But it's the internet; for every one site that implements this, there will be a thousand that don't, and for every one that the government takes down, another thousand will pop up. And that's just the actual porn sites, there's millions of other ways to get access, be it websites, privacy-conscious apps, file sharing, etc. If people want porn they'll find it.
Of course, it being more difficult, technically involved, or otherwise shady will probably reinforce a message that it's not normal, because another issue is the normalization of porn to the point where people watch it in public. I'm also very aware I am just echoing the same thing an older generation has said about things like raunchy video clips on MTV, magazines like Playboy, movies with Marilyn Monroe, and painters painting a hint of ankle.
The parent comment suggested of the sort. There is obviously more porn on porn sites than on moderated social media platforms. Pointing out that some porn occasionally evades filters on Facebook for a couple days doesn’t mean social media sites and porn sites are fully equivalent.
> For me, social media is the worst thing we ever created.
Calling social media the “worst thing we ever created” as a comment on a social media site is deeply ironic.
I can’t believe how many commenters are assuming these laws will only apply to sites they don’t personally use. The amount of “good riddance” commenting from people inviting heavy handed internet ID checking regulation because they can’t imagine it would ever affect them personally is really scary.
So your argument is that hackernews is similar to TikTok and instagram?
I completely disagree.
The core of HN is not self promotion, narration, or comparison - the very things driving teen suicides up from social media use.
I further suggest most of the replies to my original comment are willfully ignoring the data the Australian govt is citing for these bans, and what psychologists worldwide are citing.
None of the discussion here so far even touches on a possible solution to a problem that is driving measurable deaths.
Instead we have a collection of false equivalence and abdication of social responsibility by big tech, which is fairly on brand for hn and frankly intellectually lazy from my perspective.
63C Age-restricted social media platform
(1) For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform
means:
(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service
is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more
end-users;
(ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with,
some or all of the other end-users;
(iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the
service;
I would argue it's short sighted to do nothing to prevent harm from social media, and we certainly won't find out what works or doesn't by doing nothing to chase a perfect solution that will never exist.
Doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing.
This has too many chilling effects. It's so far from perfect it's crazy.
By the letter of the law any service even allowing only one-on-one conversations is covered. It's obvious to me that these secondary effects are by design.
Open communication is the most important thing that democracy needs, and this is a clear attack on it.
> Are you suggesting porn, violence, and other mind bending content is not present on social media?
If protecting kids from porn is the objective, the most obvious thing to do would be to require age verification for porn sites, not some other random websites that happen to have occasional porn.
Ironically, kids will now have to visit much more hardcore sites (4chan etc - ones without age verification) if they want to socialise online. The effects will be similar to banning alcohol, it doesn't decrease demand, just pushes it elsewhere creating worse problems along the way.
The internet was wild before social media but somehow the weird stuff remained fringe before recommendation algorithms and the perverse incentives that emerged from recommendation algorithms and content creation meant that feeds became an on ramp to all kinds of nasty things
I'm not exactly a greybeard but I remember when happy slapping was a viral phenomenon but that seems pretty tame by comparison these days
4chan is a synecdoche representing all those fringe ~'social media' substitute sites; they'll soon be common knowledge in Aus, at least among the U16s..
Eh, not really. I'd consider myself a greybeard (not literally, but I am online since 90s) and everything is so much tamer now. It wasn't unusual to find open, unprotected and unencrypted sites with really, really weird stuff - that kind you only see on darknet today. Over the decades, everything became mild, normal, mainstream - which is IMHO bad and I blame the algorithms.
Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.