Australia passed a law that bans children under 16 from using social media sites:
The major parties backed the bill that would make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts.
Personally, I have no problem with the law. I think it’s a great idea, in fact. One might argue that parents should be responsible in this case, but the technology is simply too powerful and too seductive. Also, the technology of social media is one that very few people understand because of the subtle manipulative power of the algorithms designed by big tech.
Unlike one suggestion I found on a message board, I also don’t believe social media can be made better by trying to make its algorithms less manipulative. The manipulative nature of social media in inherent in its technological nature. It is especially important then to keep young people from social media because their brains are especially susceptible to become hooked onto such technologies.
Still, I don’t think this sort of law is really a good answer for the problems brought on the world by social media, and high-speed communications technologies in general. One reason is that due to the open nature of the internet, children may become addicted to lesser known portals that will not be affected by this law due to their ambiguous nature or small size.
But more importantly, this law in a way serves to make the integration of social media less obviously damaging in the short term. What that means is that such platforms will continue to evolve with even less criticism, and their next stage of evolution will become even more dangerous. In fact, every law passed that places fairly lax restrictions on social media make it seem more legitimate in a way, restricting its current incarnation but ignoring all possible future incarnations. It is just like pruning a tree: the process removes the obviously unsightly branches by allowing it to grow.
What we need to do is restrict the growth of social media more severely. But social media is also not the core problem: the core problem is the existence of big tech companies. It is such companies that are behind social media and such companies whose primary aim is to push the addiction to technology to further the growth of unnecessary technology that only really benefits those who use it to concentrate wealth into their own hands.
Thus, we need to place restrictions on tech companies, not social media. We need to restrict the amount of energy they can use, and their size too, so that they are stripped of their control of modern economies. Of course, outright laws will never do this. Instead, the only way to do this is to change society completely so that it returns to more local communities that are based on fundamental principles of slower living and less energy consumption.
In some ways, the big tech companies are the physical manifestations of a disease of unrestricted technological growth that is inevitable once people are rendered unable to depend on their local communities and local lands for sustenance. They are the most efficient way in which technology has found to advance itself. Thus, although they may not be the root cause of the major problem of biospheric destruction today, they may actually be very good targets for laws and opposition that would restrict and choke them into nonexistence. Perhaps then, new space would be available to develop more sustainable communities.
But it’s crucially important for local communities to develop to fight technology in the first place. Laws alone in our existing economic system will do nothing and will never be passed without public support, and that can only come when we have a few seed communities to start the greater resistance.
So, although Australia’s law is a good thing in a very local sense, we need to go much farther to create a better society than merely responding locally to global problems.