The Australian government is considering new laws to ban children under 16 from social media, in a move consitent with the recent desire to control the Internet.
What follows is the Pirate Party's submission (number 62) to the senate regarding the Online Saftey Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024.
Foreword
The Pirate Party thanks the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications for the opportunity to make a submission about the online safety of our citizens.
The Pirate Party was founded exactly for this sort of issue − our core tenets are freedom of information and culture, civil and digital liberties, privacy and anonymity.
This submission has mainly been written by Owen Miller. His career as a software engineer has included roles at Amazon, at the Defence Science & Research Organisation (DSTO) and at startups in Sydney and New York.
Our Stance
Social media has quickly grown into a core component of modern society, offering opportunities for social connection, for entertainment, for education and even for income.
In focusing on the problems happening within social media, it's worth noting that these are typically phenomena which were already happening in offline life too. Bullying predates the Internet, and if children were ever supposed to become more enlightened; if they were ever meant to grow out of these base, callous instincts, then wouldn't it be useful to have a portal to the world's knowledge?
It's for this reason that banning children from social media actually risks worsening the issues of bullying and suicide. Children will be stuck living their whole lives in their isolated town, unable to consult the wisdom of older friends in distant places.
It's not just the children who will suffer here − the older friends and relatives will similarly miss the presence of the children. While Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister, he apologised for the stolen generations, yet now it seems Labor has forgotten any lessons from that incident.
Of course, the adults who won't be missing the presence of children are the adults on the dark web, out of sight from any sort of content moderation or an audit trail, should anything happen to the children who will inevitably be tempted to visit there.
How will the Labor government protect children from these malevolent predators? It's almost as if schools, parents and government institutions should be giving children tools and education to combat the harms they might experience in our society.
The provision of such tools is surely easier than the monumental task of determining the identity of every visitor to every web service. Who's to say the visitor even has an identity? If an Internet-of-Things toaster with a microphone listens to the hot takes of a 6-year-old girl and posts it online, then the web service will see the toaster as the user, so does the toaster get banned while children are near the microphone?
Sure a human might have purchased the toaster and set up the account for the web service, but AIs are increasingly capable of living in our modern world, and it's not beyond the realm of possibilities that a self-driving toaster could drive to a park and listen to the children there.
A child at a keyboard can easily pretend to be a robot, so if we're getting super strict about enforcement, then essentially the only agents allowed to use social media will be adult humans. This further kills off the phenomenon raised before, where social media can be a flourishing town square full of commerce, wisdom and social interaction.
The government's unenlightened crackdown will see our children surrounded only by the sort of local, outdated bullies who caused all these problems in the first place.
It's a step backwards for Australia and it will further make Australia a laughing stock amongst anyone considering a tech startup here.
We are opposed to this Bill and recommend it be rejected.