It’s weird how so much of the reporting on this (e.g. CBC radio news in Canada this morning) focuses exclusively on what this means for teenagers, as if adults aren’t also directly affected by the imposition of age checks. Sure the law suppresses the political speech of young people; that shouldn’t be controversial, it’s explicitly designed to take away some of their main telecommunications tools. The question for the court as it pertains to 15-year-olds is whether that’s justified and allowed by Australian constitutional law, which I imagine the government can make a pretty good case that it is.
To me it’s the larger question of how far the chilling effect of denying net anonymity to adults will go that seems like the more important one, seeing as it affects everyone in the country.
Anyway it seems like it is not actually a “social media ban” since it does not include e.g. Mastodon — although I’ve yet to find a good explanation as to how that works legally and whether it’s likely to change. For now, maybe we can hope that it will drive a few more people towards the fediverse and thereby do some good, until fedi grows to the point where they feel the need to hobble it too. Assuming of course that the whole project doesn’t just collapse in failure.
I’m pretty much on the same page. The reporting has been oddly sub-par and absolutely has barely touched on privacy concerns.
The handful of things I read and heard only focused on the kids claiming that losing the sites will tear away their social lives? I get it. I had more social media back in the day, but that argument for this situation is a weak one.
It’s weird how so much of the reporting on this (e.g. CBC radio news in Canada this morning) focuses exclusively on what this means for teenagers, as if adults aren’t also directly affected by the imposition of age checks. Sure the law suppresses the political speech of young people; that shouldn’t be controversial, it’s explicitly designed to take away some of their main telecommunications tools. The question for the court as it pertains to 15-year-olds is whether that’s justified and allowed by Australian constitutional law, which I imagine the government can make a pretty good case that it is.
To me it’s the larger question of how far the chilling effect of denying net anonymity to adults will go that seems like the more important one, seeing as it affects everyone in the country.
Anyway it seems like it is not actually a “social media ban” since it does not include e.g. Mastodon — although I’ve yet to find a good explanation as to how that works legally and whether it’s likely to change. For now, maybe we can hope that it will drive a few more people towards the fediverse and thereby do some good, until fedi grows to the point where they feel the need to hobble it too. Assuming of course that the whole project doesn’t just collapse in failure.
In one article I saw they claimed that they didn’t aim for Bluesky (it acted on it’s own tho) because of low user numbers.
Fediverse is pretty much nonexistent next to that so…yeah. They don’t care because it’s literally not worth the trouble for them xD
I’m pretty much on the same page. The reporting has been oddly sub-par and absolutely has barely touched on privacy concerns. The handful of things I read and heard only focused on the kids claiming that losing the sites will tear away their social lives? I get it. I had more social media back in the day, but that argument for this situation is a weak one.