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Aurornis 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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beardedwizard 7 months ago | parent [-]

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.

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brokenmachine 7 months ago | parent [-]

From the actual bill:

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 say that HN is covered under that.

https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...

You are quite shortsighted if you can't see the possible outcomes of such a far-reaching and anti-democratic law.

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beardedwizard 7 months ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	brokenmachine 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		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. Also can we not recognise that social media can have good effects as well? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/social-media-ban-unde... Murdoch media is losing it's power and fighting back. Why not restrict the algorithms they're permitted to use, to fight echo chambers? That might actually have a chance of helping every person, not only <16 year olds?

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nomilk 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

See: perverse incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Examples_of...

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djtango 7 months ago | parent [-]

Why is it 4chan and not WhatsApp groups?

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

	▲	nomilk 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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..
	▲	thrw42A8N 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.