If there's one thing we know about the Albanese government, it's that they're not deterred by the certainty of failure. I imagine they've had plenty of advice that the idea is unworkable, but have chosen to ignore it.
The common thread with toxic social media is that it's all funded by advertising. The solution, therefore, is to ban advertising. This would be relatively straightforward to enforce - you simply fine any firm which displays one of their advertisements on the account of someone under 16. How can firms ensure their ads don't appear on the accounts of children under 16? I don't know, but I reckon the social media companies could figure it out pretty quickly if they had to in order to maintain the advertising revenue they receive from adult users.
An interesting strategy! But I'm thinking the companies would then implement the ban but under-16's would engage in the same behaviours as described in the article to avoid the ban. Are you suggesting that the threat of a penalty pushes the responsibility back onto the s-m platform to restrict access? Won't that apply int he case of the present ban?
The responsibility lies with the advertising firm. If your ad appears on an under-16's account, you're fined. How the social media firms and advertisers negotiate the payment of the fine is up to them. The point is to have two parties with the same motivation (money) involved in the negotiation, not one party trying to protect the public interest and another trying to make money. Firms pretty much always win when their lawyers take on the government because a) they're motivated by a very simple goal and b) it's much easier to find loopholes than to write a law without any.
This feels like it cashes out to the same policy. If social media companies are liable for posting to teenagers (and ignorance is not an excuse, I presume) then they would need to age verify to avoid it. Why not just cut to the chase?
And I'm not sure the toxicity really stems from advertising, except in the generic sense of advertising paying for the whole platform. The toxicity is mostly just the addictiveness of the algorithms, and the low quality of the content.
Lastly, so much of the advertising is embedded in user-generated images and videos. This would require staff at the social media companies to read/watch every post. They already struggle to keep up with just the material that's flagged.
I agree. But it just seems like the change of business model to "do some age verification" is much easier and cheaper than the change "monitor and vet every single post".
But there's no need of monitoring or vetting. The *advertiser* is on the hook for the fine. All they have to do is notify the social media companies which content contains their ads. There is the possibility of someone maliciously posting a firm's ads to get them fined, but the advertiser could show they hadn't paid for the ads and the malicious actor could be banned.
It cashes out to the same policy, except it has some hope of working. My point is, this is the chase. The toxicity stems from the addictiveness of the algorithm, but why has the social media firm made the algorithm addictive? Because they want to sell ads, so they want users to keep coming back. When you ban advertising, you remove that incentive.
Your objection to the difficulty of monitoring the posts is not a concern, because the responsibility wouldn't lie with the social media firm, but with the advertiser. If an advertiser pays for advertising embedded in images/videos, and that is shown to under-16s, they'll be fined. If they don't want to be fined, they should simply advise the social media firm which images and videos contain their advertisements.
Ok, so they inform the social media site that this post has advertising content. Then what does the site do with this information? Show the post to no-one, or show the post only to over-16s?
If the latter, how will the social media site know that they are only showing it to over 16s?
They show it only to over 16s. I don't know how they know they're not showing it to under 16s, but it's not my problem and I don't have billions of dollars riding on figuring out the answer. They do, and I reckon they'll figure it out. If they can't figure it out, I guess social media is not viable. If social media is genuinely toxic to children, and we can't find a way of keeping it from children, we'll just have to do without it.
But note this is also the case with the Albanese policy - if social media companies can't comply with the law, they can't continue to operate. It's just that my proposal would actually work, whereas the government policy will fail comically.
Yeah I think I agree with all of that second half. More than happy for social media to just wither and die if it can't make itself socially beneficial (I think John Quiggin disagrees with that bit).
It just makes more sense to me to have a law that says "work it out or leave" than a law that achieves the same thing by a roundabout mechanism.
The problem with blocking VPNs is that they are widely used in the corporate world to provide secure access to company systems for employees working remotely.
Yeah I don't see them blocking VPNs. Both in the sense that I think their tech people would tell them it's not possible, and in the sense that I can't see any reason they'd need to.
If teenagers want to doomscroll insta so badly that they're going to evade the checks, then I don't think anyone in government cares that much. They're trying to curb mass behaviour, not eradicate it entirely.
I have just bought a Japanese gardening knife (hori hori) for a daughter in England. Brexit has made parcel post from the EU more or less unusable for individuals so I shopped online in the UK. It's a knife , and can't be sold to under 18s. Amazon UK tried and failed to verify my age, so my online order with them failed. A smaller vendor relied on the honour system and the order went through. The solution here, if you really want one, is for the recipient, not the buyer, to sign for the package with proof of age ID. It's all rather pointless as teenagers can buy kitchen knives at any supermarket.
The episode reminded me of applying for a US visa. I had to declare that I had never been a member of any organisation intending to overthrow the US government by force (I can't swear to the exact wording, but that was the gist). Of course any real terrorist would be ready to make a false statement on this. The point may be that if you do commit an act of terrorism, the false statement provides a simple holding charge while the plod laboriously assemble evidence for the real and more serious indictment. Possession of a knife may perform a similar function in law enforcement.
More to the point, has anyone considered banning recommendation algorithms on social media? In the golden age of the Internet, all sorts of bad stuff was already available somewhere. But nobody was actively pushing it.
I think this will be more successful (on its own terms) than most commentaries I've seen expect.
Two relevant reasons, and then two disanalogies with adult sites:
1. To succeed, the ban doesn't need to make it literally impossible for a 14 year old to access Instagram - it just needs to prevent it from being default 14 yr old behaviour. The entire point of social media is network effects. There's no point being on a site unless a critical mass of your friends are too. It's beside the point to say "you can avoid it with a VPN" - if it requires faffing about, most teenagers won't bother. And if most of your friends aren't bothering, then whats your incentive to? Related, if the problem is the addictive nature of *phone-based* social media, then once again, any degree of faffing about is going to kill the dopamine cycle.
2. The ban doesn't have to work well for the government to keep doing it. Look at countless boondoggle infrastructure projects or "efficiency dividends". Once the gov has staked it's reputation on getting this done, I think they'll find a way! I figure they've got about three months to walk this back if they want to - otherwise kids are getting banned by hook or by crook.
3. Very few people are signing up for an anonymous account on porn sites, or even allowing their browsers to remember URLs. No one in their right mind is going to hand over ID docs or get a third party involved. It's completely different with a major corporation's website that you visit everyday without shame.
4. These are big companies with major Australian revenues which are gained by targeted advertising based on tracking. The government can absolutely interfere with those revenues. They can't ignore the ban like some tinpot adult site with generic banner ads. Because network effects are the point, the government can afford to give special attention to a handful of companies - not something you can do with the entire internet of porn.
And if some smaller players do pull out on principle (X, maybe Bluesky) then some people will be annoyed, but I don't know that it's much skin off Albo's nose.
The problem is how will they know the real age of the user? If I am 12, and want to go to facebook, I will happily lie about my age and add 5 years. If proof is required, I wonder what form this will take. Technically, this seems unworkable to me.
Pardon the tangent, but I love noticing slight language differences.
Here on the other side of the planet, I am pretty sure the only way "spelt" doesn't get a squiggly red underline is because it is understood as one of the so-called ancient grains that make up the sort of breakfast cereal ancient hippies like me buy.
Regularization doesn't need a committee. It just happens, bit by bit and not uniformly. For example, "dove" as the past tense of "dive" would be an error in Oz, but not in the US.
I found a list of 150 irregular English verbs. Only 11 of them are currently undergoing regularization: burn, dream, hang, light, plead, sew, speed, spill, thrive, weave, wed. The process is as you say not uniform across the Anglophone communities, and it is exceedingly slow, a handful per century. Sneak joins dive and spell in the much shorter list of deregularization, often tried out for comic effect, and tested by children..
Re age verification - presumably, commercial entities are already able to do this for their on-line adult customers who have passports, driver licenses, etc. They have enough identity assurance methods to secure financial transactions. All they need for children is access to births & deaths registries. So, when that final step is enabled, Govt may be happy to hand over all identity management to commercial providers, saving Govt the bother.
If there's one thing we know about the Albanese government, it's that they're not deterred by the certainty of failure. I imagine they've had plenty of advice that the idea is unworkable, but have chosen to ignore it.
The common thread with toxic social media is that it's all funded by advertising. The solution, therefore, is to ban advertising. This would be relatively straightforward to enforce - you simply fine any firm which displays one of their advertisements on the account of someone under 16. How can firms ensure their ads don't appear on the accounts of children under 16? I don't know, but I reckon the social media companies could figure it out pretty quickly if they had to in order to maintain the advertising revenue they receive from adult users.
I broadly agree on the role of advertising. I'll be talking more about this in the next post.
An interesting strategy! But I'm thinking the companies would then implement the ban but under-16's would engage in the same behaviours as described in the article to avoid the ban. Are you suggesting that the threat of a penalty pushes the responsibility back onto the s-m platform to restrict access? Won't that apply int he case of the present ban?
The responsibility lies with the advertising firm. If your ad appears on an under-16's account, you're fined. How the social media firms and advertisers negotiate the payment of the fine is up to them. The point is to have two parties with the same motivation (money) involved in the negotiation, not one party trying to protect the public interest and another trying to make money. Firms pretty much always win when their lawyers take on the government because a) they're motivated by a very simple goal and b) it's much easier to find loopholes than to write a law without any.
This feels like it cashes out to the same policy. If social media companies are liable for posting to teenagers (and ignorance is not an excuse, I presume) then they would need to age verify to avoid it. Why not just cut to the chase?
And I'm not sure the toxicity really stems from advertising, except in the generic sense of advertising paying for the whole platform. The toxicity is mostly just the addictiveness of the algorithms, and the low quality of the content.
Lastly, so much of the advertising is embedded in user-generated images and videos. This would require staff at the social media companies to read/watch every post. They already struggle to keep up with just the material that's flagged.
Traditional media have to keep track of their advertising. If it's too hard to do this on social media, maybe they need a different business model
I agree. But it just seems like the change of business model to "do some age verification" is much easier and cheaper than the change "monitor and vet every single post".
But there's no need of monitoring or vetting. The *advertiser* is on the hook for the fine. All they have to do is notify the social media companies which content contains their ads. There is the possibility of someone maliciously posting a firm's ads to get them fined, but the advertiser could show they hadn't paid for the ads and the malicious actor could be banned.
It cashes out to the same policy, except it has some hope of working. My point is, this is the chase. The toxicity stems from the addictiveness of the algorithm, but why has the social media firm made the algorithm addictive? Because they want to sell ads, so they want users to keep coming back. When you ban advertising, you remove that incentive.
Your objection to the difficulty of monitoring the posts is not a concern, because the responsibility wouldn't lie with the social media firm, but with the advertiser. If an advertiser pays for advertising embedded in images/videos, and that is shown to under-16s, they'll be fined. If they don't want to be fined, they should simply advise the social media firm which images and videos contain their advertisements.
Ok, so they inform the social media site that this post has advertising content. Then what does the site do with this information? Show the post to no-one, or show the post only to over-16s?
If the latter, how will the social media site know that they are only showing it to over 16s?
They show it only to over 16s. I don't know how they know they're not showing it to under 16s, but it's not my problem and I don't have billions of dollars riding on figuring out the answer. They do, and I reckon they'll figure it out. If they can't figure it out, I guess social media is not viable. If social media is genuinely toxic to children, and we can't find a way of keeping it from children, we'll just have to do without it.
But note this is also the case with the Albanese policy - if social media companies can't comply with the law, they can't continue to operate. It's just that my proposal would actually work, whereas the government policy will fail comically.
Yeah I think I agree with all of that second half. More than happy for social media to just wither and die if it can't make itself socially beneficial (I think John Quiggin disagrees with that bit).
It just makes more sense to me to have a law that says "work it out or leave" than a law that achieves the same thing by a roundabout mechanism.
My argument is it's not a roundabout mechanism, it's the only viable approach. Or at least, that Albo's approach isn't viable.
The problem with blocking VPNs is that they are widely used in the corporate world to provide secure access to company systems for employees working remotely.
As such, a ban on VPNs would be unworkable.
And in universities as well?
Yes, universities too.
Yeah I don't see them blocking VPNs. Both in the sense that I think their tech people would tell them it's not possible, and in the sense that I can't see any reason they'd need to.
If teenagers want to doomscroll insta so badly that they're going to evade the checks, then I don't think anyone in government cares that much. They're trying to curb mass behaviour, not eradicate it entirely.
I have just bought a Japanese gardening knife (hori hori) for a daughter in England. Brexit has made parcel post from the EU more or less unusable for individuals so I shopped online in the UK. It's a knife , and can't be sold to under 18s. Amazon UK tried and failed to verify my age, so my online order with them failed. A smaller vendor relied on the honour system and the order went through. The solution here, if you really want one, is for the recipient, not the buyer, to sign for the package with proof of age ID. It's all rather pointless as teenagers can buy kitchen knives at any supermarket.
The episode reminded me of applying for a US visa. I had to declare that I had never been a member of any organisation intending to overthrow the US government by force (I can't swear to the exact wording, but that was the gist). Of course any real terrorist would be ready to make a false statement on this. The point may be that if you do commit an act of terrorism, the false statement provides a simple holding charge while the plod laboriously assemble evidence for the real and more serious indictment. Possession of a knife may perform a similar function in law enforcement.
More to the point, has anyone considered banning recommendation algorithms on social media? In the golden age of the Internet, all sorts of bad stuff was already available somewhere. But nobody was actively pushing it.
I'm going to write about recommendation algorithms later in the series
I think this will be more successful (on its own terms) than most commentaries I've seen expect.
Two relevant reasons, and then two disanalogies with adult sites:
1. To succeed, the ban doesn't need to make it literally impossible for a 14 year old to access Instagram - it just needs to prevent it from being default 14 yr old behaviour. The entire point of social media is network effects. There's no point being on a site unless a critical mass of your friends are too. It's beside the point to say "you can avoid it with a VPN" - if it requires faffing about, most teenagers won't bother. And if most of your friends aren't bothering, then whats your incentive to? Related, if the problem is the addictive nature of *phone-based* social media, then once again, any degree of faffing about is going to kill the dopamine cycle.
2. The ban doesn't have to work well for the government to keep doing it. Look at countless boondoggle infrastructure projects or "efficiency dividends". Once the gov has staked it's reputation on getting this done, I think they'll find a way! I figure they've got about three months to walk this back if they want to - otherwise kids are getting banned by hook or by crook.
3. Very few people are signing up for an anonymous account on porn sites, or even allowing their browsers to remember URLs. No one in their right mind is going to hand over ID docs or get a third party involved. It's completely different with a major corporation's website that you visit everyday without shame.
4. These are big companies with major Australian revenues which are gained by targeted advertising based on tracking. The government can absolutely interfere with those revenues. They can't ignore the ban like some tinpot adult site with generic banner ads. Because network effects are the point, the government can afford to give special attention to a handful of companies - not something you can do with the entire internet of porn.
And if some smaller players do pull out on principle (X, maybe Bluesky) then some people will be annoyed, but I don't know that it's much skin off Albo's nose.
Banning VPNs will *never* happen. The downstream effect of a blanket VPN ban will never be acceptable.
The problem is how will they know the real age of the user? If I am 12, and want to go to facebook, I will happily lie about my age and add 5 years. If proof is required, I wonder what form this will take. Technically, this seems unworkable to me.
Apart from the US, how do other countries deal with this ~ education or restrictions?
Thinking of the problem(s) as "social media" is a mistake in my view. I plan to write about this later in the series.
Pardon the tangent, but I love noticing slight language differences.
Here on the other side of the planet, I am pretty sure the only way "spelt" doesn't get a squiggly red underline is because it is understood as one of the so-called ancient grains that make up the sort of breakfast cereal ancient hippies like me buy.
That's all. And now back to reading.
Regularization is taking place all the time, but "spelt" remains standard in Oz. I've heard of the ancient grain, but I don't think we have it here.
Heh, "regularization." That seems like a committee meeting I'd pay dearly to avoid.
I don't mind the differences. I just like noticing them -- I delight in them.
When you see "spelled," does it look wrong? Or are you by now used to reading American stuff that if goes right on by?
Have you ever written/type "spelled" yourself?
Regularization doesn't need a committee. It just happens, bit by bit and not uniformly. For example, "dove" as the past tense of "dive" would be an error in Oz, but not in the US.
I don't notice spelled, but I never write it.
I found a list of 150 irregular English verbs. Only 11 of them are currently undergoing regularization: burn, dream, hang, light, plead, sew, speed, spill, thrive, weave, wed. The process is as you say not uniform across the Anglophone communities, and it is exceedingly slow, a handful per century. Sneak joins dive and spell in the much shorter list of deregularization, often tried out for comic effect, and tested by children..
What is the past tense of "wed" if not "wedded"?
Divorced? :)
Re age verification - presumably, commercial entities are already able to do this for their on-line adult customers who have passports, driver licenses, etc. They have enough identity assurance methods to secure financial transactions. All they need for children is access to births & deaths registries. So, when that final step is enabled, Govt may be happy to hand over all identity management to commercial providers, saving Govt the bother.
"all they need for children is access to births & deaths registries. " Wow!
I use VPNs to protect myself online from hackers, etc. Removing this protection will cause untold damage to all Australians.