But how goods betting on sports?
Betting may as well be our national sport.
“Angry American that profits from promoting US companies that make trillions from gathering personal data, attacks Australia, calling the country stupid for attempting to protect it’s children from said companies”
Alternative title: The Internet Completely Loses The Plot, Claims Australian Government Plans To “Ban Kids From Watching YouTube”
Is this social media under-16 ban going to be a problem for aussie.zone?
Who: Yes, Aussie zone appears to fit the definition of a social media site.
What: “A provider of an age-restricted social media platform must take reasonable steps to prevent age-restricted users having accounts with the age-restricted social media platform.” Details are a bit scarce on “reasonable steps”. There’s a bit about how we are not to collect Government ID details though.
When: Presently December 10, 2025 but the bill is worded such that they are prepared to shift it.
Why: Protect the kiddies from the evils of the site. By the way, if you spot any actual bad content please report it.
How: and now we get to the big question. I truly don’t see how you’d enforce this on Lemmy. Even if a perfect system were introduced to verify everyone’s ages somehow, nothing stops people from shifting to a non-australian instance and just keep using the site. Or just spinning up their own private instance at home. Lemmy federation works a bit like email - imagine trying to stop kids from being able to access email. Again, I just don’t see how you’d accomplish that.
So, we’re doing what the government is doing. Keeping an eye on things and waiting to see how the big players respond. I’d love to see Facebook or YouTube to just go ‘nup’ and withdraw from the market. The public backlash would be insane and this bill would quickly vanish. People are asleep on this thing because they don’t really see it affecting them. Yet.
The UK has just introduced an age verification thingy, and it’s off to a poor start. The words are nice, but putting them into action is not trivial.
nothing stops people from shifting to a non-australian instance and just keep using the site
We get to keep using the site AND traffic costs decrease for aussie.zone. Win-win!
email is allowed and read only access is allowed, so if someone makes an email based posting/commenting frontend for lemmy you could host that and disable lemmy-ui /jk
actually if you just disable lemmy-ui and keep hosting the backend, can you just tell the users to use other frontends to access the site? surely API access is fine?
It’s going to apply to search engine sign ins and Spotify too
I’m not sure yet, but it sounds like Lemmy is within the scope of the legislation.
Key features of the SMMA include:
- Requires age‐restricted social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years old from having accounts (the minimum age obligation),
Under the SMMA, a platform is an ‘age‐restricted social media platform’ if (section 63C):
- the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‐users,
- the service allows end‐users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‐users,
- the service allows end‐users to post material on the service, and
- it meets such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules
If, hypothetically, VPNs and Gary’s mod don’t work, and our favourite channels don’t move elsewhere … how many of us would be willing to hand over our ID to maintain access to YouTube?
You don’t have to hand over ID, YouTube (and all other services affected by these new laws) must provide an alternative for those who do not wish to use ID. If you’ve maintained an account for over 16 years, YouTube may also be able to use that data to pass an age assurance check.
Will anonymous access still be allowed? I remember there was some vague wording about logged in vs logged out in terms of search engines, which seemed to suggest that only logged in users would be affected. Presumably there would still be age-gated content, though, which historically required a login. Hopefully that doesn’t expand if that’s the case.
Will anonymous access still be allowed?
To YouTube? Yes. The legislation requires social media companies to ensure people under the age of 16 do not have accounts. It does not prevent people under the age of 16 from accessing these social media platforms whilst logged out. For something like Facebook or Instagram, which rarely work unless logged in, this will have a significant impact, but for YouTube it makes barely any difference. I haven’t used YouTube logged in for a very long time and there is very little that is off-limits, beyond highly graphic content, so this is a far cry from the “ban” it has been hysterically portrayed as in the media.
The search engine thing is a different piece of legislation I believe, but it also does not require you to be logged into an account to perform web searches. You will still be able to use Google and Bing with default safety settings enabled.
so this is a far cry from the “ban” it has been hysterically portrayed as in the media.
I agree the media reporting has not been great, but my concern is more about slippery slope type effects where this will be extended to cover more and more sites. Some would argue that “slippery slope” arguments are fallacious, but I think there is a point here, especially when laws that can be argued to “protect children” are hard to roll back due to the political risk (and are easy to expand for the same reason).
I agree and I am concerned too, given that the Australian Government has a track record of encroaching on civil liberties under very vague “security” and “safety” justifications. I do think regulation in this area is very important, though, and that perhaps the only realistic way in which occurs is via some encroachment on our individual freedoms as netizens. I find a lot of people who claim to only be opposed to this specific implementation are actually just outright opposed to literally anything that even minutely affects them once you coax their ideology out a bit more, and I’m definitely not in that group. There is an important balancing act to make here between complete individual freedom and combating a widespread societal brain drain and mental health decline in young people, and my feeling is that many of the loudest opponents are only interested in the former, purely for selfish reasons.
I’m going to lose access to my playlists and have a hard time finding rare versions again or song titles that are hard to search.
Random things also can get flagged as mature
Video playlists? You can export those outside of YouTube. I use Grayjay so exported all my subscriptions and playlists a long time ago (hence why I no longer watch through an account).
Cool thanks. I’ll check it out
I personally use a mix of grayjay and revanced. Grayjay is missing a few QoL features like a sleep timer. You can always make a burner account for revanced if you want to keep to a single app but honestly I find it works fine when I use it!
I’m not
