Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 just became law. How it will work remains a mystery

The legislation does note that some services are “excluded”, but does not name specific platforms. For example, while services providing “online social interaction” would be included in the ban, this would not include “online business interaction”.

Looking forward to watching Facebook claim it's all a business interaction because they're selling the user data or something. Also surely this includes any and all online forums.

@spiffmeister @Joker I'm interested in how they'll handle iMessage. And if they allow iMessage, why not Signal? And so on. Gonna be some interesting lines have to be drawn.
- I they're going to need Mr. Squiggle to make those lines look like something coherent.

How does China verify users on all their apps?

Everything the Center for Humane Technology has ever done should be mandatory reading, viewing and listening for anyone who attempts to insert themselves into the debate over this. It's so tiring hearing completely uneducated morons from all sides making the same basic bitch arguments over and over again Hopefully now they can all shut the fuck up for five seconds and stop shitting up the discourse on what is a very important issue.

The likes of lemmy instances may be either small enough to fly under the radar, or handwaved away by legislators with "don't worry it's not the target of this legislation", or even be given easy access to ministerial exemption ...for now (maybe).

The kicker comes in 10-15 years' time when, say, a government's donor inconvenienced by protests organised using a self-hosted forum then asks the government to crack down on the age verification requirements of that forum, effectively silencing it due to the requirements being too onerous for a small forum, or the userbase being unwilling to submit their IDs/faceprints/whatever.

This may be the doomer in me, but I fear this will spell the end of Aussie.zone - Lemmy fits the definition of social media, but I don't know how it's feasible for @lodion to verify every user's age...

Liked this solution from chinwag. https://chinwag.au/verification/
- That sounds pretty good. The problem is that getting the Gin to @lodion may be a bit tricky. Also the quality of server administration may not be to the same standard as they dispose of the Gin.
If that's the case, we just all pack up and take over some British instance.

A little payback for the colonisation /s
- A possible ban on social media for under-16s in the UK is "on the table", the technology secretary Peter Kyle has told the BBC.

To be extremely clear: the Government announced that this was an enormous priority that had to be rushed through. They introduced it last Thursday, closed submissions on Friday, and held the inquiry on Monday. Then it was passed by the House on Wednesday and the Senate had a grand total of 1 hour to debate amendments to it on Thursday.

All this incredible haste and lack of due process for a Bill that will not take effect for at least a year. It's optics, pure and simple.

Well done to the Greens, independents, and LNP Senators Canavan and Antic for having some fucking integrity. Regardless of whether the Bill itself may have ended up being agreed to, the process by which it was passed is inexcusable.

Here are some of the things that were proposed as amendments to this Bill, that the Labor and LNP uniparty voted down.

The Minister must, by legislative instrument, formulate guidelines for the taking of reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with age-restricted social media platforms

In other words, before the Bill actually comes into effect, there need to be some guidelines about what the fuck it actually means. But apparently Labor and most of the LNP (Canavan—who moved this amendment—and Antic aside) don't think guidelines matter.

the Minister must be satisfied that the legislative rules would not have the effect, or be likely to have the effect, of substantially lessening competition in the market for that kind of electronic service

Labor and the LNP are specifically aware that small guys...like us here on Lemmy...might be hit harder, and decided to vote not to make sure the rules prevent that from happening.

[Remove:] If an entity...uses or discloses the information otherwise than...with the consent of the individual...the use or disclosure of the information is taken to be an interference with the privacy of the individual

Ok I've summarised this one immensely because the way it's laid out is very technical. I'm referring to amendment 3215 by Canavan if anyone wants to verify it.

But basically, Canavan (and Pocock, who moved a similar amendment) wanted to say "if you collect this data, you must only use it for verifying people's age. Even if you get consent to use it for other reasons, you're not allowed to." This would have absolutely enshrined the protection against things like "oh but we put a tick box to get consent to use it for other purposes and they clicked it."

Labor and the LNP didn't want this.

an individual is not an age-restricted user if...a parent or guardian of the individual consents to the individual not being an age-restricted user

Yup. Parents are not legally allowed to declare that their children can use apps. Because Labor and the LNP voted this amendment down. Now, if a parent helps their child do it anyway, the parent and child can't get in trouble, but the platform can, because platforms cannot knowingly allow children to use the app, even with explicit parental consent and supervision.

Now, if a parent helps their child do it anyway, the parent and child can’t get in trouble, but the platform can, because platforms cannot knowingly allow children to use the app, even with explicit parental consent and supervisio

Not correct. An inadverdent act is not illegal, but circumventing telecommunication controls is a criminal offence under the Telecommunications Act, with penalties up to 20 years imprisonment.
If they were rushing through the bill then any amendments in the senate would require the bill to go back to the house. Partially explains the reluctance to consider amendments (though why bother with debate then).

Depressingly

The ban is, however, backed by 77% of Australians, according to a new poll.

Most of whom probably don't care how it was passed or details on the amendments.
- The bill was passed by the Senate after amendments. It had to go back to the House anyway. They just chose not to pass many of these quite common sense amendments raised by one of their own members (Matt Canavan), meaning they had plenty of time to consider their opinion and would have voted on it with that prior understanding in mind; they're not being blindsided by something they have yet to have a chance to fully form an opinion on. The House received the Senate's amended Bill and passed it within minutes.
Jesus chriat they shoulda just slapped in one that said 'this is about monitoring citizens'

You can't see it, but I have my dubious face on.

It'll be interesting to see the definition of "social media". All I've seen so far is a list of sites/services that will be banned/exempt.

Lemmy doesn't seem to fit into such a law. Lock down a pile of sites running Lemmy, another instance pops up isn't covered by the ban. "Ban Lemmy software, then" I hear you say. Thing is: Lemmy is open source. Someone can fork it, release a new federating service software called TotesNotLemmyLol on their site and get around the ban.

I genuinely can't tell how the government will implement this.

I say this as a dad to a teenager who will be affected by this law, and no - I wouldn't want him unsupervised on Lemmy. He'd be safe enough in Local (you guys are lovely), but it's a dark world out there.

I reckon this instance will be considered social media, I don't really see how it wouldn't be. I imagine even if you were to move this instance to a server outside of Australia, you both being Australians means you'll still have to manage ID verification crap

I'm not so stoic, I think this probably will end up affecting all of us here
- The act is online now. Lemmy is clearly defined as social media under Section 13a of the act.
  
  Of course, I have no idea how we'll comply with the act - there's obviously no existing field or provision in the Lemmy Code to enter a private identifier as a user to confirm your age. We have a year to figure that out.
  
  It's also hilarious to imagine international instances complying. Imagine the scenario: Kyrgyzstan has passed a law that states that all its users must provide an ID to use aussie.zone. Are we going to comply with this law? How many of our users are Kyrgyz? That's what this law appears to call for - asking our friends at lemmy.world (who are hosted in Finland) to comply with an Australian law because some of their users are Australian.
- @Baku @Nath Oh. So even if I set some things up in Singapore (closest with decent latency I think) then I, being resident here, can still be punished for not requiring age verification on it? That seems helluva over-reach.
  Mind you, whole concept is an over-reach.
They won't ban the site, they will just fine them for not verifying age (30,000 penalty units, 1 federal penalty unit is $110).

Lemmy does fit the definition outlined in the act, the thing they haven't defined is what the reasonable steps will be to verify age. It will likely only apply to sites hosted or with a presence in Australia. Its not like they can fine an instance in a random country although maybe if it's a jurisdiction that will play ball (maybe 5 eyes countries, maybe close trading partners).

That's the neat part