Nanny state or good call?

[stui magpie]

A couple of recent news items regarding legislation under consideration hit the criteria of are they nanny state over reach or a good call.

The 2 are the proposal to force age limits on people accessing Social media, depending on the view point anywhere between 14 and 18.

The second is the proposal to limit or ban online gambling advertising.

For mine there's an element of nanny state in both, but also an element of good call, depending where it lands.

Letting kids access social media should be a parents responsibility, but when the parent gives the kid a phone or tablet and doesn't keep tight control of what apps they download and access, there needs to be (IMHO) some controls in place that prevent young kids accessing social media. My kids grew up in the pre-smart phone age so accessing early social media like My Space was done on the family PC in the lounge room where I could see what they were doing. Nowdays it would be a nightmare.
My view on the age limit for access would be 16. If you're old enough to give informed consent to have sex, you're old enough to go on Tic Tok or Insta. (Snapchat should be banned)

With the online gambling ads, they shit me to tears personally and I'd be happy to see them seriously limited if not outright banned, but there's a balance there to be found, Im just not sure where it is.

Thoughts?

[Dark Beanie]

Agree on the online gambling ads, especially at sporting events.
Don't think you can have outright ban but a limit would be good.

Age limits on social media are good in theory but how can you police it?

Many parents give their kids devices without any care about what their kids may access. I have spoken to parents who have given their child a phone so they are 'safe' walking to/from school or on public transport but have not idea about the apps or social media they access. One of the issues is parents/guardians - not just with social media - not wanting to parent as it is all too hard. They leave it up to schools to educate their kids about what is appropriate.

Even with limits, savvy kids will get around it but I suppose it will make it harder.

[Skids]

Yep ban gambling adds, along with adds for alcohol.

Why they are allowed to promote the most damaging drug on the planet as a glamorous, fun thing is mind blowing.

[stui magpie]

^

I actually wouldn't have a problem with at least restricting alcohol advertising. Like online gambling, it's only legal for 18+ but the adverts are viewed by kids too.

Kids will drink if and when they want depending on older role models and peers.

@Dark Beanie I agree with the social media and parents who don't want to parent and also that kids these days are so tech smart they'll find ways around it, but yeah at least make it harder.

[Culprit]

Modern Parents can't say NO and want the Government to introduce a law to ban their kids from Social Media. Gambling Advertising is massive dollars, you take that away it will have an impact. I'd rather see a ban on Harvey Norman advertising in the Herald Sun.

[David]

Seems like typical ALP overreach to me. There's plenty of scary stuff on the internet to be worried about beyond the realm of TikTok and Instagram that a young teen with a smartphone has free access to, and I don't see how attempting to stop them from setting up profiles, chatting with their friends and making videos – i.e. the same thing that anyone who has grown up in the past twenty years has already been doing – really resolves that problem in any meaningful way.

Having said that, I'm less concerned by the more tangible things that people worry about regarding teens on social media and that are undoubtedly being talked up to sell this policy – grooming, cyberbullying, etc. – and more by the general social media addiction that so many of us have and that is being developed at an early age, inevitably affecting real-life relationships, exercise, capacity to take time out and think without constant stimulation, and so on. In that sense I'm a little more sympathetic to the notion of kids not having access to social media at a young age, but I've also never believed that banning is the answer to this stuff. Far better to teach media literacy and skills, and enable teenagers to integrate this aspect of the modern world – and it is part of it whether we like it or not, and will be as they grow up – in a healthy way. Nanny state stuff rarely works out in the long run, and it's inevitably only going to rub people the wrong way.

[David]

Bernard Keane in Crikey on the embarrasing history of Australian governments trying to control the internet:

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/19/an ... media-ban/

Albanese cements Australia’s status as the global village idiot
Bernard Keane

“Parents want their kids off their phones and on the footy field. So do I.” That was Anthony Albanese’s justification for a detail-free proposal to ban kids up to 16 from social media. Too bad if you’re a kid who likes reading, or playing music, or art — it’s the footy field that has the prime ministerial imprimatur. And too bad if you’re a teen who uses social media to connect with others like you, reducing loneliness and stigma. Get out and play a contact sport.

It’s not the first time Australia’s political leaders have embarrassed themselves trying to act tough on tech. We’ve had moral panics about kids online before. John Howard and his then communications minister Helen Coonan succumbed to one in 2007 when they rushed out a $90 million internet filter hastily patched together by the Department of Communications. “Protecting Australian Families Online” (PAFO) was a filter for parents, based on an ACMA blacklist. How did that go? A sixteen-year-old bypassed the filter within minutes. For good measure, WikiLeaks later published the whole ACMA blacklist.

The PAFO debacle was par for the course for the Howard government, which first earned the title “Global Village Idiot” for itself with a remarkable series of assaults on the internet. Howard’s communications minister Richard Alston wanted a national pornography firewall and later a compulsory internet pornography filter on every computer, but never got very far with either. He did manage to ban discussion of euthanasia online — a ridiculous law that remains on the books and hampers effective use of state voluntary assisted dying laws.

Alston also slipped into his 2000 broadcasting changes (designed to prevent digital television from leading to any competition for the free-to-air broadcasters) a proposal to conduct a review about imposing broadcasting regulation on internet streaming, until an outcry forced him to abandon the idea. Alston was also famously hostile to broadband, for which Australia remained a global backwater until Labor’s NBN arrived. He thought the only good use for broadband was pornography, and that it was a “costly waste of time“. Alston’s colleague, and successor as Communications minister Daryl Williams, proposed to criminalise forwarding emails, for good measure.

The arrival of Labor Communications minister Stephen Conroy marked a radical step into the 21st century, especially on broadband, but he too was enamoured with the idea of an internet censorship regime, duking it out with your correspondent in these very pages on the issue. Like his predecessors, he ultimately gave up the attempt (hilariously, the Coalition, which had backed an internet filter when in government, claimed the same proposal from Labor was a sinister plot to control the internet).

The return of the Coalition, however, ushered in another era of repeated quests for Global Village Idiot status. Malcolm Turnbull’s “multi-technology mix” was a disaster that ended up costing $56 billion. Attorney-general George Brandis imposed data retention (which he had opposed in opposition) on telcos and ISPs, in the process delivering one of the all-time great train wreck interviews where he couldn’t tell the difference between metadata and content.

When Turnbull and Brandis turned their attention to banning encryption, Turnbull earned international headlines when he said “the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”

Then there was the debacle of the Morrison government’s COVIDSafe app, which cost taxpayers $21 million and — despite cheerleading from fools in the mainstream media — delivered precisely nothing of any use. Later, Scott Morrison’s handpicked chief internet censor Julie Inman Grant — one of the original proponents of a “papers please” online age verification tool — threatened to shut down the websites of sex workers as part of yet another attempt to remove pornography from the internet.

Ironically, Inman Grant and her team of net censors have actually worked out, after talking to industry, that age verification is a bad idea, saying “a one-size approach for all businesses is unlikely to work … it will take a combination of technological solutions to address the issue”. Indeed, it’s clear from the complete lack of detail attending the prime minister’s commitment to yet more internet censorship that the government has no idea how to produce anything other than yet another silly voluntary filter.

What are the chances it results in yet another dud app like COVIDSafe to add to the parental control apps already available, that will be deleted, unmourned except for the wasted money, in a couple of years’ time? Kidsafe is already taken. How about PAFO? People might have forgotten about it in the intervening 17 years.

[stui magpie]

@David

I don't disagree with much of that and I'm not overly bothered at younger teens accessing the content on Tik Tok or Insta (X maybe) because generally the content (IMHO) isn't the issue. It's the ability to have anyone connect with you, start messaging you, if you have a public profile.

Apart from cyber bullying and grooming, there's also a blackmail scam going around which has claimed lives. Similar to grooming, it involves a scammer contacting teens using a profile pic of a young person of similar age but the opposite sex. They chat, then start sending the teen photos of "themself" asking for photos back in return. The photos get increasingly risque until the teen sends a dick pic or boob shot then they instantly get told if they don't put $X in this bank account in 15 minutes, that photo will be sent to all their online friends.

I read somewhere that Insta was already progressing with something to identify "underage" users and change their profile settings to private along with other interventions that would require parental intervention to change. That's IMHO a good step in the right direction

[Skids]

All in all, the technological age is a disease.

Walking my dog, I see groups of kids, walking to the bus stop, eyes fixed on the phone, oblivious to the beautiful morning, a rainbow, some white tailed cockatoos, a kookaburra singing above.
Nope, they're fixated on the screen, walking like a zombie, oblivious to the world passing them by.
I pity the fools.

[Durka]

And they wouldn't even know who Mr T was.

[think positive]

yes to the gambling block,

re social media, definitely an age limit, however, when will we start making parents accountable for their lack of parenting?

the amount of kids and adults who think its ok to stare at the screen in company of others, and to walk blindly down the road, while people with trolleys and prams navigate around them ..... and the things people post that they would never dare say out loud....

social media is the absolute worst thing that has happened to society.

dont get me started on parasitic so called "influencers". Elle for example saying she "cured" stage 1 cancer with plants and seeds, and the hoardes think they can cure stage 4 without chemo or drugs, not mentioning the lumpectomy she had. People are gullible, you have to save them from themselves.