Yeah. I'm pretty sure for profit social media isn't good for anyone. Adults shouldn't use it either. But we decided long ago that you can't stop adults from drinking or smoking weed, so adults are just mature enough to handle it or approach lies and manipulation with more skepticism, but I look around and see it's not true.

I feel like at least things like Lemmy and Mastodon are much easier to filter or walk away from when you aren't in the right emotional space.

Why are you here then?

How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done?

You are being intellectually lazy and it shows.

if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can't get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can't retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them.

https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/

Spring 2025

A few weeks ago, a YouTube short caught my attention. The short was yet another commentary on how Gen Z supposedly can’t focus on a particular thing for more than a few seconds. I scrolled through the YouTube comments and noticed a refrain: studies prove it. Everyone’s attention span is shorter, studies prove, as we become more deeply immersed in a digital, screen-filled world (insert unknown source here). Today’s teens, studies prove, bear the brunt of this crisis with an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish.

Something about that claim gnawed at me. After years of experience in the field of educational development, I knew the reality was more complicated than these sweeping generalizations. Where were these studies everyone kept referencing? What evidence existed behind this seemingly universal belief about our shrinking ability to focus?

I suspected I might find only a few studies to support the claim. I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence.

...

The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).

Advocacy group Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA) says social media and the internet is “often a lifeline for young people with disability, providing one of the few truly accessible ways to build connections and find community”.

In a submission to the Senate inquiry around the laws, CYDA said social media was: “a place where young people can choose how they want to represent themselves and their disability and learn from others going through similar things”.

“It provides an avenue to experiment and find new opportunities and can help lessen the sting of loneliness,” the submission said. “Cutting off that access ignores the lived reality of thousands and risks isolating disabled youth from their peer networks and broader society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-lost-my-friends-advocacy-groups-warn-australias-social-media-ban-risks-isolating-kids-with-disabilities

You sure about that buddy? Confident enough to maim the fragile social networks that young people living in hostile environments may rely on imperfectly in favor of another solution you haven't even come up with yet?

Leave this place if this is how you see social media, by your own viewpoint digital communities aren't good for people so why are you here?

I don't think that uploading a government ID makes anyone safer online, especially when those IDs are guaranteed to be exposed online, and used to abuse people the legal way (through hyper detailed profiles).

Australia also lacks common-sense free speech protections, so it's easy for powerful people to target anyone they dislike. Just ask Friendlyjordies.

Fair enough, but for the record I am not just arbitrarily mad about this.

This is the fediverse.

We should be excited about the possibility of social media when it is employed in a kind way for adults and younger people.

How am I supposed to feel optimistic when even here people resort to kneejerk reductions about social media moral panics without engaging with the nuance?

Yeah it is frustrating, but you aren't wrong. I am angry because I care.

These places still exist, although admittedly they're further from the spotlight and many were sapped by mainstream general-purpose platforms. But there are thousands of them around for those who care to look. I don't even think it's a stretch to say we're on one, community hosted by Aussies for Aussies.

Back in the old days we used to run forums and mailing lists for people of various interests. People used to make their own little idiosyncratic places full of creativity. I miss it so much.

Me too, friend. Me too.

The central reason why we can't have it anymore is that governments around the world have regulated it away. One example being what the article in the OP is about. 🙁

Agreed, completely. I used Facebook for all of 9 months before I did the self reflection and realised that it was like voluntarily poisoning myself and got out in, I think, 2012 or so. I was unemployed at the time and it became clear to me that it was doing bad things to me mentally and I was developing an addiction to the scroll.

Imagine if you would that instead of this garbage social media ban on kids we had some serious investigation into the corrosive nature of these social media orgs and they were held accountable for every bit of "experimentation" they conducted without informed consent. While we were at it we could have maybe whipped up some regulstion to curb the gambling industry.

The only people I have personally talked with who say the teen social media ban is unambiguously good just so happen to be the same people whose brains have been completely cooked by a combination of Facebook and Sky News. I kid you not when I say that the last person to loudly assert social media ban good also told me about the time he threatened bodily harm to a man who was wearing a mask immediately after Covid lockdowns were lifted and got upset when he unmasked got within 20cm of his face.

Oh and the absolute bullshit conspiracy theories he spouted about Daniel Andrews while telling me he wishes we had an Australian Trump to "get rid of all the corrupt pedos in Australian Politics".

Oh how I wish we had some IT savvy legislators who would make good law, since this won't happen I would settle for them doing nothing. This sort of ineffectual crap serves the sole purpose of creating opportunities for these corporations to further entrench their hold over the internet. I am watching on with dread to find out how much data is going directly to Palantir from this mess.

So you are criticising this story for being to broad and generalised by using a broad and generalised example. You are right the thirty minutes my kids were blocked on social media was absolutely worth the upheaval and angst of this government imposed erosion of EVERYONES privacy. Oh and before you start waffling about how I should be policing their social media usage, I was doing that before this farce was implemented through the astounding application of a skill called parenting. Only thing is now the major control I had over my kids most prevalent online usage... Youtube... Is now gone as I no longer have the ability to view what they are using.

This law doesn't actually make anything better, it doesn't help and it just causes division and more angst. When the vast majority of the kids that go to school with mine have had uninterrupted usage of social media and its only 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 that get targeted it is just another means of ostracization, only this is government mandated.

But hey if you think this is a good and effective law I have a bridge you might be interested in, solidly made only one previous owner.

Uh no.

That's not why sm was banned for kids. It was because it's a highly addictive algorithmic machine.

"Go out and meet kids your own age" is a ridiculously boomer take.