Yesterday, parliament heard that the major parties will come together and pass a law banning teenagers from social media, after a period of careful thought roughly commensurate with that of a 15-year-old making a Black Friday impulse buy at Shein.com.
I’m glad they have put the onus of social media platforms, however I think there is no feasible way to make this work short of requiring 100 points of ID be provided to your social media account to prove age. As much as I’d like to share that information with every platform I think I’ll pass.
Further to this, how do you police that on something like the fediverse? Is @Aussie.zone going to shut down because the onus of checking IDs too much for a small social media provider? What about IRC?
I assume there is going to be a series of marches consisting of a million angry children and their parents protesting the loss of Minecraft and Roblox …
I’m worried about this. I see no protections other than the minister’s discretion for small social media being liable for civil penalties of $9million. Thats the kind of money that freezes the social media market in place, allowing only the very largest to be involved.
This is of course if the fediverse admins are unable to implement reasonable steps for age verification.
I’m not technical, so i’ll be interested to know peoples thoughts on the implementation, and maintenance of age verification?
@Gorgritch_umie_killa @Lodespawn Doesn’t sound too big a technological challenge (think along the lines of when you sign into a website using Google or Facebook as your ID provider). But puts more hassle on site admins. And, more importantly, how are users going to know if a site is actually doing authentication or just gathering their ID data? Then there’s the question of what sites they will try and include in the ban. Meta etc is a given, but Lucy’s Australian Knitting forum? iMessage? Signal? Mastodon instances?
Then there’s the concern that all of a sudden Govt have a link between all of our online nicknames etc and our actual names. That’s a massive issue in my eyes and they’ll need to clarify if that’s going to happen.
In the end my son could, and probably will, just rent a private server in Singapore for a couple of dollars a month and VPN through that. I expect he’ll set his mates up on it too. So instead of some kind of visibility of what he’s doing on the home network, I’ll have none.
And we’ll be paying handsomely for this whole exercise.
I, like a lot of parents I’m sure, am actually in favour of not letting kids into those places. But I can’t, yet, see how it can be done.
The definition of a site that would be affected is in the online safety act. Your son’s singaporean Minecraft server would definitely be included and if he had a beef with one of his friends they could report him and he could be fined 30,000 penalty units or $3,300,000.
He could however get around it if he charged his friends $0.0001 per Mb of data transferred between them and the server (business interactions) or made sure that every chat post included an ad and all polygons were skinned in ads (see section 63C(1) and 63C(3) of the act amendment)
@Lodespawn tbh, i suspect they will all just open a shared Google Doc and chat in that.
That is excellent
@Lodespawn I had a read of that definition in its current form and it’s ridiculously broad.
For Singapore I meant a VPN server hosted there. So he could connect to that and then off to mydangerousbombmakingforum.com without Albo checking he’s 16.
Oh yeah sorry I see that now
The way I see it it would be a struggle for big social media sites to implement. I think they are more likely to shimmy on out of here.
The legislation seems to exclude everything for business purposes, if a child is selling skins on Roblox are they then entitled to an account?
It also excludes advertising, if all a user’s interactions are being sold by the provider to advertisers and that being their primary business model, does that mean the account is off the hook?
On another note I love the definition for ‘material’ in the existing act … shows a rock solid understanding of the internet.
Can’t see where they state the definition for ‘material’, what does it say?
Hahaha it’s in the original act and it’s hilarious.
Pretty impregnable net the legislative writers have cast there.