Every now and then our government goes on a censorship rampage, egged on by some morally outraged lobby group.
Over many years there's been many porn-banning attempts (funny how it aspects of that are illegal everywhere except Canberra, capital city of Australia, that only came into existence to hold our federal government). It usually gets shot down in flames as adults who vote, and pay for their internet access, don't want some censor-freak group insisting they must also partake in some adult-verification and personal identification scheme (that will probably have some massive privacy breaches). The last attempt at that more or less failed, though the various well known porn-brokers did get more proactive at weeding out extreme and illegal content, faced with a fix-it-yourself or we-will-fix-it-for-you ultimatum.
I use the description control-freaks about these people deliberately. There are some very loud groups who's ideas about what people should or shouldn't do are very opinionated and out of step with most of society. If they had their way, there'd be nothing on TV but Disney-esque programming, there's be nothing with any violence, profanity, horror, romance, suggestiveness, and definitely no sex. Nothing contrary to their own point of view. Nothing that conflicted with their religious superstitions, it's all a blasphemy that they want to stamp out. Their kids wouldn't use the internet, wouldn't have a phone, wouldn't have any unsupervised socialisation with anyone, never go out of the house alone, and not allowed to leave home until their get married in their thirties. There are some extreme crackpots out there that want everybody to be like them, and they'll go to extraordinary lengths to fulfill their agenda. And they don't even have to belong to what might be glaringly obvious as a weird church to get indoctrinated into those beliefs.
The latest fanfare (in 2024) has been about social media and banning young people from it. And they've used salami tactics of going slice-by-slice with little steps that you mightn't object to, until they reach their actual goal of things you would have immediately objected to if they'd started at that point. It's gone through various stages of we'll ban 13 year olds, that'll be the cut off limit. Then it went up to we'll ban 14 year olds, we won't raise it, kids will be 15 year olds before they can go on social media… Which struck me as a bad age—from everything I remember from high school (being a student and working in them), the 15 year olds were the absolute worst as being arseholes to each other, so a really terrible age to suddenly be let loose on social media. And, now (November 2024) they've shifted up to you'll have to be 16 before you can use social media, with a mad scramble about deciding what will be allowed or banned. Facebook will be out, young photographers will disappear (Instagram, etc), there'll be no young musicians uploading their performances to YouTube, and I dare say there's going to be hoards of furious teenagers who find their on-line multiplayer video games with chat features are going to get dragged into this mess.
And it turns out that a large backer of the ban kids from Facebook brigade was the Murdoch press, as part of their ongoing war about wanting Facebook to pay them for news (but not wanting to pay Facebook to advertise their news).
In all the years I've been using Facebook, I've never actually seen “news” on Facebook, I've only ever seen headline references that lead you to load the story on a news website. That is free advertising, that is not news on Facebook.
Nor is the press something that I'd call youth-friendly, either. For instance, they like to blame youth unemployement on the youth, with ludicrous dole-bludger stories, rather than hoe into the real cause (employers). Like to beat-up the news to make out there's a youth-crime epidemic. And all they're interested in is making money selling news, which they don't do to young people. So the idea that they're doing it for the kids is just hogwash. They're a sacrificial lamb in their capitalism games.
I have mixed feelings about this. I'm glad I didn't have to contend with the this stuff when I was a teen, it didn't exist back then. And neither did mobile phones, fancy video gaming, or even personal computers in a form you'd recognise. Though bullying was rife, school was Lord of the Flies territory, and those in charge were fucking useless at dealing with it. Let's face it, no matter what they say, most of the very large number of school shootings in America will be down to student abuse that went beyond the tolerable, few will be just because the person was nuts. I just do not believe it when someone says that nobody ever treated the shooter badly, it's going to be one of those in-their-opinion they shouldn't have minded the way crap was being foisted upon them. When you just don't give a damn, people take matters into their own hands. And when you're being abused all day, every day, for several years of your life, some people do deserve a smack in the head.
It'd be quite a few more years (after my youth) before the public internet was a thing. But in the years since then kids have got their own phones, joined lots of social media platforms, and mostly done okay. The trouble is when things are not okay, all these platforms are just as fucking useless at handling it. And that's the real problem.
It was kind of understood on various messaging platforms that you could block jackasses, and never hear from them again. But you couldn't do much more than block people. And if you applied any critical thought about participating in many platforms it was a bit like walking around in public with your phone number on your shirt telling everyone to phone you for a good time.
Since everyone was anonymous there wasn't any way to hold people accountable, so various services started insisting on some form of identify verification through your phone (even if only identified to them, with you still using some anonymous nickname to be seen by everyone else). But that, in itself, is not effective enough at controlling miscreants. It only stops the few that have some small amount of shame. It's little more than being seen to do something, without actually doing anything about the problems.
You find on WhatsApp, for instance, there is no way to block all incoming messages from strangers. You're left with banning each incoming annoyance as it happened, which could be a never-ending battle. The same situation existed with SMSs, many e-mail services, and no doubt with many other messaging services. It would be a small change to have a setting that nobody can contact you, in any form, without prior approval. But they won't do it.
Facebook was a bit better, in that you can restrict other people's access to you. But not only can people talk about you behind your back, they can publish things about you for all and sundry to see, pretend to be you, and there is little that you can do about it. There were methods to report things, but you find it's a complete farce.
Any time that I've reported noxious content on Facebook you get a nearly instant response back that they found nothing wrong with it, and were not going to do anything. You were expected to just ignore and block it, which does a fat lot of good for dealing with things like someone pretending to be you. You may be given a chance to challenge this response, but that never did any good, they didn't change their reaction. If they gave you any options for why you want to challenge their decision, you can only pick from a small selection of reasons to object, none of which were applicable to your situation, and then they'd reply back to you with no way for you to respond any further. You couldn't follow up any further action on the complaint, and there's next to no way to get in contact with anyone in Facebook to do anything else. Clearly they had not assessed your report or the content you've reported, it was just an automatic system responding. And they abdicate any further responsibility for their service.
Although you have to agree to their terms of service to use it, it seems there is no way to get them to enforce those terms on other people. You can't get them to stop spam, harrassment, fraud, nor other illegal activities. I can see that their deliberately impossible-to-use reporting system, and their useless reactions (just like our useless bullying-enabling teachers who'd say to the victim, “just stay away from the bully,” and do absolutely nothing about the bullying, because they just couldn't be bothered), has fuelled the fire of the latest campaign to make social media illegal for young people in Australia. And does nothing to suggest it isn't necessary.
Once more young people are going to be stopped from doing something that they want to, for no other reason that some people are arseholes, and nobody wants to actually do something about them. Problem solved as far as the control-freak lobby is concerned. But the reality is problem ignored, to all the victims.