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Comment by anenefan | Hacker News Reader

There is no law stopping any of these under 16 kids from creating an algorithm free area such as a special interest forum or joining a forum to chat to each other. Forum being somewhere that has real level headed folks who undoubtedly would act as a voice of reason and not encourage silly BS if it were to surface.

As for the under 16 ban, it's more that social media platforms snubbed the regulators reacting to a consensus of concerns over bad algorithms, and slowly esafety via govt regulations found another way to skin the cat. Kids that are emotionally strong and robust will most likely skirt the ban, those who are susceptible that the platforms used to target purposely ... well those platforms no longer have any legal legs to stand on if things go wrong.

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I have serious doubts that these kinds of laws will accomplish anything as advertised, and no doubts about their "unintended" consequences.

You can't restrict a portion of the population from doing something without identifying everyone, and that's probably the actual goal.

The law was just a way to get around idiocy that removing some problem algorithms was too hard on social media platform's part. It's a bit like country roads, there's a ban on kids riding or driving vehicles on them without a licence, there's a loose understanding what's not going to attract the law, then there's behaviour and areas where it's a total no go - then the police will work hard to sort that out.

I don't know if there's any more intention than that, though almost immediately with the ban I was enjoying not seeing the latest 13 to 16 year old twit posting their recent car stealing / wild ride around the streets the tv news services had found on some social media page to play up youth crimes.

If the social media that could not remove the purposely age targeting algorithms parents were up in arms about in 2018 .. 2019, haven't already done so since the under 16 ban came in, to put it bluntly they're not paying decent capable lawyers.

As for proof of age, esafety already proposed how that should happen, arms length and not direct proof with personal identification directly with the platform. It's social media platforms wanting photo id or other PII ... but of course that's exactly what those platforms want, more PII.

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