This is state censorship targeting vulnerable people. Fuck Australia.
Given the high approval rate for social media age restrictions, VPNs—a clear workaround—are likely to be banned or subject to age restrictions themselves.
The House of Commons in the UK has just proposed exactly this for under 16. Freedom is dying.
If freedom is something that must be won, then groups with little political influence—not only children who lack the right to vote, but all relative minorities—are constantly at risk of having their freedom taken away.
If this law were ever to be repealed, it would likely be when the political influence of children who have grown dissatisfied under these restrictions becomes sufficiently strong.
At least the majority of today’s adults believe this restrictive law is appropriate and beneficial for children.
And this is the reckoning the West is now feeling. The rest of the world has long known this.
And that is what entities like EFF and Privacy Guides along with others are trying to change through educating and spreading awareness.
This is how crazy of a place PG can be. Usser made up a bunch of stats, used it to come to a meaningless conclusion and receives multiple positive reactions.
I think we should try and give answers that are not based completely on conjecture as new users may misunderstand, especially if these answers are positively reinforced.
I interpret it as more a joke than facts when I read the post. But I agree there is a risk of misunderstanding jokes, sarcasm etc. in an online text-based forum.
I can see your point. I’ll put up a conjecture warning
WARNING: The post I wrote below is conjecture, not facts or proven statistics.
Original post:
Any kid older than like 8 years is already engrained into and addicted to social media.
And don’t underestimate 8+ year olds, let alone teenagers. They are resourceful, and won’t just put their hands up.
My estimates:
- 75% of kids in Australia will find a workaround through downloading one of the hundreds of shady free VPNs from the Google Play Store or Apple Appstore, reducing their online safety.
- 20% will ride this out on the verification of someone else. Just asking someone else to verify you.
- 5% of kids in Australia will actually not find a workaround for it because their parents said so.
So those 5% are effectively be reached by this law, not because of the law implementation, but because of parenting.
That’s very reasonable of you.