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Written by nick on 2024-11-21 at 12:23

My submission just now, 'cos I'm going to be too busy tomorrow to think about it:

I am a freelance software consultant, and I am a parent of two teenagers, currently aged 14 and 18. They use "social media" every day, and have so for many years. We coordinate our busy family lives, share photos and music and inspirations. We stay in touch with friends in the USA and Korea. During Melbourne's COVID lockdowns, social media was a lifeline for our children and their friends, allowing them to maintain relationships with their peers despite severe disruption to their social lives, and to explore the world from the safety of home.

I myself was a very early "digital native", exposed to social media as a teenager in the days of dialup BBSes, when a modem at 2400bps was a bridge to a much larger world. Discussions about music, science fiction, philosophy and politics ... some of that stuff was pretty stupid, but it expanded my horizons and it eventually led on to my research work in telecommunications and bioinformatics, so maybe it wasn't so bad.

So: as a parent, and a technologist I do not think this bill is a good idea. It's a parent's job to support their kids in their relationships of all kinds, and this bill will not help us do that. Attempting to restricting young teens' access to social media sites will just make it harder for them to report bullying or stalking when they work out how to do it anyway.

In addition, as a technologist, I can't help pointing out that the description of "social media" in 63C is hopelessly vague.

"the [purpose] of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users" could refer to email or tin-can telephones. The explanatory memorandum later mentions an intention to exclude "messaging apps" at some point in the future but that's not well defined either, and the importance of this distinction to the various studies quoted is not explored: how exactly is "social media" defined in each of those studies / surveys? Having such important matters of definition left hanging in the air and to be fixed later suggests that this proposed legislation is not ready to be decided upon.

This seems a very strange piece of legislation to waste your time and energy on. If you're worried about the welfare of children, perhaps concentrate on relieving poverty, which is correlated with just about every measure of physical and mental health in children.

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