I feel the need to ask to please try to refrain from minimizing the very real and valid concerns of your comrades when they are explaining how bad this can be for queer or otherwise marginalized youth.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Another aspect here is that some people wouldn't be around in here or other aligned spaces if they didn't have access to the internet. In my personal experience of being a homeschooled church kid, I probably would've ended up being a straight up christian conservative if I didn't have access to the internet. It is a bit of an oversimplification, but it is true to a degree.
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Have you considered the internet is a bit cringe tho?
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I'm actually really mad about this. The PM put out this smarmy video being like "go take up and instrument ($$$) or read that book" etc but like ok, I'm a book worm I was one as a kid.
As a kid there was a local used book store, run by a wonderful woman. She was a local, it was a safe place watched over by friendly eyes. I was allowed to spend a lot of time sitting on the floor in the corner of her shop just reading books finding what I liked. That was great! Yeah there was a library but I had to be on "good behaviour" there and the librarians were more concerned with school assignments they weren't massive fantasy dorks motivated to feed me a steady diet of beloved classics.
I visited my home down a while back, guess what's out of business? This is a pattern seen in everything. The spaces for kids to have idyllic little childhoods are gone, they are paved over, owned and fenced, or regulated away. You can't build a treehouse as the trees got cut down, there are no hobby shops anymore, there are no skate parks etc, people call the cops on unsupervised gatherings of teens, there aren't as many bush reserves and they're smaller, pools cost more and are rarer, roads are more dangerous with new cars and more of them, businesses feeling the squeeze are encouraged to move on unprofitable lingering kids, net cafes are closed, if you let yourself into a school playground to use the equipment the cops get called.
It's complete BS to just magically expect kids go have wholesome childhoods we've made difficult.
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Gonna just say the same thing i said in the megathread for anyone who thinks this is a good idea: 1000s of queer and otherwise marginalized kids are gonna lose the only little bit of community they have away from their shitty parents and "communities"
Came here to say this. The internet has been instrumental in helping many people to understand their own queerness and this kind of access restriction is going to hurt a lot of people.
Yet another violent overreach by the Australian regime
There are always exceptions, but were 'many' marginalized kids really getting any meaningful community in "TikTok, Facebook, Insta, X, Youtube, Snapchat, Reddit, Kick, Twitch and Threads"?
Maybe I'm just old and out of touch 
but both now, and as a queer youth, the only kind of community or support I ever found was in forums and chats outside of those huge pointless platforms. Big social media is alienating, full of ragebait and misinformation (especially about queer issues) and exude the sheer opposite of what I'd call "community".
My instinct is that driving youth off those large platforms and will drive them onto smaller, more "actually" communal online spaces, which will be beneficial all around.
Tiktok and reddit both have large trans communities, including smaller groups. It says includes so I wonder if that includes things like discord which do have, again lots of big and small communities. Tons of opportunities to get to know people 1 on 1. Outside of here that's where all my community is.
Question is what communal online spaces, I'm sure we know what, but for kids who are used to the mainstream spaces, how can they go to the communal online spaces? And, you know, legality and all, because even if platforms aren't in Australia, either they get blocked because they don't follow the "law" or have to do the same surveillance to their Australian users..
I think X (Twitter formerly lol), Tiktok and maybe Reddit are stepping stones for these marginalized kids, I still see a lot of queer stuff on those platforms, though it is just because they're popular social media spaces, not necessarily good ones, I mean how'd you'll find out about like the Fediverse (like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.) for example if it weren't through a Youtube video or Twitter post?
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If there were actually any safe spaces for children on the Internet we wouldn't have this issue. Things like Club Penguin and flash game websites with proper moderation. But of course, then comes the need to monetise, so kids are incentivised to beg for their parents credit card, and then comes lootbox gambling. It's not the Internet that has damaged an entire generation (me included), it's the capitalist Internet. There are only like 4 websites now and they're all social media.
I mean, even when I was a kid and kid websites existed, kids absolutely went into places online that weren't for kids. But it caused a lot less societal problems when those sites weren't massively relied on by adults and teens, and there were actual spaces intended for kids where like 90% of kids spent a good 80% of their online time. And it's not like those kiddie sites weren't monetized and built to get kids to beg for Mom's credit card, there was a shit ton of paywalling features behind premium memberships you had to pay monthly for. But you could generally have an alright experience for free on the less predatory ones, at least. And capitalism made even that model no longer viable.
(As an aside, rants about how capitalism ruined the Net often set me off imagining if we hadn't lost the Cold War and if the Soviets had come up with the Internet before the West did. I think it'd be a way better place. We might have just as much centralization but it'd be state rather than corporate, which might suck a bit less, and the political leanings and party lines of today's small leftist sites would be the default, there'd be small explicitly neoliberal-capitalist sites referred to with derogatory terms by the rest of the Net.)
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This is just going to result in more "SIGN IN AND GIVE US YOUR CUM TO CONFIRM AGE" type surveillance, isn't it?
Yeah. This is a massive step in that direction.
The infrastructure is already in place for KYC financial operations. I had some fuckass site try to get me to use a biometric ID middleware service just to get some crypto so I could cop drugs and that ID middleware was one of the 20 or so platforms that participated in the age verification tech trial for this social media shit.
Someone on reddit posted a screenshot from bluesky which was requiring them to confirm their identity with either: gov dox, credit card info or biometric face scan. So I suppose at least on some social platforms the "insert verification genitals to continue" crap is already implemented.
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You better believe it
Hexbear "don't fall for 'protect the children' bullshit" challenge
I understand that "protect the children" rhetoric is always a smokescreen for bigotry and an excuse for censorship, repression and for controlling kids, but have u considered that the internet is weird and cringe
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I think outside of this, the internet's wild west phase is shutting down. A lot of sites I use have straight up been wiped or made impossible to use by constant copyright strikes. I'm talking about global media conglomerates like Canal+ DDoSing any streaming website that hosts their content, no matter how small. It's impossible to do almost anything on the internet these days without being shut down hard.
Yeah I was seeing a bunch of sad posts on Reddit from kids saying goodbye to subreddits that they frequented. A couple of them were like “I’m in an abusive home this is my one outlet now I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” So this is gonna suck for a lot of kids.
Yep like with out lack of third spaces separating kids from community in any way is a good idea.
ban children from corporate social media
ban corporate social media
Social media is poison left on its own so you know corporate is gonna amplify its worst aspects.
Notice how they can still play gacha games apparently. All that concern trolling about protecting them kids while they have completely free rein on playing games designed around dark patterns to turn people into addicts.
I suppose on a positive note, a bunch of game chats is going to see a massive spike in activity since games don't technically count as social media.
What are the platforms that are not included on the banned list?
Steam and Steam Chat
We're going to have an entire generation of Aussie kids with their brains melted by Steam chat. I guess instead of possibly turning towards reaction due to Facebook and Twitter, they'll definitely turn to reaction due to Steam chat lol
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Terrible idea that solves nothing.
I have so much to say about this shit that I don't even know where to start.
tl;dw: 
They are gonna find out who their customer base WAS.
Don't worry, our government is incompetent enough that the kids will easily find a way around this ban.
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