't on insta you weren't connected. Now my kid talks to other kids on the phone or sends SMS, but also doesn't really stay in constant contact with their peers outside of school hours, they do their own thing or organise socialising themselves.
It's been hugely positive for interrupting the hostile social media companies from hijacking kids' social connections for the purpose of addictive algorithms to drive ad revenue.
From what I hear, once social media use is embedded in the older teenagers, they are all working around the ban very easily. The social media companies have made no real effort to enforce the ban or comply at anything more than a minimum level, and I wouldn't expect them to as they have absolutely no concept of social licence.
It's beautiful to see civil society take back one little bit of freedom from psychopathic oligarchs.
This is pathetic, it is like saying anti smoking laws failed because within a few months teens were still smoking. This is a generational change. No sane person ever expected teens already using social media would stop using social media. It is the next cohort that it is going to make a difference to.
I expect better from Reuters than to be the propaganda mouthpiece of social media platforms.
Ban the hardware, not the software.
100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you have to make a conscious effort to "go on the computer", and when there are significant opportunity costs to doing so, you naturally put it into its proper perspective.
So, are you suggesting that the legal use of smartphones should be banned for anyone under the age of 18? What kind of society do you want to live in?
Agree but the parents want the hardware for the kids' safety, and it has to be a smartphone specifically so the parents can GPS track them and to do facetime calls to prove they're OK...
The whole idea of excluding teenagers from social interactions because you can't police how shit people are is absurd.
Isn't that a mischaracterisation of the goal and the actual implementation? Avoiding social networks is restricting away from unhealthy spaces, not preventing social interactions per se.
I've got news for you - this is how we've protected teenagers since forever in the real world! What do you think age restrictions on movies, casinos, or porn are for? Why do you think children have to be home before a certain time in the evening? Why do we not let them roam anywhere alone until they are old enough?
That is such a dishonest representation of the ban that I think that even the majority of people that’re against it would admit that it’s BS.
I bet it succeeded in identifying more adults in order to go after people for speech. Anonymous speech should be protected.
The law doesn't require identifying anyone
The 16 year olds are goners already so who cares about them. It will definitely work for the younger ones who haven't been mindrpd yet.
The fact that they'll ban kids from accessing every social media except Reddit tells you everything you need to know about the real motives behind this "ban".
I'm not on social media. But reddit seems slightly more intelligent than tiktok, instagram, X. What's the real motive then, according to you?
Here's a revolutionary idea.
Instead of mandates, why not lower the tax burden on citizens. That would give move freedom to parents to decide not to work, and actually, parent their kids.
Don't force parents to both be absent from home because the burden of the bureaucracy salaries is too great without sucking blood from the middle class
Houses don't need to cost 0.5M AUD with long mortgages that force 2 parents to work. They cost that because the government is spending like a drunken sailor and destroying the value of money held by everyday australians.
What houses cost under $1.5m?
Plenty of single income families had their children on social media.
This is just a conflation of different issues to push an unrealistic narrative.
Any tax reduction on the average household will just become a rent increase, and nothing will change for the household.