you got beat up... and people got bullied into killing themselves because of social media. you sound like the dense one. stop making this about you. also read thr actual law.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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If only we did the bans 15 years ago when literally everyone saw this coming.
thats a good thing no?
For LGBTIQA+ kids and kids in domestic violence situations? Removing social media can be detrimental and even lead to a life threatening situation. That is simply a fact.
The eSafety Commissioner ignored submissions from mental health organisations begging them to follow a more nuanced approach, no such luck.
There is definitely a myriad of legitimate valid concerns to be had about social media. It's addictive, manipulates emotions for clicks/views and encourages ordinary people to perform shock and outrage for the algorithm. But that problem doesn't just affect young people, and I would argue that adults are just as vulnerable and the manipulation of whom has far more dangerous and immediate consequences for society.
Also on the note of predators, they didn't block problematic platforms like 4Chan or Roblox. So the pedophiles still have access to your kids, they just can't talk to their cousins or watch tutorials on YouTube. Another job well done by the Australien government.
Edit: I won't be engaging with bad faith arguments. Insta block because life is too short!
social media does more harm than good. it has caused kids to commit suicide. thats a simple fact.
also this not being able to watch tutorials on youtube or cant talk to thier cousins anymore is just wrong. you really need to read the law about it. as your "facts" are incorrect.
Not if the social in social media was actually referring to keeping in contact with friends and mutual support.
I'm ambivalent on social media bans as they seem rather blunt approach to the problem of algorithmic dopamine triggers. My kids don't have access to tiktok or Instagram but they are starting to get interested in joining discord communities around their interests. Online predators aside this seems a good thing. Having access to the net in the nineties is when I started to see fellow hobbyists from around the world discussing things in newsgroups. It expanded my world view.
social media does more harm to children than good. aocial media might have expandes our worls view back then, but there wenrt algorithms that aim to narrow your world view that happens nowdays. these kids can still join forums and such. they can sull get to thw sociap media site and pages. they just cant have an account on them.
The web was a very different place in the 90's. Overall, parental supervision of a kid's online use is one of the most logical approaches, but I think it's virtually impossible because the it either only goes so far and can't filter absolutely everything, including the more subconscious influences (negative ones) of social media, or it goes too far in a way where parental control apps can be violation of privacy to certain degree to an adolescent. And in either case, they can eventually learn how to circumvent them, because rebellious kids can be clever.
It's difficult find where the middle is aside from a complete ban for those after a certain age. The one-in-ten teens seeking counseling could've been utilizing social media as an escape from something preexisting; I don't expect a person lacking plenty of life experience, with their brains still in development, to be insightful of themselves enough to the be able to tell the difference between the source of a problem and the causative reason for that problem to become noticeable. Fully developed adults aren't much better at that either.
The addictive aspect of social media can tie into that pretty well. Pulling that dump of dopamine that's picked up habitually from them could probably cause a 'withdrawal'; I'd bet at least some anxiety. I'm also willing to bet a lot of those one-in-ten teens probably have a difficult time dealing with it in particular. It'd be a psychological dependence, but a persons environment has a lot of impact on how addictive behavior is manifested (at least with what the "Rat Park" studies would indicate).
Then again, social media could help with social cohesion and probably complement a young person's social life like those discord groups; direct messaging I think are particularly healthier in comparison to a doom scroll feed. I think this is closer to where the line could be drawn
I was a kid in rural UK surrounded by bucktooth hillbillies and the only reason I found out about gender dysphoria and transitioning was 4chan, if I didn't bypass the multiple blocks the school had to find like-minded people across the globe id have offed myself.
For the non-typical individuals this could be a horrible thing and cut them off from the only people that might actually seem like people to them.
That was the beauty of the internet, no matter where you are, you could find some people like you online, even if everyone else around you does not even understand what being gay is etc.
This wasn't the 90s either, this was like 2016.
It doesn't even have to be so dramatic, I have never met anyone IRL that didn't seem like a complete alien roaming about untethered in society, no clue about the news, no clue about much of anything, they can't name media they like, but I don't, and they don't have any hobbies, even my cat had stronger opinions on stuff.
You'd be lucky if they like sports but they don't even talk about it that much. It's like an LLM struggling to keep up generating responses as I keep talking to it or something.
Heck I've definitely had more interesting convos with a Mistral-7b I used to run locally trained off my own WhatsApp messages and there was literally nothing new to me that she could say, (and unlike corpo yesmen LLMs she even pushed back when I tried to make her agree with me that I'm a deep sea isopod, she will be missed RIP).
Online people always seemed more real, actually aware of stuff, they had hobbies, opinions, dreams, thoughts about the world. This even extends to people I then went on to meet IRL after finding them online, whether it be dating apps or whatever.
All I feel is sorry for those kids, they'll be miserable, cut off from the world for no real reason other than that the boomers are a massive voter bloc and they should've never had the internet because it fried their brains to high heaven, but cutting off their internet access is political suicide, and the government doesn't want to sit around doing nothing, so they do this, the exactly wrong thing possibly, all while young people have always seemed to suffer no ill effects from the internet.
Idk what it's like in Australia but in the UK basically everyone above the age of 50 in polls is some hard right racist, and everyone below is half-decent. Problem is there's more of them than us, so we're just doomed.
and they still can connect with people. they are not getting cut off from anything. they can still research about things. they can still go to the websites. they just can't have an account. you may be a success story. but there are also people who have been harrased and thier life made worse because of social media.
How are they going to talk on whatever would be the Skype of today without an account? Are you dense?
Why don't those people who've been allegedly supposedly harassed on social media delete their accounts instead? At least there they have that option, unlike any IRL bullying. I used to get beat up daily in elementary school and wasnt the only one. If anything once the trogs got on the phones life got much better.
you got beat up... and people got bullied into killing themselves because of social media. you sound like the dense one. stop making this about you.
also read the actual law. start a website they can join then to talk to like minded people that wont encourage them to killl themself or push right right propaganda, or advertise dangerous ways to lose weight and show manipulated photos of thin people when the algotythm has notoces they are feeling sad about thier weight.
"algotythm right right themself notoces thier" to you too.
Also of course it's not just about me, but it helps to put yourself in the shoes of those that will be impacted by this thoughtless censorship law, to try on their perspective for a change. I know that if this impacted me as a kid it would've been fucking awful for reasons I stated prior. You've given no rebuttal to this, so I won't bother waiting for one, or for you to learn to type coherently for that matter.
Also how fucking gross of you to even attempt to conflate something as inconsequential as cyberbullying with real life physical violence. Literally if you don't like the internet just turn the screen off and go outside. I had no such option.
And it's not the youth that's falling for right-wing propaganda, and never has been, look at the data and the polls - almost all right-wing voters are gen-x and boomers. The kids are fine, the call is coming from inside the house.
stop being so high and mighty. your issues are not more important than others issues. there is no censorship. they can still see all posts. people just cant directly interact with them. if they cant see posts then the onea who are censoring it are the social media companies. read the damn law.
how dare you say that people killing themselves because of harrasment they got on social media is not important and nothing should be done about it. once again read the damn law! as you have your facts wrong
addiction? the article is hard paywalled
Gee, too bad no one saw this coming.... /s