It was never designed to protect children

Glad to see it's not even working. Let's keep fighting aginst these evil laws

‘…internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway’

Terrific job, gov.

I don't know. There's some joy in saying I told you so, to people who had the hubris to try and stop teenagers from being teenagers.

With a 70% non-compliance rate, that isn't entirely surprising.

Platforms are even less likely to implement real reforms that the author alludes to.

Speak for yourself. I find quite a bit of joy in "I told you so".

Key point: "Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram."

What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

Pre-fucking-cisely.

The addictive design of platforms, software and algorithms should be adressed, not the users age.

And the tech companies should be made responsible to design more healthy platforms, etc.

The problem is the design of tech, not the people using it.

They're propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors

The fallback argument for the social media ban is that it’s better than nothing. But with results like these, it may be worse than nothing, given it potentially creates new problems. Children will remain online with arguably less supervision and support, new privacy and digital security vulnerabilities seem to have appeared and the worst aspects of social media lay largely unaddressed.

I wish more people understood this. Changing something can mean you've caused harm unintentionally, even if you haven't identified it yet. Too many people seem to have the thought process "We have to do something! This is something. Let's do this." without ever considering the harm they might do.

This and the porn thing have been massively invasive in terms of privacy. It's so transparently just building a database of facial data. It doesn't even make an attempt to comprehensively block everything on the internet, or realistically enforce compliance.

A 30% reduction of kids being exposed to these harmful platforms is a good thing and I'm glad to see it.

Also, all laws are imperfect, and expecting 100% efficacy is moronic.

I've talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don't care, because it hasn't blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.

But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it's very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as "it hasn't been active for very long. Lets wait and see."

I just think that's interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don't totally match my internet social circles.

Censorship is never the answer. Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer. A world where you burn down shit just to get a job as a firefighter makes this path a bit more difficult and harder to follow.

7 in 10? so 3 are off of it? good news 🥳

please expand to over 65 year olds as well

IMO It's not a question if they remain on, but how much time they spend on it. She's focusing on the wrong metric.