Australia

It’s pretty depressing to see how many people have been ignoring the genuine harm that can occur using social media.

I feel like most people agree that it can be harmful. The problem is more that they don't understand enough about how social media works to realise that it's a structural design problem with the technology itself and one that can only start to be addressed through government regulation. To a lot of people it becomes solely a personal responsibility problem. If a child has an addiction it's solely the parent's fault for allowing their child to become addicted. If an adult has an addiction then it's solely their own fault for letting themselves get addicted. When it gets framed as an individual problem rather than a structural one, it's easy to oppose any and all legislation on the basis of "well none of us have a problem so why do we have to pay for a solution/be punished?". It's difficult to understand how easily psychological manipulation can occur if you don't understand the techniques being used.

Another, related, problem in this particular case is that a lot of people still seem to think the main problems are the more sensational things like child predators or violent content. Whilst those are very real and serious concerns, they are pretty extreme examples and getting fixated on them makes it very easy to ignore the more insidious effects of social media usage on developing brains. I guess that's one of my main problems with the current implementation; it’s based around account ownership and some platforms like YouTube still use an algorithm and build a shadow profile with recommendations based on what you've viewed even if you're logged out. For some of these platforms, the current legislation is going to do little to combat addiction (beyond signalling to parents that this stuff is bad, which is definitely important).

I don't know about you, but in every circle I'm in the concern is just the abysmal implementation that not only doesn't address the actual problems but kind of makes them worse, and it'd be really easy to write a better policy that properly addresses that without any ID being involved.

It's pretty depressing to see how many people in favour of this are prepared to make everyone suffer invasive demands for personal information in order to use a good portion of the internet. These laws haven't even come into force yet and they've already caused harm in the form of tens of thousands of leaked IDs, to say nothing of the problems with further reducing anonymity of discussion in an increasingly authoritarian world.

Social media is not the internet.

Social media is a privatized mass-spying and manipulation tool that directly and intentionally destroys the mental health of its users.

Yes but parents aren't doing that so..........

Should they?

Does that include single parents? Overworked parents? Parents who don’t understand/use the internet? Do you believe that all children follow their parents’ rules when they step out of the door of their houses?

Make an actual argument for young children having social media access.

They won't.

They shouldn't need to.

They will still need to under the current form of the social media ban.

But the paremts aren't doing shit, it's why the Governments stepping in.

I mean, i actually can't see why this isn't a more serious option.

It will be a game of whack-a-mole.

They'll just keep adding to their list of apps requiring ID.

And those apps you list are next

Then they start banning protocols

Yes. Explain to KP Oli how messing with Gen Z's Internet has no bearing on politics, since they're not voting for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests