Social media ban not an effective solution
RMIT University Media Release
The Federal Government is planning to introduce a minimum age restriction for social media platforms to prevent harm. RMIT experts comment:
Lisa Given, Professor of Information Sciences
“Government calls for a ban on social media for young people are premature and not supported by clear evidence.
“Children need to gain the necessary skills to navigate online worlds – including social media – and banning them from these platforms is not the solution.
“Parents and teachers play a key role in supporting children to develop technical and information literacy around these platforms. Adult support is also critical if a child is navigating harmful behaviour online, such as cyber-bullying.
“Young people may also find ways to circumvent these bans and be less likely to disclose if they have encountered harmful content.
“There are technological challenges around age verification that will make a ban very difficult to enact or enforce. For example, strategies of age assurance are easily circumvented by users, while strategies for verifying age raise data privacy concerns.”
Lisa Given is a Professor of Information Sciences at RMIT University. She is director of RMIT’s Centre for Human-AI Information Environments and the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform.
Dr Dana McKay, Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information
“Social media is one of the only public spaces where children can communicate directly with their friends – often maintaining connections with distant friends and loved ones that would otherwise be impossible.
“Banning children from social media is a blunt instrument that ignores the social benefits children get from having direct communication with their friends.
“While there are risks inherent to social media, these risks could be addressed by regulating social media rather than children.
“Many of the problems can already be addressed by minimising advertising and detecting and addressing harmful interactions through behavioural analytics, for example.
“The answer to the challenge of social media and kids isn’t banning kids from one of the final remaining publics available to them; it’s making those publics safer.”
Dr Dana McKay is Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University. Dana’s research focuses on ensuring advances in digital information technologies make the world a fairer and more equitable place.
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6 comments
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Andrew Smith -
Keitha Granville -
paul walter -
Pete -
Clakka -
paul walter
Return to home pageNot sure whether the adult proponents understand &/or use social media, but good for ‘pensioner populism”?
Those needing guidance and/or control are ‘adults’ rusted onto RW MSM, iincluding those in politics and media, who are the targets of ‘influence’.
Spot on Andrew. It’s up to parents to KNOW what apps their children have access to, banking them will only encourage underhand use, older children or adults will help kids to be “older” for the purpose of joining. Far too many small children, under 12, have mobiles with everything on them – that’s down to parents
Just a wedge for censorship of the political kind. They have been called out on soc media in the absence of broadsheet legacy media reportage on a number of issues the politicians don’t like being exposed on.
Secondly, censorship seem a bacterium spreading like a pan demic right across the world just now.
” White man speak with forked tongue”..
Sounds true paul w, while children can benefit from guidance, the bigger picture is the control freaks in govt are trying to use this issue as an excuse to get a foot in the door for more censorship everywhere. TPTB will use children to further their plan to force digital ID on us all and their main weapons will be as usual – fear and guilt.
The main aims of the exercise, which relates to their personal insecurity and is driven by greed, are to:
– shut down ‘dissident’ adults who can think for themselves;
– memory hole everything that doesn’t fit with their narrative;
– ignore any opposing views, especially if it is backed up by real science.
That is where we are at today.
The ‘Enlightenment’ looked like a signal of a new age, now we have dictators coming out of the woodwork. If people don’t push back we’ll be more authoritarian than China or Russia before you can say ‘Govern me harder daddy’. There will be some people who are happy not to think it through, happy to want to live according to whether they have a green screen with a tick on their phone rather than a red screen ‘Stop and report to . . .’ for the rest of their life, but I’m not one of them. 15 minute travel zones and food choices based on some bureaucrats whim or algo are not my thing.
On the topic of memory-holing, what happened to the 911 annual talkfest this year?
At least Judy Wood’s work, ‘Where Did the Towers Go?’ still exists.
https://archive.org/details/where-did-the-towers-go-eviden-judy-wood
The internet and social media was a great ideal and had the potential to liberate ideas across the globe, that is until the manic govt supremacists and their tech oligarchs got their evil fangs into it.
The next great corruption will be genAI. It’s already started with the usury, exploitation and corruption of chatbots and virtual assistants.
yep. You blokes get it.