Darnell (Seize The Day)

The Search Engine giant is laughing all the way to the bank after the nation down under passed legislation that will take down Google's rivals.

Australian lawmakers on Thursday approved a landmark ban on social media for children under 16 in some of the world's toughest such controls.

The ban, which aims to address the impact of excessive social media use on children's physical and mental health, affects social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit, but not YouTube.

The platforms, which bear sole responsibility for enforcement, have one year to figure out how to implement the age limit, which is the highest set by any country. If there are systemic failures to keep children from having accounts, the platforms are liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million). (NBC News)

If you are trying to figure out how YouTube was able to escape the ban despite failing to stem the tide against spammer, scammers & trolls, the answer is simple: kids.

An advocacy group that pushed for children and teens under 16 to be banned from social media has supported YouTube being given an exemption, but warns there is still a risk of kids being able to create accounts on the video site. [...]

That's because the government has excluded “messaging apps,” “online gaming services” and “services with the primary purpose of supporting the health and education of end-users” from the ban. [...]

Director of the 36 Months campaign Greg Atwells backed the exemption, telling the ABC the goal was never to stop young people from communicating or accessing educational tools and entertainment online, but rather to protect them from addictive algorithms and online bullying.

“Using YouTube for entertainment and educational purposes I think is fair enough … it's where people pretty much learn how to do things, I learnt to change the oil in my car,” he said. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

So Google is thrown a legal lifeline while everyone else is forced to drown. I would not be surprised if rivals sued over this exclusion. However, I suspect they will attempt to rebrand themselves as providing educational videos to the masses, which would probably allow them to escape the wrath of this law.

While protecting kids is important, this law will be extremely difficult to enforce without some sort of identification feature. The Australian government will have to grant social networks the legal right to obtain user identification information, making social networks prime targets for hackers.

I suspect we will witness some pushback from tech companies over this law before they realize that having access to their users' legal documents will benefit their real customers—advertisers.

👨🏾‍💻 by @darnell@darnellclayton.com 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day 📧 darnell@darnell.day

🕺🏾 Follow my adventures upon: 🐘 Darnell (One) 🦁 Darnell (Movies, Opuses, Entertainment) 📸 Darnell (Out Of Office)

🦹🏾‍♂️ WordPress Workarounds: 💻 Darnell (TeleVerse) 🌍 Darnell (Africa) 👨🏾‍🎨 Darnell (Creative Outlet)

🥷🏾 Other Hideaways: 🧵 Darnell (Threads) 🔞 Darnell (Hard News) 🐬 Darnell (Flipboard)