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.
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.
Counter-point: won’t they just start using small websites like this one instead? I remember interneting before social media, there’s always anything you’re looking for on a website too small for Australia to know about.
Have you considered the internet is a bit cringe tho?
Yes and No. Modern social media worked well to convince consumers that there’s no other way. But I was a queer teen online before majority of these tools existed and from the list I saw, tumblr wasn’t included nor was deviantart and discord was explicitly excluded.
So yes we shouldn’t minimize valid concerns but queer and marginalized communities are not dependent on the existence of social media and shouldn’t be tethered to such.
Queer people used to just use forums that catered exclusively to queer people. Joining centralized social media site and sharing space with queerphobic reactionaries has been disastrous.
Besides updates to adhoc HRT, some of the old forums may still exist too. And with discord still available, I think queer youth can be alright.
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.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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.)
imagining piefed as the alt internet is very funny to me
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?
Well, I found out about Hexbear through friends on IRC, but…
Not really, no. I’ve seen more marginalized kids grow to “joke” about killing queer people after spending lots of time on those apps. All the anecdotes pushing against this are coming from people who used the internet in the 90’s and 2000’s before these apps collectively became “the internet.”
Reddit is shit at being a community, but it’s far better than being stuck in exclusively Christian nationalist spaces. Even as a right-wing platform, it helped me question my political beliefs and discover my sexuality (which isn’t as important now that I’m in an accepting area, but it fucked up my mental health before then), along with finding loads of information relevant to my hobbies, and it’s also how I found Lemmy. Lemmy/Hexbear is a much better community, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the breadth of information and discussion that Reddit has. Where I live, leftist organizations mostly advertise on Instagram. As far as other productive uses go, Facebook has Marketplace and Groups which can have information that Reddit doesn’t, Youtube has tons of educational content, and TikTok/Instagram/Facebook can be helpful for promoting art or skills. I would agree though that in general, the algorithmic feed-driven platforms are horrible for community, and Reddit being infested with bots and paid actors makes it more questionable.
Do small forums and chats still exist in 2025 or were they all ‘outcompeted’ by the big platforms?
There are literally thousands of them. You can start your own for free or less than $50/year depending on what you’re looking for and desired scale. You can even find dead empty ones, invite 10 people, and be the only ones using it for weeks. Moderation is probably harder than actually getting started.
I don’t get what teenagers posting semi-anonymously are learning that they can’t learn from seeing older queer people post about. A lot of the progress in pushing back homophobia in the 2000s-2010s wasn’t kids doing it, it was visibly gay adults.
I made friends I went to my first pride with through these “useless” online platforms.
Remember that people aren’t born adults, they actually have to survive to that age. Which is kind of difficult when you are alone.
You don’t get the value of direct social interaction and community participation vs sitting unseen and unheard watching “the adults” have conversations amongst themselves?
I am talking about community, not about just “learning”. The internet is the only real source of community and friends for many queer youths
Learning and community aren’t the same thing, your comment doesn’t address her criticism at all.
Hi, I was a kid in the 90s and early 2000’s.
The first place I could safely say “I am gay” (spoiler I was not but I only understood straight and gay as things you could be) was usenet of all places.
This is quite the take to be making on a social media site semi anonymously
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
I will not entertain the idea that these “protect the children” people actually want to protect children from real harm until they ban all priests from coming within a kilometer of any child
i mean; the real issue here is aus gov not recognizing why social media (and the web) is a problem - if they wanted to solve it they could have banned kids form using platforms built around algorithms designed for eyeball retention. there are meaningful platforms out there (like this one) which is being completely disregarded despite the actual benefit it has on youth; particularly those who are struggling.
but hey; maybe this will see a resurgence of protocols like IRC!
Theres a fuckton of kids stealing money from their parents wallets or credit card to pay for FIFA Fut or other gacha
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.
The same people who thought Universal Healthcare was BIG GUBMINT are oddly okay with this
This just in, most people have no consistent beliefs and are just picking bullshit at random
So I suppose at least on some social platforms the “insert verification genitals to continue” crap is already implemented.
Giggle was, in many ways, ahead of its time
You better believe it
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.
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
Very compelling, much to think about
Concerning.
But we got to protect the kids. Facebook and Twitter are filled with predators who prey upon kids. But don’t worry. They’re still allowed in online spaces safe for children like
Steam and Steam chat.
So is real life
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.
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.
When I first moved here the kids were using the ODOT (Oregon Department of Transportation) traffic cams to communicate. They would make a poster and stand in front of the camera for 15 minutes. The camera took a snapshot once every 15 minutes and posted it online. Another group that didn’t have phones used the video game Animal Jam to talk to each other.
The Australian government’s ban on piracy/“”“copyright infringement”“” was to half ass a filter they hand to ISPs that’s very infrequently updated.
So when thepiratebay or eztv or whatever moves to a new domain, it’s available for several months. I have friends who don’t use VPNs and get around the “block” by going on Google and searching “nyaa proxy” and one of the redirects on the page would work.
Oh, and if you swap your DNS to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, you can indefinitely bypass any Australian government censor.
I always find it interesting when the (your) comment gets more up-votes than the (my) post.
Yeah, doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to it sometimes. Though jokes about government incompetence usually go over really well here, so that’s probably why in this case.
The incompetence seems to come in waves of four years at a time.
In this case it could be an in-group/out-group (instance) thing I’ve noticed. Sometimes people use home instance sometimes as a pre-vetting for ‘comment probably safe to upvote’ but scrutinise other instances’ comments a bit more cautiously. I can’t really say ‘don’t take it personally’ because as the person on the receiving end it can definitely feel bad
Not to worry, between the trolls, bots, and my Ex I don’t take anything personally.
3:4:1:? ratio
We’re not gonna have a world that’s safe for our children, as long as we can’t trust our government to actually be monitoring it for thugs who want to harm our children.
The only way possible to create such a government is if you get to elect your neighbors in the positions to represent you, someone you actually know, and you get to voice your demands to them.
Until we get to that point, we’re left on our own to keep our children safe. If you’re fortunate you might have your own community helping you out and I hope if you’re a parent that you do.
I also don’t really understand how is a blanket ban on the internet suppose to achieve anything? Having no internet didn’t stop the kids from growing up into Nazis
Maybe it’s different in Australia with it being a global north country but I wouldn’t be against this in my country with how all those apps are US propaganda machines and just churn out Pro-US right-wingers.
Kick, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit can especially go to hell. No marginalized kid is going to Kick and coming out a better person.
We lack the infrastructure to host our own social media so the best we would be able to do is ban the foreign social media and build up our traditional media. We’re a very social country and most of the people living on those apps are wealthier shut-ins.
see this is the actual problem, the cart is being put before the horse.
banning teens from social media because of the insidious yankoid influence, instead of removing the yankoid influenceTrue, especially in certain countries still using FACEBOOK or WHATSAPP for communication… ugh.
I agree with the other commenter, there needs to be an alternative before the ban, preferably a state-sponsored federation ecosystem like what Lemmy is.
Not that I fully agree with this article but good lord I don’t imagine china is missing Facebook, X, Instagram, Kick, Reddit. Like what possible value could these add to their lives?
okay but kids can still use Baidu and their native websites this isn’t that.
Australian kids should just learn Chinese.
Semi-serious, the kids here are so monolingual they’re almost American.
