Die Streaming-Plattform Twitch soll in das Social-Media-Verbot für unter 16-Jährige einbezogen werden

Ah yes. This will go well. No way a child will simply ask their parents to sign in, use a VPN or fake profile.

Requiring age verification to even watch a stream would destroy twitch. Incredibly difficult to get new viewers if to even test out the site you have to tell the government you are making an account there.

Let alone the massive data collection that will come from linking real people to their viewing habits

And the sheer stupidity of requiring an age check to watch some minecraft streamer who explicitly curates kid friendly content without profanity or adult topics regardless

I don’t know how they mechanically expect to pull this off. The infrastructure simply isnt there. If the government really wants an age verification system they would need to build one themselves that these sites can access (rather than all building one themselves), and they need to design it where the user’s real identity isnt saved post verification. Doubt that will ever happen

I used to use twitch as background noise and would read the chat sometimes, it is absolutely unhinged and quite frankly, children should be kept away **from the chat** for a bit.

Stopping kids from watching the streams themselves is silly considering twitch can be quite chill. Who remembers the Bob Ross marathon a decade ago, an extreme example, yes, but still.

Ya know what, let Australia cut off the internet.

By the time those kids are old enough the current system will be so vastly hated that it will be removed

„OMG! People can communicate with each other there! Can’t let teens be doing that. They might be social with each other!“

I say this as a parent who has never banned any of my kids from using social media. Instead I gave them guidance and knowledge on how to best protect themselves, spot potential danger and to know they will never be punished for coming to me to show me something / ask questions etc.

Now I have done the best job I can yet still even with parental safe guards, advice and knowledge I know I am powerless to fight against people using various loopholes, exploiting Google / Meta / twitch etc measures who barely enforce them as weak as they are, are subjected to all kinds of vile videos / posts / comments etc..

Here is a fact, in the 2023 in the US alone there were just under 36 million reported of cases of online CSAM material, nearly 31 million of these stemmed from Meta platforms (Facebook / Whatsapp / Messenger / Instagram)

Facebook as a company could do so much more if they wanted to but it is far far cheaper and easier to lobby the US Congress so it becomes somebodies problem.

The likes of Facebook / Google / Twitch etc have had years to put in measures not only to dramatical limit CSAM and other content being uploaded, but also put in systems in order to help Law Enforcement agencies around the world to find those who upload them.

As a quick example they could work with the likes of The Internet Watch Foundation, Thorn, Ofcom etc who have massive databases of CSAM material.

This would allow them to both help expand those databases and instantly removal and report any IP’s that upload any CSAM material that is contained within those databases.

Instead not only do they do the absolute minimum, but often they are very unhelpful with requests from law enforcement agencies when it comes to CSAM material requests.

Instead they have done everything they can to push the responsibility onto others and now we have reached the point where countries are able to convince people that best course of action is to implement draconian measures.

It is the greed of these multi billion dollar companies that have given governments the power to convince people that is the best way forward.

So yeah be angry at your Governments but ultimately the fault lies with those companies that you use on a daily basis.

Of all the attempts to wrangle the ’net Australia’s go is almost laughably bad. Sure, on a very basic level they recognize that there’s problems with this nebulous thing called „the internet“, which I do see and do agree with: there’s incredibly exploitative platforms who chase profits at the expense of their users and the countries their users live in. For a penny they will platform the worst fucking people that lie constantly and cause civil unrest for as long as they can keep their hate grift going. These platforms are abusing democracy day and night and just getting away with it.

And so much like the other countries the aussie government want a magic bullet type solution to stop any and all of „the internet“ things happening to the youth with the twist of it being a full stop? Which is not a solution by any means just a delay; it doesn’t solve any of the exploitative things the internet does like doomscrolling, click/rage bait, data harvest and more. Things that don’t even require a social media platform to happen and adults aren’t one bit immune to.

All they’re going to do is destroy modern socialization for a generation of kids and leave so many of them stunted. You’re not making kids touch grass anymore than they currently do; worse still internet slang evolves so fast that the kids that don’t get online are going to struggle to relate with the ones that do and vice versa. I think that in of itself is going to be a fascinating study opportunity; an event of in and out groups with at such a scale to be so potentially damaging to human socialization on a national level that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to conduct purely for the science of it.

Those late teens that never got around the blocks are going to finally emerge online like a defecting North Korean with no defenses against the multi-billion dollar industries that exist purely on abusing and exploiting users.