Social Media

And soon could be European Union.

Are European parents just as useless as ours?

Are you being paid by the social media giants to oppose these laws?

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I wish! I despise Zuckerberg and their ilk. But if they were to offer me money to publicly oppose these laws, I’d take it. I’m a whore.

I can see there is a need to protect the kids from the worst social media has to offer. I get it. Kids should be protected from harmful content. But there are better ways to do it, and unleashing the Digital Karen on them is not it. This is policy rushed through just for political points. Like aggreation was.

Kids will find ways around this. Remember when they brought in similar laws in the UK and pissed everyone else off? VPN usage sky rocketed. The amount of times I’ve had to get kids off school computers for using Psiphon to get around our proxies is beyond annoying.

It’s a slippery slope. How long before adults will have to have a digital ID just to access social media services? They’ll probably offload it to some dodgy third party age verification for way too much and put the data at risk for being leaked.

Parents also need to actually do some frigging parenting. Not leave kids onto deviuces as digital babysitters. Don’t give the kids smart phones until their sixteen. If they must have a phone, give them a cheap burner phone that can only text and ring.

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So you agree kids should not have access to social media yet you still oppose the laws. I agree with what you are saying that parents should be controlling what their kids access. But can’t you see that having these laws just enforces that? It lets parents say to their kids that they don’t need a smart phone and they can’t access social media because it’s the law.

I really don’t understand the argument about kids finding a way around it. Kids also find ways around smoking and drinking alcohol. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws against it to protect them.

I have recently spoken to parents whose kids are late teens/early twenties and they’re all saying that social media has wrecked these kids. They have wasted so much of their lives online already and many of them actually lack social skills going into the real world now.

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Kids will still access the stuff. Kids aren’t stupid - the internet sees censorship, which is exactly what this is, as nothing more than road damage and will find its way around it. The problem is, it will lead into the unregulated underground. It only takes one or two for it to spread.

I’m worried that this will lead down a slippery slope - if this fails, we’ll be the ones punished. It’s unnessary government overreach and eventually the potential for privacy breaches and data leaks. Not to mention the potential for costly blowouts and corruption if they go for a third party solution. That’s my main objection.

The platforms should have done more self-regulation and remove content that would be considered objectionable. We’re the ones being punished for their slackness.

We’re also being punsihed for parents being frigging slack and trying to be “friends” with their kids. They need to be adults in the room and learn to say NO.

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But how is that any different from kids going underground now and accessing whatever they shouldn’t?

The point of the law is that it will protect more children than it currently does. You can’t ddny this is likely.

How are you being punished? You’re making assumptions that there will be restricted access for you but nothing will change for people your age.

Why is X subject to the ban, but Bluesky isn’t? Sounds like a political decision, not one based on facts.
Incidentally, Bluesky is struggling to clean up the filth infecting it.

What filth are you talking about

Isn’t there a blanket thing with these new laws that come December 10 every social media site would need to implement the changes anyway so even if it’s not banned it still needs to upgrade its age verification process.

Adult content or worse.

I am pretty sure that X has adult content as well.

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Anything based on Masterdon is going to be hard to control. Someone can just set up a Masterdon-based network and allow anyone to go on unchecked and unverified, then once targeted, shut down and set up a new site.

This ban will fail in the long tem. Kids will go elsewhere, and so will the predators. Pollies seem to think the kids are that stupid that they will willingly go with the ban.

The platforms and parents have failed kids. Not enough enforcing and not enough saying of NO.

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This is essentially what’s going on right now. Anyone who is under 16 and was on socail media is now heading to social apps not effected by the ban. And there are alot of these.

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Exactly. It’s the old tale of Hydra - cut one off, two grow in its place.

Did the Cyber Karen and opportunistic pollies not realise this?

This will be a waste of time and public resources.

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They will be scrambling over the next 6 months, and it will never end. It reminds me of when the first starting cracking down on piracy. They added the major piracy websites then the list grew eventually it exploded and got really big then eventually the websites were all on the dark web and they couldn’t really stop it. This is most likely going the same way…..

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Taiwan blocks Xiaohongshu, the Chinese version of RedNote, for a year over fraud concerns.

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