U16 Social Media Ban - Senate 1hr debate before the vote, some time tonight on the livestream

Satire, I thought it was obvious.

It's a wild overstep peddled in the name of "think of the children!!"

As any 12 year old with a porno mag will tell you, kids will get around this without even blinking. And the fun fact is that I, a grown arse adult three times their "acceptable" age to fuck around with the dangerous social media will coincidentally be asked to prove my age, full name, address to any comment I may make online and boy oh boy wait until I say something that disagrees with the obsidian order.

We're in danger of a domino effect happening across the planet where governments finally have the de facto authorization to scour youth and youth culture off the web. For millions this is the loss of a right to access they had assumed from birth. Any argument that applies to children browsing the web applies to adults, since we recurringly prove we're not better decision makers than children.

In my country the elite are pedophiles who want to marry children and allow them to be employed debt trapping them and then forcing them into a financial corner. Our highest lawman was nearly an actual known child sex trafficker but his appointment would have sparked a World War III like series of disclosures and open blackmailing because there are now too many pedophiles running the government to effecticely threaten each other.

There is a type of common sexual deviancy inspired by eastern cartoons that fetishizes the undeveloped body. It is commonly defended by its connosieurs as valid art from a superior enlightened culture. There is a throughline of normalization of child marriage and relationship forming that is slowly being legitimized and trust me it was already legal in half my country to marry children, but not acceptable.

Meanwhile childrens identities are making them targets in school hallways, bathrooms, and gymnasiums. The ramifications of the social world order bear down on them without their consent or understanding. Fascism splits up children into tribal groups and targettable minorities just the same as adults.

Darkest of all is the future promise of more children disappearing into a black hole. Closed borders where only ICE and men like Matt Gaetz and the late great Epstein have the power to move through unabbated. In Trump's first administration they told us to our faces they lost 1,488 children. 1,488 necessary victims of border policy. They lost more than that, 1,488 if you don't know, is a Nazi dogwhistle referring to the 14 words and then signalling allegience to Adolph Hitler. They told us to our face they threw fifteen hundred children down a well. Where are they now?

Who benefits ultimately from controlling what children see and think? Who benefits from being able to silence them? Who benefits from being able speak for children?

Children's rights and liberties are a flashpoint in our civilizations understanding, worship, and secret contempt for the concept of natural and civil rights. When they're shoved off the net another much more easily targettable adult minority will be next.

But that's the problem, this bill does absolutely nothing to rectify that. They could try and hold the companies to account (good luck with Elon on Trumps team), or even better, they could snap back to reality and actually look at educating kids how to navigate and use these online spaces.

Do you think that kids at 16, suddenly getting access with no prior experience or knowledge of how the systems work will be better?

1. We have existing regulation about media and who can watch it, we should update this and apply it as well as we can to new technologies.
2. Children should be taught how to verify information and utilise online spaces healthily, like it or not, these spaces will be around in some form.
3. Parents should be taught how to work with their children and should be held accountable, same as if i let my 13 yr old go to an R rated movie.

There are much worse places than instagram and tiktok, that won't be following any government recommendations. This bill does nothing but enhance the surveillance state, as everyone will be required to verify their identity, what the government is really doing is fighting online anonymity, but please just think of those poor little kids.

I agree with all your criticism of social media, I hate it (this is the only platform I am on) but if they pass this bill, social media will still be round, fucking up the world, just the same.

Most of the Coalition. All of Labor. None of the cross-bench.

Come to Darwin where because there are people who get drunk and do stupid shit and get banned from buying alcohol, we are all punished and must present I.D every time we purchase takeaway alcohol.

Governments love group punishment because it's easiest to implement.

Have mega corporations like Facebook/meta and Twitter/x been held accountable? Because they’ve resulted in kids killing themselves or developing psychological disorders.

What I’m not seeing is the backlash against those.

Fuck our useless government. Incompetent like most. But I’m so sick of the corpos getting a little bit of outrage and then not only do people move on in short order, but they keep using their platform and generating profit for them.

What about “heavy handed” makes you think I thought this was a good idea?

I, and at least one other person here sent submissions in specifically mentioning the fediverse.

Mine wasn't a very technical submission, i tried to focus on the value and potential destruction of that value if safeguards aren't allowed for nascent social media.

So at least there is a record of it. My worry is all the Muskivites submissions will drown out ones like mine.

It's not even clear yet what form the ID checking will take. They've rushed this through way too fast and without proper consultation. But there does seem to be some sort of a plan that the ID checking would be done by a government service in some manner, rather than users needing to send ID directly to the platform.

I'll take that as a no

it's seriously annoying as fuck how there's no exemption for any of these internet regulations based on size, all it it seriously achieves is strengthening corpos and depowering individuals with souls

Games are explicitly excluded from this law.

Which is kinda fucking ridiculous, as pointed out in debate, because in-game chat is often some of the most toxic you'll encounter.