Man, fuck reddit. I wish ill tidings for them.
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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It's weird how so much of the reporting on this (e.g. CBC radio news in Canada this morning) focuses exclusively on what this means for teenagers, as if adults aren't also directly affected by the imposition of age checks. Sure the law suppresses the political speech of young people; that shouldn't be controversial, it's explicitly designed to take away some of their main telecommunications tools. The question for the court as it pertains to 15-year-olds is whether that's justified and allowed by Australian constitutional law, which I imagine the government can make a pretty good case that it is.
To me it's the larger question of how far the chilling effect of denying net anonymity to adults will go that seems like the more important one, seeing as it affects everyone in the country.
Anyway it seems like it is not actually a "social media ban" since it does not include e.g. Mastodon — although I've yet to find a good explanation as to how that works legally and whether it's likely to change. For now, maybe we can hope that it will drive a few more people towards the fediverse and thereby do some good, until fedi grows to the point where they feel the need to hobble it too. Assuming of course that the whole project doesn't just collapse in failure.
In one article I saw they claimed that they didn't aim for Bluesky (it acted on it's own tho) because of low user numbers.
Fediverse is pretty much nonexistent next to that so...yeah. They don't care because it's literally not worth the trouble for them xD
Politician: What about these "mastodon" people who seem to think they're above the law? If they won't comply we'll have to shut them down.
Tech advisor: Sorry, there's no way. It's run by thousands of individual people from all over the world, most of whom would not want to have anything to do with our legal system, and most of whom by virtue of their hobby running social media servers are extremely well-connected and would raise an enormous stink about it if we tried anything. Better to just pretend it doesn't exist.
I'm pretty much on the same page. The reporting has been oddly sub-par and absolutely has barely touched on privacy concerns. The handful of things I read and heard only focused on the kids claiming that losing the sites will tear away their social lives? I get it. I had more social media back in the day, but that argument for this situation is a weak one.
Imagine being the CEO who approved a lawsuit against a government that is trying to protect children being subjected to the very documented harms of social media for profit. Imagine that.
I think we need a diagnosis for societally acquired psychopathy.
Broken clock. This law should be challenged. While there's a sour irony in Reddit being the ones to do it, this is actually the right move for Reddit to be making.
It should be challenged by Australians. An American oligarchic organziation by definition shouldn't be able to have any influence on national policies. If the Americans ever clean up their act, which is unlikely, then one should at least consider whether they should be allowed to file such challenges.
That's not what it does though. If it was actually about protecting children they wouldn't have allowed kids to access Roblox, the company who's CEO says pedos are good for business
I wouldn't be surprised if Roblox gets blocked too. Although this is complete speculation on my part.
Is there anything specific around why Roblox would not be banned?
Not an expert, but this seems relatively reasonable. If anything one would think Roblox will eventually fall under this process, that being said, I am just thinking out loud, I could be wrong.
This idiotic law should be challenged. "Protecting children" is an tired excuse used to justify limiting people's freedom and invading their privacy.
Are there that many under 16 Redditors that it would make a big financial impact?
Reddit is actually doing the right thing for once? WTF.
The government needs to support parents instead of censoring the internet.
Don't know why this is getting downvoted.
If it was actually about protecting children, they'd invest in better education and guidelines.
Mass ID demands and fines is lazy and prone to data breaches. Not to mention destroying anonymity.
The neoliberal propaganda runs deep. The Labour Party can do no wrong!
Jesus, this idea that 'parents need to take responsibility'. Social Media companies spend billions to tune their products to be as addictive and consuming as it is possible to be. Children have undeveloped brains which are particularly susceptible to social media influences. It's like saying we should have heroine and cocain freely available to all and 'parents need to take responsibility' if they don't want their kids to be addicts!
The government should uproot the addictive algorithms instead by regulating Meta, YouTube and X.
Agreed. But you can do both. No amount of regulation of algorithms is going to prevent the developmental harm that does to developing minds (not that I have any evidence for that).
Sometimes supporting parents means restricting access to things that are harmful to minors.
Don't defend people's ids getting leaked online by age verification schemes.
HEARTBREAKING: The worst website you know just made a great point