Streaming platform Twitch added to Australia's teen social media ban
bbc.comThis doesn’t strike me as “bad”. Seeing the content on Twitch and how parasocial it is, it doesn’t seem healthy for kids under 18 tbh. Like Facebook was the craze when I was exiting highschool, and then it was instagram/snapchat/twitter through college. “Quitting” social media was one of the healthiest adult choices I ever made—comparison is the thief of joy, blah blah blah.
Problem is, that it sets a precedent, and next they will come for other websites whose ban will strike you as "bad".
Edit: I can definitely see them banning anything related to Linux and resources related to OSes because of how processes can be handled, e.g. "kill parent", "kill child", and so on. The term "kill" already has to be censored out on many websites. Of course context matters, but people really have difficulties with this these days.
You can use this train of thought to argue against laws in general, it doesn't sound like a very strong argument
First they forbade kids to smoke, and I said nothing
Then they forbade kids to drink, and I said nothing
Then they prevented kids to watch porn, I said nothing
And when the time came for me to complain about the price of cigarettes and booze, there weren't any kids to say anything.
Or something like that
Within this context, how? I do not think it can be used to argue against laws in general. Plus we have a lot of experiences now about it setting a precedent and them coming for your beloved websites. It is not even debatable today.
Laws tend to set precedents (that may be used to justify other laws)
Yeah, so should we have something like Chat Control and more, similar regulation(s)? It really is not so far off from banning platforms. I remember when people were trash-talking China for doing this, and now "we" are doing the same thing we initially opposed. I suppose people may only start opposing it when it starts to affect them.
I am also wary of things like government owned encryption backdoors and ChatControl, mostly because I feel like like society should be resilient to authoritarian takeovers (and they always seem to happen much faster than we would expect, we'll see if see the US gets another fair election in 2028)
I am just not swayed by the slippery slope argument because as someone else said, it can be used for anything.
Do we actually have a disagreement? I genuinely have no idea.
I do not care about Twitch and I consider Facebook outright harmful, but I do not think they should be banned. I have not fully read the article, but I bet it is "think of the children", a really old justification for "I want more control", a classic power grab.
"we" do what china did because they're beating us at our own games. It's "free market" until BYD shows up, it's "no regulations" until tiktok shows up
Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys
> Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys
I never implied this, that would be silly on many fronts.
Are you in favor of Chat Control or not? Why?
While your slippery slope argument can be applied to literally anything that children are restricted from, it consistently fails to materialize.
Perhaps it's predictive power is not as expansive as you think.
They won't ban Linux for containing "kill" but because it teaches kids to "hack" :)
Talk to your kids about the danger of using 'linux' today!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-police-distance-themselves-...
I think there is such thing as a moat on legislative and cultural movement, whether that moat is good or not. So rather than "slippery slope" I think of it more like reducing or building moats.
It’s actually a good example nations should follow. It will still be exploited and sought after which also is a good thing in its own. And that’d be OK. While the general uninformed public, which is oblivious to its dangers, will be spared.
I see what you're saying, but it's a little bit ironic that you write this on a social media platform. Granted, a more niche and focused one with not all of the misgivings of the big platforms, but still.
I don’t think it is ironic. When people quit social media, they usually do not mean quitting to other people via electronic media. Allegorically you could say that same way when people quit drinking, they rarely mean water.
What they mean is quit predatory electronic platforms that only exist to make you addicted so they can use your life and data as a money cow. HN is a dinosaur from the age when forums were just bunch of nerds and geeks talking about computers and stuff.
1) Hence why i put “quitting” in quotes, I certainly still use YouTube,
2) but even as such I don’t consider HN to be a social media platform. It’s more of an RSS feed/forum + comments. Sure it’s a social media platform in the clinical definition. But there are no dark patterns AFAICT, no explicit advertisements to support funding, no corporate-powered psy-op campaigns to sway public opinion.
Twitch problem is not just parasocial... possible to get stalked. sometimes full chat of kids is prompted into disclosing their ages/locations and they do it because guard is down
Twitch works overtime to drive people to spend as much time on streamers, which isn't good for either side. Caps on donations, especially based on age, would go a a long way.
Some 'performers' need comparison to not be whiny little bitches.
Some parents make sure their kids get amphetamines before puberty, or testosterone shots. Just so that they come out on top in comparison. If it's not enough, some go as far as to sabotage other families and to poison other kids.
This whole social media thing is all that on a global scale. Just a bit more subtle in the early days. But it's still poisoning teens.
It's no more than that; sleazy, overwrought, raunchy.
It reduced overall competence which means it kept even the top far below potential. But to them it's enough, and the rest only cares for fun, anyway.
We will never see what could have been. It's not even future generations' luck that it's so obvious. Nothing can be learned from this that would stop the toxicity. Just fall in line and be boringly, hyper-relatablablaby awesome.
It's a showgirl's kind of world. /wu˞…/
(still hitting that depressed tone instead of that cynic, 'noir' kind. Ffs, it's creeping all over me.)
so you litte wanker downvote without adding context? we can have a public debate, if you want. I won't prepare. I'm in the bottom 1% of our species, if you need assurance that you are capable of making me smile with respect for who you are ( I've met very very few who are, but ALL of them have more than I do )
Children social media bans are just an excuse to deanonymize the internet so politicians can send the police after their critics.
https://anzsog.edu.au/research-insights-and-resources/resear...
The ban is supported by a large majority of Australia according to polling, so this is democracy working as intended.
Possibly because they've been misled into thinking it will be effective.
The OP isn't necessarily wrong though: the effect of the law is basically not well understood, hence the popularity.
It's a case of people not understanding what age verification means (you are collecting everyone's ID to do it) and/or nor caring because "they don't use that Internet".
There's going to be a lot whinging once a bunch of boomers and boomer-millennials see an age check prompt on Facebook.
Thank you.
What does this ban actually mean?
As I understand it, it bans kids from creating an account. They can still doom scroll or waste their life watching reels without a login, don't they?
This may push social media back to making their content accessible without an account :)
At least for Twitch that means they can't give money to streamers making a small country's GDP a month.
Almost all streamers have some thirdparty "tip/donation" system set up (usually streamelements/streamlabs via paypal or stripe, sometimes also giving some TTS effects on stream) so that's still possible.
>streamelements/streamlabs
I tried donating via one of these a while ago and got stopped by a requirement to link a Twitch account. Could you give an example of a donation page on there without that requirement?
I'm pretty sure Twitch/YT handles the payment processing; StreamElements/StreamLabs only provides things like the TTS stuff
They run their own donations platform as far as I can tell, you can add various payment processors: https://streamlabs.com/donations
Should kids be able to buy, say, an athlete's or celebrity's merchandise?
And social media companies are compelled to deactivate any existing <16 years old accounts. Not just creating.
On the one hand I’m glad HN doesn’t do embedded images, on the other I’d really like to see this thread just be popcorn eating GIFs.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how this plays out - I feel like Twitch reaches such a large and diverse demographic that the response will be palpable.
I haven’t looked, but I’m assuming this ban already applies to YouTube, right?
> I haven’t looked, but I’m assuming this ban already applies to YouTube, right?
Apparently someone from the government looks at the site and assesses how 'core' the online social interaction is to the site.
Banned: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Kick and Twitch
Not banned (yet): Pintrest, YouTube Kids, Google Classroom, WhatsApp, Discord, online games like Roblox, AI chat.
I'm surprised that Discord isn't part of that ban since it seems so much more social media like. One could argue that it has much smaller private and semi-private groups but there are large servers with hundreds of thousands or even millions of users that are basically the same as Reddit content and user wise.
Steam straddles the line between gaming and social too.
This list indeed seems to be a random selection
Being a parent myself, the list is not random. The ones in the banned list deserve to be there. I would argue Youtube Kids needs to be banned too.
IF the filters actually worked for youtube kids then i would not have an issue with it, some very low effort AI crap keep showing up with the latest brain rot song so i agree.
Discord and Roblox are probably the grooming/edating center of the net right now. The banned ones are just SFW sites where they can see some titties.
Roblox apparently was at risk of being banned but worked with the government to implement extra controls
I thought YT Kids doesn't have comments? Watching videos etc is still possible with the ban.
Seems reasonable to me.
If the aim was to limit children exposure to social messengers, then Discord absolutely must be on the list. I don't know the backstory, but it seems to be a typical exercise of political power by the people lacking expertise in the field.
That wouldn't be totally bad. Besides reducing the power of google and their algorithms over people, it would give an advantage for other platforms to grow.
But of course those alternatives would also be banned at some point in time.
I don't think many adults remember what it was like being 13-16 years old. Twitch is part of the culture. Would I have liked to been "banned" from using IRC, chatrooms or keeping an online diary in the 90s, as were common in geekier teen culture? Not every kid is geared towards playing team sports, chess club, or hiking all weekend. I socialized in person quite a lot as a teenager, but my online life was still very important to me in a way that's only more significant with modern teens (and I know because I'm raising my own now).
The term "online social interaction" keeps getting thrown around as if that's inherently a bad thing. For some teens, that's one of their biggest social outlets outside of school, and that is not necessarily bad even if sometimes bad things happen online. What is bad is when parents don't take an interest in their kids and what they're up to, but you can't legislate for that.
Banned for the wrong reason. It's a cam girl site targeted at kids.
Its not a cam girl site targeted at kids. There are thousands of streamers on the platform playing different games. I do agree that the pool / beach section should be closed but honestly its a minority (look at the viewer stats - kids can get porn a lot easier then twitch). Also, that section is not targeted at kids, its targeted at adults in nations with anti porn laws, which gets apparent when you look at who is donating to the streamers.
A shop showing pornography openly or use of various sex fetish toys while selling also bread is still inaccessible to any kid, so thats a pretty weak argument. Worst defines the overall situation.
Given how fucked up the recent generation in thousand little ways and addictions is, and I personally believe predatory 'social media' and overall resulting physical alienation are the largest culprit, these steps are good or at least well-intended. Those corporations are predatory, aimed at weakest and most defenseless (kids), ruining their future lives one bit at a time.
Sure, it should be mostly parents managing their kids well and giving them smart phones or consoles as late as possible in their development curve, but if something is so harmful, some regulation makes sense. 0 sympathies for meta-esque corporations, its us-vs-them due to their endless greed.
> A shop showing pornography openly or use of various sex fetish toys while selling also bread is still inaccessible to any kid, so thats a pretty weak argument. Worst defines the overall situation.
A more appropriate analogy would be a shop with a clearly marked and separate "Adults Only section"
> these steps are good or at least well-intended.
I might agree that they're well-intended - but the road to hell is paved with those.
>shop with a clearly marked and separate "Adults Only section"
But it's not. Most of them don't even have the useless "are you +18" yes/no button. They are literally featured and recommended on the homepage.
Where though? I just browsed the homepage a bit and didn't see any porn :(
Twitch is not a "cam girl site targeted at kids". It's primarily people playing games, and streaming said games.
It's probably fair to say it's both ;-)
It has not been primarily gaming for at least +5 years. Just take a look at the homepage and categories.
The only 2 non-gaming categories I saw were Chatting/IRL and Music. The majority of streams appear to still be gaming.
Pipeline to OF... And gambling... And extremist views on both sides... Actually I might ban anyone under say 25 from there...
The current Australian government looked into banning gambling advertising, consulted with the gambling lobby and decided not too.
They are a-ok with wall to wall sportsbet ads on football games. I'm sure no kids under 16 ever see those ...
Its not much different from the homeless person by the station begging for a donation
I wish they would’ve just banned smartphones and tablets for kids. Same thing how alcohol is banned. Sure parents will still buy them for their kids but at least for a few hours a day they’ll need to leave the devices at home.
The problem is and has always been parenting and not electronical devices.
There’s immense societal pressure to be on these apps.
We tried for years to not have our kids use these apps. We were doing okay during covid lockdowns. But after lockdowns, when we needed to be with other people, and our kids needed to be with other kids, we caved.
Unless every parent collectively decides (or are forced, hint hint) to not give their kids the devices. The kids will become social outcasts without them.
Are they going to do age verification? And how?
The only way I can think of would effectively require identity verification as well.
They will most likely utilise some sort of system where a photo or short video are uploaded and an AI will make a determination of age. It’s not going to be accurate but will probably be compliant enough.
Then they will say it's broken and demand digital ID to 'fix' it.
The law speifically reuired non-ID methods
> Specifies that no Australian will be compelled to use government identification (including Digital ID) to prove their age online, and platforms must offer reasonable alternatives to users,
> Establishes robust privacy protections, placing limitations on the use of information collected by platforms for the purposes of satisfying the minimum age obligation, and requiring the destruction of information following its use
https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/docume...
Roblox has already begun to roll something out. I’m anticipating about 6-12 months we’ll start hearing news about privacy concerns and all these photos of children have been leaked.
I wonder what the reasoning can be to ban Twitch and TikTok but not YouTube. Because I highly doubt that YouTube will ever be banned. Yet YouTube has shorts and a devilish algorithm, just like TikTok.
"The Australian government has so far named ten platforms to be included in the ban: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming platforms Kick and Twitch. "
Why do you think it is not included?
Because, to my knowledge, it's not included anywhere in Europe. A quick search seems to show that Australia would be the only country to do so. Thanks for the info!
This is imo a much needed move due to how absurdly socially manipulative twitch and other social oriented platforms have become.
A lot of the top dog streamers especially employ cult like social manipulation to ensure that they stay relevant and continue to earn a boat load from exploiting their fans, obviously it didn't used to be this bad and there are still streamers not doing this but it's a general trend downwards towards enabling and normalizing antisocial behavior.
one more step towards let's age-restrict (KYC) everything that is not government approved propaganda
make no mistake, this is about deanonymization and has nothing to do with "think of the children"
...and nothing of value was lost.
This doesn’t go far enough. Kids under 18 shouldn’t be allowed to use smartphones period.
Why just smartphones? Why not all computers?
At a guess;
* Heads up for desktops, head down for smart phones .. avoid early neck problems.
* No one got run over at a cross walk looking at their desktop.
* Probably (debatable) less screen time over all if smartphones banned, desktops left in.
Not a debate hill I'd choose to die on though, it's all very subjective and varies family to family.
> * Heads up for desktops, head down for smart phones .. avoid early neck problems.
> * No one got run over at a cross walk looking at their desktop.
In all the discussions about these bans and the effects of phones and social media on kids, I've never once seen physical health brought up (at least directly) :P
Fair points, but not exactly what I think concerns people like GP :P
> it's all very subjective and varies family to family.
Whoa get out of here that's far too nuanced for this topic.
Not portable and always accessible. It makes a huge difference.