Most of the post is geared more towards Mastodon/microblogiverse content, rather than Lemmy/threadiverse stuff. There’s a lot of cultural overlap, but where they diverge, this post aims for the former.

Direct link to the Toot.

You’re welcome, @[email protected]

Do you think that these are unrelated? Capitalism builds on puritanical protestant ideology, which played a part in the early spread of capitalist ideology. See Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It’s not a perfect cause and effect, but rather one piece of a web of cultural influences.

Off topic, but 4chan is exempt from Australia’s recent social media minimum age laws because of the fact that it doesn’t require accounts.

Most, if not all, of these year in reviews is literally “here’s a summary of the things you explicitly did on our platform while logged in to your account this year”. It’s kind of absurd to call that tracking. Like, Lemmy and Piefed do have that data, this meme aside. It’s literally located at https://lemmy.ca/u/ech (admins, but not regular users, can also see upvotes and downvotes). They just chose not to do any sort of summary or analysis of your data for the year.

I suppose then, for any child born around 00:10 on 1 January, there might be some pressure to encourage the doctor to write the birth certificate as something more like 23:50 on 31 December? Because of the social prestige with being older?

Or maybe the opposite, since being physically older than your peers is correlated with better academic and sporting performance?

A few years ago, iirc, the Korean government instructed people to stop using the traditional system and to use the international system instead. Has that had much of an effect in practice, or are people largely ignoring it? Or do you think it’s something that younger generations will pick up more over time while older people continue using the traditional system? (This last option being sort of what happened in Australia when we transitioned to metric through the '70s.)

Also, what happens to someone born on 1 January? Are they born du sal, and thus the youngest of their sal, or born han sal and remain han sal for a whole year?

On the nation-state

Then I think it’s really important that you are clear about that, mainly with yourself, but also any time you talk about the issue in public. Conflating Israel with all Jewish people is a deliberate attempt by the Israeli government and its supporters to make it easier for them to brush off criticism of their actions as “antisemitism”, and is itself an antisemitic act.

It’s also a major factor in increasing genuine antisemitism, because some people see the atrocities the Israel government is committing, see that Israel claims to be acting on behalf of all Jews, and then they turn around and blame all Jews for the actions of Israel. Which only serves to help Israel’s case, which is why it’s so important we be clear about the distinction whenever possible.

that’s kinda harsh on jewish people

Harsh on Jewish people as a whole, or harsh on the nation-state of Israel and its supporters, many of whom are Jewish?

I don’t particularly like the notion that it’s unreasonable to expect to be able to get healthy food at affordable prices without being required to use a car…

Or the conflation of using a cargo bike with being some impractical urban hipster.

They might have actually somehow managed to come up with worse logos than Google uses. I assume the top one is an email app, the bottom left is a file manager, and bottom centre is a password manager? But I’m less than certain about those, and everything else is a complete mystery.

Sorry mate, but you’ve got it wrong. The Prime Minister has specifically come out and said that this law is aimed only at companies, and that children or the parents of children who are able to get onto social media anyway will not be punished. Only the companies that let them slip through.

And you only need to read the legislation to see that that’s true. There are no penalties associated with accessing social media under the age of 16. Only with “a provider of an age-restricted social media platform…failing to take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts”. Or less closely related, “a provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not collect information…for the purpose of complying with [the above requirement] if the information is of a kind specified in the legislative rules”, and another similar “a provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not…collect government-issued identification material…for the purpose of complying with section [the above requirement]”, but this last clause “does not apply if…the provider provides alternative means…for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user”. It is also the case that a person who provides an age-restricted social media platform “must comply with a requirement…to give to the Commissioner, within the period and in the manner and form specified by the notice [about that person’s compliance with the law]…to the extent that the person is capable of doing so.”

That’s it. That’s all the new penalties that can be applied.

Here’s a page from the eSafety Commissioner that also confirms it.

Are there be penalties for under-16s if they get around the age restrictions?

There are no penalties for under-16s who access an age-restricted social media platform, or for their parents or carers.

The fact is, right now we know that Facebook has at times made a deliberate, conscious choice to leave in aspects of their algorithm that were causing harm. Their own studies have shown this. Making that practice illegal—knowingly causing harm with your algorithm—would be a good place to start with regulation.

no age can go on the internet.

I don’t think anyone had ever suggested anything like that.

it’s way too obvious that this law ain’t gonna achieve its stated aim

Absolutely. See my much longer comment elsewhere in the thread for all the real problems with this bill. We don’t need conspiracy theories. Hanlon’s razor very much applies here. It’s incompetence, not malice.

However, I think we can look at the worst part of this Bill—the nature of its passage through Parliament—for a clue as to its underlying purpose. It passed in just a week, right before Christmas last year, but didn’t actually come into effect until yesterday. The goal was good PR. I suspect not rattling cages with the big social media companies was part of it too. They wanted to look like they were doing something to protect kids, and hopefully win the election off the back of it (not that they needed much help with that, with how incompetent the LNP were), but they didn’t want to put up the fight that would be necessary to force the social media companies into actually making their algorithms less harmful…to children and adults. It’s lazy, it’s cowardly, it won’t work. But it’s not a secret ploy to spy on you.

with Labor getting over half the lower house seats from about a third of the votes

Yikes. This is some really dangerous misinformation. Labor received 55% of the votes. Because we use an actual democratic system, not the FPTP farce that America and the UK have. You cannot compare first preferences in IRV to votes in FPTP.

Step one is stuff like this, require id to verify your age

Right, but the law doesn’t do that. In fact it was specifically forbidden from doing that. Here’s the full text of the Bill. Section 63DB specifically says:

(1) A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must not:
(a) collect government-issued identification material; …

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if:
(a) the provider provides alternative means…for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user

In plain language: you can only accept ID to verify age if you also have some other method of verifying age instead.

So far, it looks like most sites are relying on data they already have. The age of your account, the type of content you post, etc. Because I have not heard of a single adult being hit with a request to verify their age anywhere other than Discord, and even on Discord, it’s only when trying to view NSFW-tagged channels. (Which is an 18+ thing, and completely unrelated to this law, which is 16+ for all social media. Despite Discord having been officially classified as not social media, but a chat app, which does not apply.)

It also says, in 63F:

(1) If an entity:
(a) holds personal information about an individual that was collected for the purpose of, or for purposes including the purpose of, taking reasonable steps to prevent age - restricted users having accounts with an age - restricted social media platform; and
(b) uses or discloses the information otherwise than:
(i) for the purpose of determining whether or not the individual is an age - restricted user; or …
(iii) with the consent of the individual, which must be in accordance with subsection (2);
the use or disclosure of the information is taken to be:
(c) an interference with the privacy of the individual for the purposes of the Privacy Act 1988 ; …

(2) For the purposes of subparagraph (1)(b)(iii): (a) the consent must be:
[(i–v) voluntary, informed, current, specific, and unambiguous]; and
(b) the individual must be able to withdraw the consent in a manner that is easily accessible to the individual.

(3) If an entity holds personal information about an individual that was collected for the purpose of, or for purposes including the purpose of, taking reasonable steps to prevent age - restricted users having accounts with an age - restricted social media platform, then:

(a) the entity must destroy the information after using or disclosing it for the purposes for which it was collected

In other words, whatever information you collect to do the age verification, unless you already have it, with the user’s consent, for some other purpose, you must not store their information.

It would not have been hard to just not include that part of the law. Some privacy advocates would have spoken up about it, but the general public would have probably brushed it off. No, they included that because this isn’t about information harvesting. It’s a misguided but genuine attempt to protect kids. And, if you’re looking for a more cynical spin on it, it’s to win some good PR with people for being able to say they’re protecting kids, while also not doing anything that would substantially hurt big tech’s bottom line…like regulating the algorithms themselves.

But again, you mentioned the US government. What does that have to do with this? This is a law passed in Australia, but the Australian government. An entirely different country, and one with an actually functioning government and legislature.

First of all, what does the US government have to do with this?

Second, I made quite a detailed comment. Which bits do you disagree with and why?

Most people are viewing this as a good way to prevent misinformation brainwashing

If only the government had actually made that the law. Crack down on the harmful algorithms that commercial social media use, instead of this shit.