Hi Lemmy.World Admins and Support Staff,
I like this place a lot and wanted to give you a heads up pollies down under passed some new laws.
The govt wants a ban on social media for everyone under 16. This week was the last sitting week of parliament and a few bills were passed by both houses and are set to become law. (See link).
I’m not after any immediate reaction or actions, but looking to bring it to your attention for you to discuss (edit:internally) how you would react. I haven’t seen the legislation and don’t know how this is meant to be mechanized and it seems pretty hard to do.
Some other tech giants have already made statements as this appears to be a worldwide first.
Edit: I might have a look at the laws text and put some details here as a comment
-AnAustralianPhotographer
From the Lemmy.world terms of service:
No one under 18 years of age or under the regulated minimum age defined by your local law (whichever is higher), is allowed to use or access the website.
If someone lies to access the website, it’s on them.
I’d be pretty confident the Australian Government isn’t just gonna let Facebook update the Ts and Cs to say no one under 16 and call it a day. They are expected to actually try to enforce it.
Lemmy can at least argue under 16s aren’t enticed to come here, no matter how much we offer free (as in speech, but also as in beer) stuff.
Facebook: “We get to scan photo IDs now? Perfect!”
The law specifically mentions government IDs in the legislation . If(edit:i’d) have to check, but Im confident they’re specifically excluded.
The article says they can’t require them, but can offer it as one option so long as there are others.
What “Lemmy” will be arguing this and where, though?
If you have a company, that’s easy for a government to go after. Lemmy is software built and run for free by randoms on the internet. They might try to go after the devs if any of them reside in Australia, but they’d have a very hard time stopping it. We’ve seen that sort of effort fail before, when China and India tried to ban Bitcoin. We see it in North Korea even now, where people still access banned networks and content all the time.
Most Lemmy admins are just trying to do their best. If the Aussie government publishes realistic guidelines for small services then many instances will probably make an effort to follow them. How enforceable it is is not the point.
What “Lemmy” will be arguing this and where, though?
“Lemmy” as a thought experiment, not Lemmy with a lawyer in court. Devs wouldn’t be affected, it would apply to the people running the service (I.e instance admins)
I have a better idea, fine the god damn parents of the kids. I didn’t choose to inconvenience my life with your fucking nonsense.
No it’s not. It’s in the service operator to verify. With the current writing every instance would need to verify age.
Are Lemmy.world servers located in Australia? Google says Europe so it seems like this is a non-issue.
Most social media have corporate entities in many of the countries they serve because they want sales people to sell that ad space and bank accounts to receive that ad revenue through, so usually the means of enforcing this would be to fine those entities/bank accounts. But I doubt lemmy.world would have much connection to Australia.
Or are there provisions in the law that would let them block the servers?
Ive had a look at the legislation, its an ammendment to an existing set of laws. It underwent some changes as it passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate, so i had a look at the ‘As passed by both houses’ version at https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r7284
So it looks like what is ‘Social media’ can be defined by a Minister / Commissioner, it looks like there needs to be something documented by the entity to prevent underage users(again not calling on lemmy.world to do something for this as part of this post) by the Social media company, and it looks like the recording of government id’s for the purpose of confirming ages is expressly prohibited.
A penalty Unit is around $300.
I am completely at a loss as how will this be implemented OR enforced
Without the government providing an age verification service, I would guess the answer to the former is a performative checkbox and the latter is “haphazardly and arbitrarily”
Use Tor
Lemmy is not social media
Reddit is considered a social media under this law.
What makes Lemmy different?
They’re not directly equivalent because Lemmy is a service (like HTTP, phpBB, or e-mail protocols), not a singular service provider (like Reddit or Gmail). The law would likely have to be enforced on individual instances.
In a practical sense, lawyers might want to have the compliance mechanism built into the Lemmy project itself… but what do I know, I’m not a lawyer, and lawyers generally know/care fuck all about the technicalities of emerging technologies.
Here’s a link to the text of the legislation.
From what I understand they define it very broadly:
(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
(ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
(iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or (b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;
So basically everything Web 2.0 - ish that they haven’t given an explicit exception to. Lemmy totally qualifies.
By those definitions any newspaper website with comments is social media. The sole purpose (or main purpose) of a Lemmy instance is to aggregate links, the comments are secondary (just like in newspaper websites). The definition is too vague and if you apply it to the letter it would include 99% of websites, even porn websites have comments these days.
The sole purpose (or main purpose) of a Lemmy instance is to aggregate links
We call them “link posts” and I think they may qualify as posts under this broad definition.
For the purposes of this Act, material is posted on a social media service, relevant electronic service or designated internet service by an end - user if the end - user causes the material to be accessible to, or delivered to, one or more other end - users using the service.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/osa2021154/s11.html
The definition is too vague and if you apply it to the letter it would include 99% of websites
I think that is their intention
For the purposes of subparagraph (1)(a)(i), online social interaction includes online interaction that enables end-users to share material for social purposes.
Well that clears things up…
Now they just need to define “social purposes”.
They seem more concerned with making sure businesses won’t have issues.
Note 1: Online social interaction does not include (for example) online business interaction
If retailers though they might have issues just because they let customers post product reviews there would have been a fell funded campaign against the legislation.
That’ll definitely hold up in court. Delusional stuff 🤣.
On what grounds will it be struck down? The only constitutional rights recognised by the courts are the right to not have a state religion imposed on you and (as of 1991 or so) freedom of political association.
It’s spelled out in literally the first clause. Enabling social interaction. Truly big brain shit.
