I don't think we should normalise children on platforms where the content contains political agitation, sexual and violent content, crypto and fintech scams, etc. Especially when this content is packaged up to them and commodified.

These platforms make more money than the ATO (Australian Tax Office) brings in a year. I think they have the moral obligation and means to create safer spaces- either inside or seperate from their adult platforms; they can reduce or prevent the types of harms when children are exposed to this type of content.

Whether this approach is the best one, or even worth it as it is written in law is definitely something you can argue, but the idea that there isn't a legitimate goal here (keeping children safe), just isn't true. I know not everyone that says this always has good intentions, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing harm upon them.

If you look back at vox pops from when drink-driving laws were introduced, or when seatbelts became mandatory, or when ID requirements were tightened, the arguments for and against were eerily similar. We haven’t changed much in that regard, but now people wear seatbelts, children can’t buy cigarettes as easily as they used to, and drink-driving rates have fallen. I think these are noble goals.

The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content

I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist

I actually do think people directly see the negative public health impact, its so visceral in so many parents lives, and that that is the driving force behind all of this.

I love being cynical, but I actually do buy these efforts as being purely "for the kids", kind of thing. Sure, there are knock-on effects, but I do buy the good faith-ness of phone bans in school and of these social media bans for kids.

Of course they aren't. If they were actually helping kids, they would be going after algorithmic feeds in general and the most predatory platforms like Roblox (especially given its recent scandals), doing something about kids being exposed to gambling advertising, etc.

The bill was put up for public comment for less than one business day before being rammed through Parliament. Australia is just sending out one of the horsemen of the infocalypse so that other countries have an excuse to follow suit. Like how our "Assistance And Access" Act was a test run of the UK's "snooper's charter".

This law will just lead to:

1. kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these filters

2. platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"

3. everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)

>We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions,

When Twitter added its location feature and it turned out that political accounts with millions of followers are run out of Pakistan or India you have to be crazy to still deny the scope of foreign influence that is exerted over social media.

You see it with the rise in anti-semitism or Russia's explicit promotion of influencers targeting Western youth. Why on earth would we let our kids be brainwashed by foreign intelligence agencies? There is no reason to assume this is some "hidden agenda", this is as big of a public issue as the mental health of teenagers. The United States used to have media rules that limited foreign ownership in companies with a broadcasting license, and now 14 year olds get their political lessons straight from Moscow, it's ridiculous.

Agreed. I'm no fan of social media, and especially not a fan of TikTok and Instagram. But I really doubt this is about the kids more than it is about getting another foothold along the path of controlling internet access wholesale.

The Australian government didn’t do this because of any concern about children; it’s to punish (mainly) Meta for backing out of the Australian Social Media Bargaining Agreement [1]. Other social media companies are collateral damage.

News Corp wanted Meta et al to pay for the privilege of sharing links to News Corp articles (imo, ridiculous). Meta played along for a short period, but has now refused to engage, which has clearly upset News Corp (and their shrinking top line). It’s slowly changing, but it’s an unfortunate truth that News Corp still has incredible influence over Australian politicians, hence this had bipartisan support.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/12/meta-coul...

> I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.

Most Australian schools banned phones a while ago. Attempts were made to measure the outcome. For example, South Australia saw a 72% drop in phone-related issues and 80.5% fall in social media problems in early 2025 compared to 2023 [0]. Other states reported similar results. These early figures are a little rubbery, but overall look very good. The social media ban is in part a response to that success.

The only major concern I have is de-anonymization of the web. It's worse than just de-anonymization. They've opened the gate for organisations like Facebook to demand government ID, like say a photo of a drivers licence. It contains a whole pile of info these data vultures would like to get their hands on, like your actual date of birth and residential address.

The sad bit is I doubt de-anonymization was goal, in fact I doubt they put much thought into that aspect of all. If it was the goal there far more effective ways of going about given the corporations permission to "collect whatever data you need to make it work". They could have implemented a zero knowledge proof of age service. But given the track record of their other computer projects, a realistic assessment is it had near zero chance of being implemented at all, let alone on time and on budget.

But if they had of insisted the providers implemented some sort of ZKP themselves, I would have found it hard to argue against given the past experience in schools.

[0] https://ministers.education.gov.au/clare/school-behaviour-im...

Scrollable video is killing the Dems in general, not just because of Israel. It's like all the worst of local news crime reporting on steroids.

Meta == Phillip Morris - This is a public health issue and will likely need to be treated like tobacco. Kids can't vote so I don't see the political motivation.

Australia is a huge contradiction.

“Kids” are no longer old enough to use social media as they are “kids”. At the same time Australia states are updating laws believing “kids” are old enough to be treated as and tried as adults in a court of law.

There's no motive other than "easy politicial win". The kids aren't gonna vote against you (they don't vote), parents will vote for you, you get to show people you protected children and passed legislation. Politicians support anything that keeps them in votes and campaign contributions.

> We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions

I have literally never heard this.

The ban doesn't stop teens consuming social media content like tik tok. Your argument seems like quite a stretch.

All the ban does is stop kids from having accounts, if the service allows anonymous usage then they can still find somewhere to doom scroll. My teen son has been blocked from Snapchat, and was this evening doom scrolling on Tik Tok until I blocked it on our home network.

Non-American countries are also importing a lot of American politics. I'd rather that didn't happen and is alone worthy of curbing in my opinion.

It's also a massive propaganda channel. We can argue about whether any one particular state is involved in that or not but gut reaction is that if this were the real concern, their solution would be to regulate and censor what is posted online rather than kicking them off the platform and thus detaching them from the teat of (alleged) indoctrination. (that push for censorship also exists).

Maybe Australia and the US are not involved in any social media propaganda campaigns but, at least in the case of the US, there is most certainly an abundance of precedence.

I don't know the sincere feelings of these types wrt the safety and well-being of children but I don't think the goal is "getting them back" wrt policy or whatever.

This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.

Why does the motivation matter so much? It’s not a global ban, it’s not a permanent ban, nobody is going to jail. It’s like seeing if moving the smoking age to 18 will improve health outcomes.

It’s ruining their lives as far as we can tell, and at the end of the day it’s just one country testing it out. It’ll be stastically significant, culturally close enough of a sample set for us to learn from.

I’m curious to see what the 1-2-3 year effects are. We need to let some real life experimentation happen, somewhere, instead of accepting what every conglomerate wants.

I get that “it’s easy to say” for me as someone completely unaffected by this law.

The study that was posted last week regarding at school banning of phones was enlightening. It improved scores within two years after a bit of resistance. Boom!

I want them to have a chance at being healthy and well-educated; we can’t stop teens from smoking altogether but we can sure limit their access by default.

All popular grooming platforms were already excluded from this policy

> Rahm Emanuel is campaigning for the same thing in America.

I get the sense this is supposed to signify something; don't know the name, but looking at their profile, great career, Obama's chief of staff. What's the implication?

Both can be true. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the consequences? I'm of the opinion that parents need to help regulate teen exposure, not the government. It does feel a bit like censorship.

Just my anecdote addled opinion but i seems like most of the people being mentally "cooked" by social media are in their 30's ,my generation, and up to maybe late 60's.

In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out?

The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.

Seems like they were particularly angry with our 6 News Aus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_News_Australia

Where kids were reporting on and educating each other about news and politics.

> I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.

I mean... you can say that about most of things in life. Behind every social movement or policy, it's always a mix of good faith, cynical fearmongering, and opportunism by people or organizations who stand to gain something from it. Does it matter?

If you think that social media and smartphones are harmful to the youth, you (a) should probably be glad that someone is doing something decisive about it; and (b) you get a large-scale experiment that will hopefully prove or disprove that.

> I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming this is a good faith move by Australia to help kids in school and with socialization.

Really! My experience is quite the opposite. I see a lot of people explaining why it's a bad idea.

It's four horsemen of the infocalypse 101. Look at the platforms they allowed to continue - discord and roblox, the specific worst of all socials with the most predators, least effective countermeasures.

The purpose of a thing is what it does. Australia's policies do not protect children. They quite brazenly and blatantly leave children vulnerable and exploited. The question of what those actions accomplish has a simple answer - narrative control, censorship, and weaponization of public discourse against dissent.

The real solution to these problems are cultural. If you want the best outcomes for kids, then reinforce stable loving family environments, empower a culture of resilience and competence and capability, impose accountability for wrongdoing, negligence, and careless operation. If teachers and families are leaving kids vulnerable, the solution is better education and more information.

None of the policy Australia crafted does anything good. It's just another power grab using "won't you think of the children?!" as the excuse. Next year it will be terrorism or drugs or money laundering, and they'll keep constricting around civil liberties until they have absolute control.

They'll also put various racial and ethnic officials in prominent positions, so that you may not criticize anything lest you be deemed a racist or bigot (super effective social engineering.)

> they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions

It's well known that foreign actors are all over social and that the west's foreign policy is (rightly so!) hostile to them.

Maybe. Do you forget that people use to not have phones or social media and they still had independent thought? Just because kids aren’t introduced to videos and comments about politics at a young age, doesn’t mean they’re going to be brainwashed by the ruling government. Societies operated just the same before social media.

Edit: Dont get me wrong, there could be ulterior motives, but kids will have other ways to educate themselves on the happenings of the world beside social media

> I don't believe they're overly concerned with "helping the kids" unfortunately

We don't need laws for most things, and yet we've built ourselves a society where everything is a law.

As someone with kids, I’m really surprised to hear this. I viciously keep my kids off social media. There’s no political connection. It’s a safety and mental health concern.

70-74% of voters in Australia and the UK want this. It's also a bipartisan legislation. It has nothing to do with a conspiracy among politicians.

It's not just about the kids either. People know those kids are going to grown up and impact them one day. An avalanche of broken people is not conducive to what I want on a purely selfish level as a non-parent.

Clearly this comment is propaganda. This bill had bipartisan support and the Labor government has a significant share of the young voters who are over 18.

I think adults are barely able to take reasoned political positions in today’s online environment, but at least an adult has the experience to make the attempt. Exposing kids to the type of online political persuasion we have today means that we are exposing them to something they have not got the tools to navigate. They just get swept up into whatever the popular idea of the day happens to be. To me, the argument that separating kids from social media separates them from today’s political onslaught is one of the best arguments in favor of it.

Yep, ADL and others publicly supported the US TikTok forced-sale specifically because of Israel, including the bill sponsors.

Maybe they will use more common sense then getting manipulated by bot farms.

TikTok is not going to make kids better informed about foreign policy.

Yes, specifically Australian Labor hate social media because while they are to the left of the overton window here, in reality they are a centre-right party pretending to be progressive. But social media is where the actual progressive people congregate.

This social media campaign though I believe actually came from a campaign by the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Labor are always trying to placate News Corp media, and News Corp media still blatantly tell their readers not to vote for Labor. It hasn't worked for decades, but Labor seem to believe that one of these days it will be different (it won't).

So politically it ticks some boxes for them, helps them suck up to the newspapers that will always hate them, helps diminish social media spaces where their opponents (actual progressives) congregate, and generally demonising "big tech" does just play well politically here.

A conspiracy theory? This time of the year? In New hampshire????

Apologies, you might be right, you might not, but unless you have some actual evidence you might as well be saying "The Moon landing was a Hoax"

Whether intentional or not, one consequence of a success in this area would be to isolate older people from the views of young people and to stifle the younger generations influence on these communication media in the future.

Personally I suspect these elderly people in powerful political positions to be quite afraid of kids, it wouldn't be the first time in history, but it's likely the first time they're this old and as alienated from younger generations as they are.

Perhaps we're seeing patriarchal class societies mutate into primarily gerontocratical societies.

> We've been hearing politicians complain for years that they're losing the youth when it comes to long-standing foreign policy positions, etc...

What's the alternative? Going back to TV lying that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that in Libya there's a genuine rebellion against Gaddafi?

I'd rather have multiple actors fighting to push their views on social to be honest.

I also don't like how quick is social media to jump on labelling anybody with a different opinion as a troll or a bot. This is especially common on Reddit where basically every single subreddit is heavily biased in some direction, heavily moderated to push some views and some views only.

Instead, what we should teach in school is how to treat news (any news really, even your friend telling you he's got a Playstation 7 but he can't show it to you): questioning it, verifying the sources, questioning the possible motives and biases of the source.

I'll be frank: I didn't mind Russia pushing their own news through channels like Russia Today globally. I always thought it was very important to get the views of the other side.

But my view also requires my (normal to me) attitude: question, question, question, verify.

Problem is: it's hard, it's exhausting. Claiming something false takes 5 seconds, debunking it can take hours. Most people already got their problems, and just don't do any of it.

¿Por que no los dos?

Current social media is terrible for children (and everyone, but we let adults drink and smoke) - this is known. They've been told many times they need to change or they'll get banned. They have not. This is known. It reminds me a little of when Australia banned Amazon because Amazon refused to charge GST (their version of VAT or sales tax).

The surveillance part is about adults having to upload their identity. This concern is entirely separate from the part where children are banned.

Asking "cui bono?" is always a sound question to ask in a political or commercial context, but it should not be the only one. Don't fall prey to appeal to motive. Even if the motivation is self-serving, it need not be bad per se.

Congrats for arguing for... enabling child exploitation?

The esafety report stated it was not allowed for sites to screen all users ages, and that all services had to provide a non id method of age verification.

The enemy (AUS) of my enemy (social media's effect on kids) is my friend (this ban). Their motivation is only mildly interesting.

The policy has like 70% popular support.

"What are they really doing?" is a stupid conspiracy brained question: trying to win the next election obviously and whatever you may think, representing the electorate.

(I hate the policy personally)

I don’t think the US will ever enact a similar ban. The power to shape young minds is too great, even if these service also increase suicides in children to some degree.

The same algorithms that showed IDF war crimes compilations and turned a generation against Israel can be reshaped to push a different, right-wing narrative. The David Ellison’s of the world have too much power to allow regulation getting in the way of this.

What "they" want is secondary - it's a pretty popular move here in Australia, it's what people largely want.

Labor have been failing at giving people what they want recently, and are generally considered rather lacklustre and weak. But like the vaping ban (which was predicted to be and has now been confirmed to be a backward step), this is something parents are generally happy about.

No conspiracy needed.