Australian Senate, last sitting of the year. No idea when the Social Media Ban debate is kicking off.
If anyone’s keen, feel free to give a live run-down of anything interesting in this thread.
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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.
tbh I’m more concerned about kids on cod or battle.net than insta chat (research has found a lot of kids using Instagram for absurd numbers of hours are actually just chatting).
In Labor’s defense (as loath as I am to defend them for this), many parents seem to be concerned less with the content of the messages than with the amount of time their children are spending obsessing over it. Which is much harder for them to control on a phone app than in-game console chat.
Still a parenting issue IMO and not a matter for the legislature.
It’s a moral panic. When I was a kid sitting close to the TV would make you blind.
I hate this dodgy piece of legislation. I want socmed regulated to hell, like no non-curated recommendations that aren’t transparent filters like ‘new’ or ‘top votes’, full responsibility as a publisher for the content of messages etc. I just don’t see how a slapshod reactionary ban is going to do much useful for society broadly.
I feel like the platforms will remain just as addictive and cruel, kids will just start using them later, kids will get around bans to use unregulated shithole sites, and people will wash their hands of understanding the actually nuanced problem of kids and screen time.
Meanwhile the police state expands. Cool and good.
We really don’t want this. America’s Section 230 is a really good legal framework, and it’s very important. Because if you didn’t have that sort of protection, it would become almost impossible for smaller competitors to enter the market. The likes of Facebook and Twitter should be made more liable than they are for misinformation that survives even after being reported—and for continuing to host individuals who have repeatedly been seen sharing disinformation. But as a default assumption, platforms should not be liable for content users shared. Unless your goal is to kill off all platforms that aren’t already big enough to easily comply.
Why do you want more social media companies? Ideally the industry is regulated out of existence, at least in its current form.
What social good is served should not be in the hands of companies mining data and advertising. Forums, self hosted federated systems, and chat rooms were/are all vastly superior in terms of social good:harm ratio.
Making it completely unprofitable and impossible to comply with under current mass signup sell ads models would be the point.