Australian under 16 Teen social media ban

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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plus … We are WORRING about the most valueable we have as society, OUR CHILDREN !!!

… it seems that you are NOT interested in protecting them from being raped in the basement of a pizzeria … WHY DO YOU HATE YOUR COUNTRY SO MUCH???!!!

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The ban has good intentions but will ultimately cause more harm than good. I think bringing back teaching internet safety skills to kids would do a far better job in protecting them.

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Monitoring your children’s internet activity is trivially easy.

It’s harder keeping kids away from R-rated movies on Amazon. Kids can be clever in learning mom & dad’s password for the Amazon Parent’s login account.

Kids are supposed to use their Child login on Amazon.

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I have a 16-year-old and here’s how I feel about social media after watching her:

  • There’s a kind of social media where you are open to the world and the algorithm pushes stuff on you: Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. My kid does not do those. She’s now old enough that I’d give her permission to do them if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to before age 16, or if she did, I would have wanted to have oversight.
  • There’s another kind of social media that is more like glorified group texting: Discord, GroupMe, etc. These are useful for when you’ve got a large group of people where you want to keep up with them and/or communicate but it would be awkward to have a group text for it (a group text for 100 people is unfortunate, if it even works), plus which maybe you’re adding or subtracting members from the group a lot which is hard to do with text groups. My kid’s church group communicates via GroupMe, as does her major extracurricular group (and I mean by that official communications from adults, not just communications between kids, although those are there too). She has been in Discord groups since age 13 with her friends from summer camp as well as friends from school, and it’s like a lifeline for her and has been an essential tool in her socialization and understanding how other kids think about things and communicate. I used to have more oversight than I do – now, now much. She does spend too much time on it, but I consider this something I should mediate at home rather than something that someone else should ban for me. And the good of this kind of social media FAR outweighs the bad in our household, and I worry that a “social media ban” would get rid of these too.
  • No phones in class? THAT I think is great. Her high school has instituted a ban on phones in class which is going super well. (The kids do have access to their phones between classes and during lunch, which I also think is good as sometimes I do need to communicate things like “can you take a different bus today.”) Now if they could just get rid of the school-issued iPads… but that’s a battle that isn’t going to be won, I think.