And you think this "ban" will help how? All it can do is make things worse. Ever heard of the Streisand Effect? Works for kids too. And it will probably make it worse in other ways too, because now some kids will try to hide that they are active on social media. Oh, and the step towards a surveillance-society is much, much worse than what social media ever did to kids. And will continue to do.

When it is the gate to the world? I think you are underestimating kids. Also note that one kid figuring it out means the while school knows a few days later...

Ok, sorry. It did sound like "LOL, L2P!".

The point is really not when it happens, but that it happens. It may have been at 6 or 7, I played last probably 12 years ago or so.

Maybe. But above of some level of fail and delusion you do not get access to the good layers anymore. Just look at Trump.

Well, IBM was basically a zombie 10 years ago. Something will have to stake them to put them out of their misery. Fully agree on Microsoft. Their stuff is only getting worse at this time and was pretty bad before. And their cloud got hacked several times now and had really, really bad vulnerabilities were nobody knows whether they were attacked or not (which makes things worse). They clearly do not have what it takes to survive with the increased need for IT security we have today.

Life is doing long-term damage. You need to stop listening to the propaganda.

I don't think the goal of the legislation is to ensure that 100% of kids under 16 are off social media. I think the goal is (more realistically) to get most kids off social media. And VPNs cost money and usually require a credit card to sign up. This is something that most under 16 year olds in Australia don't have. So there is a barrier there.

Indeed. Also shows that giants die slowly, unfortunately.

Yeah. China tried that. The UK too. Does not work. And to make things like the TOR browser illegal is not easy and subject to the Streisand-effect.

Simple: They will just learn ways around this ban. And then maybe the surveillance fascist assholes behind it will actually have taught them how to not get spied on later in life.

Or download the TOR browser for zero-configuration and free censorship circumvention. Like people in China do. Good thing too.

Obviously. Kinds that want to have had access to all of the Internet for a long time and that is not going to change. Negative effects? Quite limited and can be compensated with good parenting.

This is exclusively about surveillance fascists getting their wet dreams implemented.

Indeed. Blocks and other restrictions by authoritarian assholes do not work on things people want to do. And that goes even more for teens.

All these teens find out how to circumvent laws made by adult assholes. Might be a good thing too.

I talked to a DB expert at a really large bank about 15 years ago. Apparently, at that time Oracle was already not "good" at databases.