The bill proposes a fine of up to AU$50 million on social media platforms if they fail to uphold the ban. It also does not allow for an exemption for parents to allow their children to use social media.
Summary
Australia has introduced a bill to ban social media access for children under 16, enforcing strict penalties of up to AU$50 million for non-compliance.
The law would require biometric or government ID for age verification and prohibits parental consent as an exemption.
While aiming to protect children from harmful content, critics argue it may drive teens to unregulated platforms.
Some services, like YouTube and WhatsApp, will be exempt for educational or messaging purposes.
The bill has bipartisan support but faces scrutiny from independents and child welfare advocates.
Yeah our governments, globally, are light years behind tech companies. I still need to send notarized letters for things when, as an American, the dod, nsa, fbi, cia, etc all are using palantir software by the quizat haderach Peter Thiel which has more information on me than any other involved party.
This just feels like a slow burn into making lisan al gaib able to observe everything I do.
What’s worse is that prior to being a PM, he was chairman of the board at OzEmail prior to them being bought out by iiNet. You would have hoped by working for a technology company he’d have some semblance of a clue about encryption. 🤦🏻♂️
The law would require biometric or government ID for age verification and prohibits parental consent as an exemption.
Fuck that noise. It’s almost as egregious as those US states that demand porn websites require Gov’t issued ID.
I don’t want copies of those documents processed by these corps; you just know they will use it to train their LLMs on it, store it inappropriately, and ultimately end up leaking them due to a misconfigured S3 bucket somewhere.
How will we ever control the minds of children if we can't control their computers? How will we even force our narratives on them without removing all counter-narratives? How can they ever be happy without taking away their freedom and information? Go Australia! Keep that delusional settler vibe strong! \s
I get that it would probably be a net good if we could keep kids off social media. Unfortunately this is one of those things that the cost of any remotely effective enforcement is higher than the benefit in my view at least.
No, because a lot of people here care about digital sovereignty. Otherwise, we would still be on Facebook. So, if the main developers integrated that into the software, people would strip it out and fire the main software developer, or they would strip it out at every version that got released and then release it without it.