Summary
Australia has passed a groundbreaking ban on social media use for children under 16, the strictest of its kind globally.
Platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Reddit have one year to implement the age limit, with fines up to AU$50M for non-compliance.
Supporters cite mental health concerns, while critics argue the ban risks isolation for marginalized youth, lacks proper research, and excludes harmful platforms like 4chan.
Privacy concerns surround proposed age-verification methods. Opponents, including parents, scholars, and tech companies, argue the legislation is rushed and poorly designed, potentially exacerbating existing issues.
The article says that the Australian government is leaving it to the social media platforms to implement the age verification process themselves and that they can face fines if they don’t. Assuming that a company has no physical servers running in Australia, is there any reason they need to pay any attention to this? Aside from their platform bring outright banned I suppose. I’ve had debates on lemmy about whether a website operates in other countries just because it is accessible or not. If a lemmy instance based outside of Australia fails to implement age verification, should they be worried about being fined? Will the majority of the fediverse(assuming the majority don’t implement this) be banned in Australia?