All is not yet lost in a country where the children rise up as one to evade mandatory age-check barriers to social media.
Reclaim the Net reports the finding that, as judged by looking at 408 Australian teens, some 85 percent “of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still merrily logging on three months after the ban supposedly cut them off from the world.” Maybe not merrily. Perhaps only sturdily or insouciantly. Anyway, rightly. Good job, guys.
The ban is failing because kids know how to draw a mustache on their faces or borrow somebody else’s login.
Their privacy and the privacy of all other users has been invaded; the Australian government achieved that part of its mission. But the assault on everybody’s rights has not accomplished what it was supposed to. The kids are still in grave danger of being texted a link to a critique of the Australian government’s awful policies.
Solution: throw in the towel and roll it all back. Get government out of everybody’s apps. Let parents rear their own children themselves.
No! answer gendarmes like Prime Minister Albanese. Must make it work. Somehow. Like by doubling the already outsized maximum fines — from $49 million to $99 million Australian dollars ($68.6 million USD) that the tech companies must pay for failing to defeat the young people. (When in doubt, loot. . . ?)
Online predators are a problem. But Australia’s social-media engineers won’t solve it by preying on the rights of all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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