Jakarta, domclub Indonesia
—
Teenager
Australia
respond
social media ban
(social media) in Kangaroo Country in various ways, from using parents’ faces to maintain accounts to switching to less well-known applications.
This was done after Australia on Wednesday (10/12) officially banned social media for children under the age of 16.Now, the social media platform will identify Australian accounts based on the user’s age.
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Social media that must apply age limits to children include Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, X (Twitter), and YouTube.
Responding to the ban, a 14-year-old cheerleader named Lucy Brooks admitted that she lost several friends on Snapchat when the social media ban began.
However, they returned within 24 hours.Many created new accounts with some borrowing photos of their parents or older friends who were willing to help them evade age detection technology.
[Gambas:domclub Video]
Critics themselves have predicted other platforms will emerge to replace the 10 banned sites.
However, they don’t appear to have taken into account how easy it would be for teenagers to return to using these platforms using the same tricks that teenagers in the UK used when the Online Safety Act was introduced in July.
“Often it is done with the knowledge of parents, but people also use artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images and videos of people, such as asking AI to create an image of a 40-year-old person, to bypass these restrictions,” said Lucy, quoted from
domclub
.
Lucy herself lost access to Instagram but is still active on Snapchat and TikTok.
Age verification companies say their technology can roughly assess who is using an account, even if the owner passes age verification.
However, for now, children under the age of 16 who intend to access prohibited sites can still do so, especially those whose parents do not mind if they access them again.
Apart from that, there are also several teenagers whose year of birth is older.This method seemed to work in their case.
“I think it’s because I entered my date of birth as 2000 when I first registered,” said a 15-year-old interviewed by domclub.
“It’s easier to do that way,” he added, supported by the nods of his friends who experienced similar cases.
Furthermore, several teenagers on TikTok joked that they would commit juvenile crimes after the social media ban was implemented.
Switch to social media
Others said they would turn to lesser-known apps, such as Yope, a photo-sharing site, and Coverstar, which advertises itself as a safer version of TikTok with “No DMs. No Suspicious Users.”
Lemon8, owned by ByteDance, was initially considered a replacement for TikTok, but the company has now restricted its use to over-16s.
One of those who turned to the platform is Shar, a 15-year-old singer.He encouraged others to follow suit because he was worried his 4,000 TikTok followers would disappear overnight.
However, it turns out that the accounts still haven’t disappeared after the ban was implemented.
“None of my accounts on any platform were closed, even the ones I used with my real age,” said Shar, who was relieved to find that her TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat accounts were still functional.
Although some teenagers still have their accounts, Lucy and other teenagers face uncertainty about how long they will be able to use their social media.
Lucy said that her friends couldn’t download their accounts because they didn’t have enough storage space.
They don’t want to delete the account and lose their memories, but they fear their photos and private messages might be trapped in a vast digital vault somewhere, perhaps for years.
(lmy/chri)
