Comment on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Will not work. None of these kinds of bans has ever worked. Did everyone just forget that they got blackout drunk as minors who could not legally purchase alcohol? Are we under some misguided belief that age verification procedures in this manner can or ever have worked effectively to reduce harm on minors?
Will have large unintended consequences far beyond social media access for teenagers.
Will actually make the internet less safe for teenagers, as they will now be lying about their age and circumventing the systems in place, which renders all existing protections for them ineffective.
Is pointlessly age targeted legislation as social media is also bad for adults as well. Its bad because of business practices and lack of ethical considerations in gigantic monolithic international social media corporations. If your end goal is making the internet safer for teenagers, your end result will actually end up being making the internet safer for everyone.
I fully believe it will work. The point is not to make it impossible to visit, but very annoying to. I cannot forsee the average kid maintaining access for very long, especially when most of their and their friends accounts were deleted.
Less of their friends will be online, access is more annoying than ever, eventually they’ll no longer have any reason to want to go back.
You could present literally the same arguments for why teenagers would never drink alcohol. Its against the law for them to purchase right, so its an inconvenience to access, so clearly they would all abandon it as all their friends become unable to access it as well. You could make the same argument for most kinds of bans. There are actually very few things for which imposing barriers to access has ever eliminated its use. Porn is an obvious example as well. Porn bans are essentially meaningless to consumers. They are so trivial to bypass as to be functionally non-existent. The only thing that imposed bans have done is make it difficult for companies to profit off of it. I am essentially ambivalent about that, but it’s a literal direct parallel in this case.
What is likely is that tools for circumventing in simpler faster ways will develop. Installing a VPN is already a single click operation. You dont have to do anything else. Teenagers are not going to abandon social media. Maybe you havent encountered many in the past 2 decades, but social media use is and has been near universal among them since social media came to exist. Like you’re nuts if you think they’re actually going to stop using it haha I dont know what else to say. But yeah maybe youre right. Making stuff against the law totally eliminates it because everyone is so lazy and incompetent they won’t expend any effort to overcome trivial barriers to access things they have built their entire lives around lol
I don’t agree with porn as an example. It clearly isn’t a social activity.
Alcohol on the other hand… Haven’t you heard that Gen z and younger have much lower rates of drinking? Social drinking is on the decline, and I argue it supports my theory. Their friends aren’t drinking socially as much, so many don’t either.
I don’t think VPN are going to get much better than say. Good VPNs are paid services, and it’s kids under 18 we’re talking about here. They would need to maintain a recurring VPN subscription fee. Free VPNs very much aren’t the same thing.
Porn is comparable because of its implementation and circumvention strategy, not because of its substance.
Drinking rates are decreasing, yes, but i disagree that it has anything to do with carding. It has been illegal for minors to drink since… at least the 60s? Earlier? Lol
Free VPNs are abundant and teenagers using instagram are almost certainly entirely unconcerned with their data being stolen. A market gap will come to exist for better free VPNs, advertising revenue being the driving factor.
I dont think that the majority of teenagers on Instagram / Facebook / TikTok are using discord or even aware of what it is. Some of them are definitely but I dont see those platforms as being interchangeable or serving the same functions whatsoever.
And now on to recreational drug and alcohol use…
You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is… pointless?
So what if you get to watch a tik-tok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.
The majority of influencers are not in the same geographical regions as their fans. Content is not as regional as it once was. The TikTok algorithm is based on time spent viewing something, and things like search terms and engagement, more than it is about where you are geographically.
The same can be said for Instagram. How you connect with other users on instagram is by following them. It will recommend you new users based on who the people you follow also follow. Where you are does not have really anything to do with how you would engage with your fellow peers. They’ll mostly be asking you directly what your handle is and then following you. Your geography would mostly impact what kinds of new content the algorithm will feed you without any prior data, drawing instead from content that is popular with where you are from and what age you said you are and what gender you said you are.
I think a lot of people in this thread are misunderstanding how people use social media in general. Activating a VPN and creating an account somewhere else will not fundamentally alter how you use the platform. It just adds a very simple very easily accessible bypass measure to using it.
I personally expect that the platforms will make whatever concessions the government is asking for so they dont have to do this. Because teenagers make up such a large part of their userbase that it would be a massive hit financially to lose out on it. But the ban itself would be ineffective in ultimately preventing teenagers from accessing those platforms.
You can still view these sites.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Minors may not be 100% alcohol free but that does not mean they consume the same amount with or without age restrictions.
that’s true for other age-gated things like alcohol and tobacco. there is legislation to protect adults as well as banning use for children.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
It would absolutely be more effective to use legislation to address the root causes of excessive alcohol consumption than to make blanket bans. I’m not saying that the bans won’t do anything, but they are absolutely not effective on a broad scale. There are so many circumventions that are trivially easy to access that it renders the ban more of a general barrier for entry than an actual prevention of access. Its moreso “how hard are you willing to work to get it” than “you cannot access this”. So harmful alcohol consumption becomes a matter of effort. Addiction is frequently characterized by massive efforts to access substances. Its one of the hallmarks. I’m not arguing for teenage alcohol consumption, just pointing out that it’s only ever been a trivial block and we are very socially aware that it is circumventable and frequently is circumvented by minors.
And alcohol is a physical object that must be acquired. Social media access is not.
You can circumvent this ban from any device at any time. It’s like porn bans. It’s now just a matter of effort. Install VPN, click click done. Youre now able to browse freely as a minor. And again, now youre lying about your age. So all age protections are gone, and you are free to engage with the same content as before but with less actual protections in place. Youve taken an undesirable situation and rendered it into a subversive one, one that requires circumvention by design, and will therefore make the relationship between the user and the platform a dishonest one. This has a lot of consequences. It makes it a lot harder to actually check the age of people using their platforms, cause everyone underage will lie. You won’t be able to prevent them from engaging with grown adults in profoundly harmful ways, for example.
Alcohol and tobacco are (mostly) harmful in all circumstances, yes. Social media is not harmful in all circumstances. Human socialization can be a good thing, but it is impossible for those substances to be good things (except possibly in extremely niche circumstances). If social media platforms were designed to be good for people, then they wouldnt cause the same harm. If they had legal requirements to be moderated, to not spread misinformation, to not promote unhealthy and damaging habits, to stop the spread of hatred and bullying, then they would be significantly less harmful for teenagers and also everyone of all ages. These things would actually make social media better for teenagers. Completely useless age verification actually makes social media WORSE for teenagers. Teenagers are never not going to use social media. Sorry thats just the truth. Entire fields of technology and software design have been developed by teenagers seeking to circumvent age bans throughout history. These bans dont even require any kind of new innovation. They just need to setup a basic VPN. Trivial.