You know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.
There's been a few surveys, some better than others ... but the reality is they don't matter that much. The ban was just another way to skin a cat - that cat in particular were the algorithms that were targeting specifically young kids which the public became alarmed about - iirc making the news on and off late 10s.
Social media needs not strive to ban every under 16 child ... but they surely will now be careful not to deploy those specific algorithms the public had complained about especially in regard to some of the harms it was said to be doing.
Using social media under 16 could be considered like driving without a licence ... and not too many under 16 children in Australia have a licence to drive on the roads - but in rural and remote areas, on those that are relatively safe roads, a number do, with or without their parents knowledge. Many years prior to the ban, social media could be considered to be vehicle rental companies which never saw any issue with hiring out faster and faster racing stock cars and motorbikes to kids ... and later when accidents happened, asked to perhaps be more mindful. Social media companies shrugged and said too hard. Now there is a ban [1] for under 16s, yes many children are going to still do it, but now, though it's technically against the law, some parents will evaluate their child is capable enough. The ban effectively ensures social media will need to be sure to rent out safe vehicles just in case because if there is a bad accident that an under 16 wouldn't be expected to avoid, mandatory consequences now apply. Social media companies are very well aware of this fact. They don't like it and as such running numerous campaigns - more often threatening in a roundabout between the lines manner that the only way for them to enforce a ban is to go down the road many folks fear, being all out full identification required to create / keep an account with them.
[1] Those parents who've wanted to pry their kids fingers from the phone that only visits social media areas, can finally put their foot down hard telling their kids no way until they are older when it's legal, and not have to put up with any bargaining when they lock down the wifi.
Terge Mathiesen with brilliant asides like<Terje.Mathisen "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching" and with surprising insights into bisection bandwidth.
Intelligent discussions now happen on closed forums. My people have moved to mailing lists like arch-general@lists.archlinux.org, or behind authentication firewalls in professional societies.
The public internet is now populated by the sort of people I devotedly avoid in real life...
These days most of the high quality material I read is on Anna's Archive.
Can Dang implement a slop rating on submitted pages? Not a block but at least a % likelihood of AI slop content and that could also be tied with a BS rating as well.
Could use AI for both which seems hilariously appropriate.
