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retiredyesterday at 4:36 PM5 repliesview on HN

Age verification on Australian social media has loopholes. Underage influencers use an agency to manage their social media for them. So anyone with enough followers or money can continue using social media under the age of 16.

If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.


Replies

Barbingyesterday at 4:58 PM

How could one protect the, call it one in 1 million… the speech of the (young) Greta Thunbergs, for example?

I bet there is a 15 year-old much smarter than me making political videos and I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be forced to stop. What if they’re on my “team”! ;) (I kid)

Recalling how we had lots of political debates in high school: if some of those kids made videos and got really popular, and the law made them stop, they would have been incentivized to vote $responsibleParty out.

(Socials bad for kids though maybe they could selfhost their monologues instead)

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everdriveyesterday at 5:09 PM

>Underage influencers

Anyone who has hone so far as to become an influencer is already a lost cause. No law could save them.

ilovecake1984yesterday at 6:04 PM

That’s not really a loophole though. We have child actors in Harry Potter.

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logicchainsyesterday at 4:40 PM

>If you are going to implement age controls, you should implement a ban on underage influencers as well.

That just makes it even worse, why deprive the younger generation of one of the few remaining methods they have to make a decent income? We should be encouraging youth entrepreneurship, not making them spend even longer in classrooms learning things that LLMs will do better than them.

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