The equilibrium must be maintained.

This is my biggest issue with it.

Social media has become a blight on society on all levels. Not just children.

But, there's a lack of education or push for children, and adults too, to be smarter online. They're just instituting laws and legislation and pushing the onus on corporations to comply.

Sounds good at face value but doesn't factor in smaller companies who are unable to afford the changes needed to comply (resulting in the pulling out of a region) or they institute dodgey 3rd party verification systems that will just on-sell your data.

Then, there's the world of dodgey VPNs that kids and people have rushed to. Also, as other people have said, children have found work arounds for age verification.

So, what's the point? What did we actually achieve? I sometimes defer to the old addage of never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Sometimes I feel it's more like naievity or good intenaions being controlled by malicious forces.

I don't know.

What I feel though is that it just doesn't feel like it's truly about the children. If it is, there should be a whole lot more factored into this.

Instead it feels like a half baked plan being sold to us as being for the children.

I've re-read your response a few times and it may be lack of sleep, but I'm struggling to mentally register what you were trying to saying.

My interpretation of what they were saying wasn't in defence of the cartel, but that a different course of action would be more impactful. Fight them by targeting their revenue stream.

It's always good to remove the head of a cartel, but you could argue the way it was carried out had no thought behind the immediate repercussions on civilians.

They should make it so that the customer says please and thank you instead. They're literally the one's asking for the service. I think its only polite, personally.

Men can be shitty idiots, but I would just say humans as a whole can be shitty idiots. I've known a few from both sides.

Blind dating

/s

The price of winning

Like the mythical memory of a goldfish

Thanks for this. This is fantastic!

Especially if you work retail

That and it's a 'social media ban' which is a pretty broad term. Depending how you define social media it could ecompase a lot of other platforms not included in the initial list i.e. Steam, Discord, etc.

This could lead to further restrictions on freedom of speech and anonymity dependent on whatever agenda the government is pushing or to try to control dissent by forcing the poplace to provide some form of ID to access any platform/access the internet.

That may be a leap too far from where we currently are, but it's an important factor to consider as it could have wider reaching consequences if left unchecked.

That being said, I think the large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are cesspools that prey on children/teens and are designed to be addictive even for adults.

It's due to that I'm stuck on the fence a little. If anything we as a society should be looking to pressure social media companies to operate ethically.

What has happened instead is that the Australian government has basically pushed the onus on social media companies to block access to these platforms and threatened them with a fine. There's no real plan for implementation, no push for education on social media and its issues.

Someone forgot to put their diaper on in the morning