Comment on Australia’s Social Media Ban Was Pushed By Ad Agency Focused On Gambling Ads It Didn’t Want Banned
shads@lemy.lol 3 days agoNot to mention it is counter productive in a number of ways. I have lost the ability to monitor my kids YouTube usage, the kids are just going to move to alternate platforms, and I am amongst the cohort of sensible Australians who will refuse to use social media before I provide some dodgy AI company my ID, it’s going to be a lot harder to convince my kids to do the same once all their friends and peers start ratcheting up the conformity pressure after they turn 16. This whole thing isn’t misguided, it’s a betrayal of the majority of Australians who are too dumb to realise what they are giving away to access these services.
Parental controls on most devices will allow you to monitor and regulate your kid’s youtube usage, and block alternative platforms.
Having to provide ID to access services isn’t ideal, but in the context of everything else people provide to social media it doesn’t seem very significant to me?
Suggesting that this is some kind of “betrayal” is overly dramatic, sorry.
The parental controls I had? That worked just fine? That no longer work as the kids are force logged out of YouTube until they have turned 16. Or do you mean I should engage with Microsoft’s virtual spyware? Sorry but we are an opt out family and I do all I can to block telemetry and surveillance as I think my kids deserve better than to be reduced to a profile on a server. What do you use to monitor your kids activity online?
Do you not see the betrayal of our elected officials bowing to minority interests and pursuing policies that are, at very best, counterproductive, and at worst a distraction, that experts are telling them will not have the intended outcomes, to give them an excuse to avoid legislating the harder things? A deciding factor for my preferences at the last election was to minimise the creeping advance of the surveillance state that Dutton so obviously desperately wanted to push through… We are getting it anyway.
We keep moving further and further away from privacy and security in the face of the spooky spectres of “terrorism” and “protecting the children” but once we have handed those things over they are almost impossibly hard to regain. When we look back in 10 years and realise we voluntarily handed the government and big business all the info they need to monitor our every movement online at all times and got nothing in return how do we stuff that Genie back in the bottle?
No1@aussie.zone 3 days ago
You have opened my eyes to some important issues I had not considered before.
This law actually hurts parents who have actively looked out for their kids. They’ve been nurturing them, showing them the bad things that are on social media. Teaching them about critical thinking, how to spot bias. How to be aware of algorithms leading you down a path.
Is this the new age prohibition? We all know how that went.
But instead of banning it for everyone, we ban it for those who are youngest, most susceptible, and most unaware of the dangers? Does this put those children who would have been mentored and instructed by good parents and guided over years and throw them to the wolves?
fizzle@quokk.au 3 days ago
What a silly thing to say. This law doesn’t stop parents teaching their kids they evils of social media.
shads@lemy.lol 3 days ago
No, what it does is removes agency from parents and tells us that we aren’t capable of raising our kids, the government will have to do it. My kids have been asking, for several years, to get Facebook accounts so they can use marketplace. I used that desire to have a frank discussion with them about how predatory Facebook is and how sinister it is that they have subsumed so many things that used to be independent and didn’t require an account with them specifically so they can lock users in and Hoover up more data. I have told the kids that if they want Facebook accounts after they turn 18 they are welcome to open them then, but until that day I am not allowing them to give up their privacy. Do I seem disengaged as a parent?
fizzle@quokk.au 3 days ago
Yes you really do seem… disengaged as a parent.
Prior to the ban, most parents wouldn’t tell their kids they couldn’t use social for fear of making them pariahs - excluded from something their peers are partaking of.
The ban provides parents with the agency to restrict their kids from using social, because at least the majority of kids won’t be there.
I dont see how the ban prevents you from having conversations with your children?