Comment on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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.

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  • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    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.

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    • stickly@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

      • Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users
      • The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
      • A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
      • Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

      Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).

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