Brownstone Institute
Australian Government to Ban Social Media for Kids
From the Brownstone Institute
The Australian Government is set to impose social media age limits, amid increasing concern over the effect of social media on youth mental health, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced today.
Legislation is to be introduced later this year, and is expected to gain bipartisan support after the leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, called to ban social media for under 16s earlier this year.
“We know social media is causing social harm, and it is taking kids away from real friends and real experiences,” said Albanese in a statement today, which also happens to be World Suicide Prevention Day.
“The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount.”
“We’re supporting parents and keeping kids safe by taking this action, because enough is enough.”
The federal commitment to legislate social media age limits follows similar announcements from the Victorian and South Australian governments, both of which want to ban social media for kids under the age of 14.
The new legislation will build on a report by former High Court Chief Justice, Robert French, released on Sunday. The report, commissioned by the South Australian (SA) Government, includes draft legislation banning children under 14 from social media outright, and requiring companies to gain parental consent for 14 and 15-year-olds to use their platforms.
Recent polling shows strong public support for an age-based social media ban, with 61% of respondents agreeing that the government should restrict the use of social media platforms for Australians younger than 17. Unsurprisingly, support was lower among younger Australians. Only 54% of respondents aged 18 to 24 agreed with the ban.
The potential harms of social media for kids have come to prominence in the past decade, particularly with the ubiquity of the smartphone.
Author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said social media is “more addictive than heroin,” causing the “great rewiring” of childhood. He is one of many researchers who suggest that the increased uptake of social media and smartphones has created an “international epidemic” of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people.
Research by Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, found that 75% of 16 to 18-year-olds had seen online pornography – of those, nearly one-third saw it before the age of 13, and nearly half saw it between the ages of 13 and 15.
In other research, eSafety found that almost two-thirds of 14-17-year-olds have viewed potentially harmful content in the past year, such as content relating to drug taking, suicide, or self-harm, or gory or violent material.
There are also concerns about children being preyed upon online. Sonya Ryan OAM, the founder and chief executive of the Carly Ryan Foundation, has experienced this personally. Her daughter Carly, was killed in 2007 at the age of 15 by a predator she met online.
Ryan has voiced her support for new laws to protect kids, stating, “In my opinion the only way forward is to create appropriate legislation to protect our children from these harms and regulate big tech companies to include mandatory age verification across all platforms.”
Others are worried that banning children’s access to social media will cause unintended harms.
“Social media is one of the only public spaces where children can communicate directly with their friends – often maintaining connections with distant friends and loved ones that would otherwise be impossible,” said information and technology expert Dr Dana McKay of RMIT University.
Instead of banning kids from social media, the focus should be on making social media safer, said Dr McKay.
“Many of the problems can already be addressed by minimising advertising and detecting and addressing harmful interactions through behavioural analytics, for example,” she said.
Details on how the new age assurance laws and technology will work are hazy until legislation is tabled later this year, but the concept has already been in development for some time.
The Federal Government has invested $6.5 million in a trial of age assurance technology which will be used to enforce the social media age limit, with the technology aspect of the trial currently out to tender.
At the same time, Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety has given digital industry associations until the end of this year to propose improved industry codes that will be enforceable by eSafety to limit children’s access to inappropriate content online, including pornography and self-harm content.
Both of these initiatives are tied in with Age Verification Roadmap, which in turn is tied in with Australia’s recently legislated Digital ID framework, to which the government has allotted $288.1 million over the next four years.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control
The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties.
You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury to calling for violent solutions – over the last several weeks. And it serves as a reminder: censorship was never the end point. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure,” which is how we think. And to what end? A secure monopoly on political power.
This week, Fox reporter Peter Doocy was sparring with the White House spokesperson over whether FEMA is funding migrants even as it cannot help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back and called this “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the whole context of the question and otherwise never said.
It was clear to anyone who was watching that the term “disinformation” means to her nothing other than a premise or fact that is unwelcome and needs to be shut down. This messaging has been further reinforced by a Harris/Walz ad blaming unnamed “misinformation” from Trump for exacerbating hurricane suffering following Hurricane Helene.
This exchange came only days after Hillary Clinton suggested criminal penalties for disinformation, else “they will lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun because, presumably, she is not in control..unless she regards herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.
Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech is making government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has sworn to “hold social media accountable” for the “hate infiltrating their platforms.” And well-connected physician Peter Hotez is calling for Homeland Security and NATO to put an end to debates over vaccines
You can detect the fury in all their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is causing them to lose their minds, to the point that they are just saying it out loud: “Make them stop.”
Hurricane Milton seems to have caused the censors to flip out in a violent rage, as people wondered whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. A writer in the Atlantic explodes: “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis,” while decrying “outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.”
Catch that? It’s the viewing itself that is the problem, as if people do not have the capacity to think for themselves.
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control, somehow forcing the whole of the digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration even refounded the Internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.
YouTube accounts have been demonetized and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and banned. LinkedIn’s algorithms punish posts that take issue with regime narratives. This has not slowed down in light of litigation but rather continued and intensified.
The goal is to close up the Internet. They would have done it by now if it were not for the First Amendment, which stands in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university cutouts, third-party providers, phony baloney fact-checkers, pressure on tech firms that provide government services at a price, and other mechanisms to achieve indirectly what they cannot do directly just yet.
Among the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a bellwether here and his company is being bankrupted. Steve Bannon, the philosopher king of MAGA, has been in jail for the entire election season for having defied a Congressional subpoena on the advice of counsel. The protestors on January 6 have been in prison not for damages caused or trespassing but for landing on the wrong side of the regime.
Most of us had an intuition that the Covid vaccine mandates themselves were not entirely about health but rather a tactic of exclusion of those who were not fully trusting of authority. This was rather obvious when it came to the military and the medical profession but less apparent within academia where noncompliant students and professors were effectively purged for their refusal to risk their lives for pharma.
There was an element of malice, too, in the mask mandates. Even though there was zero scientific evidence that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face can change epidemiological dynamics, they did serve well as a visible sign to separate believers from unbelievers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding individualists of who is really running the show.
The final means of censorship is violence against person and property, while the end is to control what you think in service of one-party rule. Major tech companies and major media are wholly complicit in bringing this about. Only a handful of services are stopping this and they are all being targeted by the regime through myriad forms of lawfare.
Postscript: as this article is released, the website archive.org has been fully down for the better part of a week, supposedly due to a catastrophic DDOS attack. The private owners say the data has been saved and it will be restored in time. Maybe. But consider: this the one tool we have for having a verified memory of what was posted when. It is how we found that WHO changed its definition of herd immunity. It’s how we found that the CDC was behind the mail-in ballot fiasco of 2020. It’s how we know that FTX funded anti-Ivermectin studies. And so on. The links were stable and good, never down.
Until now, two weeks before the election. We are of course supposed to believe that this shocking collapse is purely a coincidence. Maybe. Probably. And yet without this website – a central point of failure – vast amounts of the history of the last quarter century is deleted. The entire contents of the web can be re-written as vaporware, here one instant, gone the next. Even if this site does come back, what will be missing and how long will it take to figure it out? Will the Internet have been lobotomized? If not this time, could it happen in the future? Certainly.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
A relatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.
“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”
A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.
“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.
Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute
Today, Wenstrup announced a subpoena to compel Moore (The FOIA lady) to appear for a deposition on October 4, 2024, saying that she’d repeatedly resisted these efforts and delayed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.
“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation,” said Wenstrup.
“Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government,” he added.
Moore, however, has indicated through her lawyers that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she’d cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find “an alternative” to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.
They also explained that Morens’ emails suggesting Moore gave tips “about avoiding FOIA,” were misleading because Morens, under oath said, “That was a joke…She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”
Nonetheless, Moore’s decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation’s top health research institutions.
It’s not over until the FOIA lady sings!
Further reading: The great FOIA dodge
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
Please help us share this information with our community.
Hillary Clinton Calls for Stricter Online Censorship as Establishment Fears Losing “Total Control”
Retired judge slams Trudeau gov’t for promoting ‘false’ accusation about residential school deaths
Is the Senate in Violation of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and Hindering Reconciliation?
Cost of Ottawa’s gun ban fiasco may reach $6 billion
-
Economy2 days agoFederal mismanagement to blame for Canada’s immigration backlash
-
National1 day agoJudge slams Trudeau, media for false claims about deaths, ‘secret burials’ at residential schools
-
Daily Caller2 days agoMusk Reveals To Tucker Why He Thinks 2024 Will Be Last Election If Dems Win
-
Economy2 days agoCanada should not want to lead the world on climate change policy
-
Energy2 days agoTMX Pipeline a Success Story – Despite All the Green Battles Against It
-
John Stossel2 days agoFree Money? What a UBI Would Really Do to People … and the National Debt
-
Crime23 hours agoNumbers don’t lie—crime up significantly in Toronto and across Canada
-
Alberta1 day agoLawyers ask Alberta court to allow businesses to seek damages from gov’t for COVID shutdown