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hThat, and welcome to TechScape. Happy belated Thanksgiving to my American readers and I hope you all have a good holiday this weekend. I’m excited to bake Grittibänz for the feast of Saint Nicholas. This week in technology: Australia incites panic, Bluesky raises the issue of personalized feeds and online things that made me happy during the holidays.
On Thursday, Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from accessing social media.
my colleague Helen Sullivan reports from Sydney:
The Online Safety (Minimum Age on Social Media) Amendment Bill bans social media platforms from allowing users under 16 to access their services, threatening companies with fines of up to A$50 million (32 million US dollars) if they do not comply. However, it does not contain details about how it will work, only that companies are expected to take reasonable steps to ensure that users are 16 years old or older. Details will come later, when a trial of age-checking technology is completed in mid-2025. The bill will not come into force for another 12 months.
The bill also does not specify which companies the legislation would apply to, although Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has said Snapchat, TikTok, X, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook are likely to be part of the ban. YouTube will not be included because of its “important” educational purpose, he said.
The new law was drafted in response to what Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says is a “clear and causal link between the rise of social media and harm to the mental health of young Australians”.”.
Get the full story here.
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The objections to the law are vigorous and multiple.
TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and X are crazy. In response to the passage of the legislation, Meta said the process was “rushed” and did not take into account the voices of young people, the measures the tech industry already takes to protect them and the existing evidence on the effects of their use of social networks.
Australian children are not a significant user base for any of these companies. According UNICEF5.7 million people under the age of 18 lived in Australia in 2023. Facebook reported 3 billion monthly users in May 2023. India is home to around 370 million Facebook users. Even if all children in Australia abandoned social media (unlikely), the number of users would not decrease significantly.
If every country in the world kicked their young people off social media, social media companies would face an uncertain future.
The concern for technology companies is the precedent that the new law sets. Tech companies also strongly opposed measures in both Australia and Canada requiring them to pay for news content. The problem was not the amount of money demanded but what could happen; If every country in the world required payment for news, the financial burden on Facebook and others would be enormous, as would the responsibility of determining what constitutes news. If every country in the world kicked their young people off social media, social media companies would face an uncertain future. Your incoming user channels would dry up.
What tech companies would prefer to see in Australia is a measure requiring parental consent, which is a much more nebulous standard and one that divides responsibility between the company and its users. Meta and others mounted much less vigorous opposition to a 2023 measure passed in France requiring parents to approve the accounts of children under 15 than to the new Australian law. However, in an ominous sign for the Australian measure, local French media say technical challenges mean the under-15 provision has not yet been implemented. And do the parental consent features work? Data from several European countries says the opposite. Nick Clegg of Meta has said that, according to the company’s data, parents do not use parental control measures on social networks.
Australian law shows that any country really could do it. We’ve seen before how one country’s laws tilt the global governance of social media: the United States imposed a minimum age of 13 for social media users with a child privacy law passed in 2000, which has since been passed. become the standard around the world due to the Privacy Policies of social networks.
Read more about how Australia’s social media ban compares to laws in other countries.
What do you want on your social feeds?
The question of control over social media came up repeatedly last week. Bluesky continues his rise. One of the main promises of the nascent social network is customization options for content that users see in their feeds. The site’s address puts it this way: “Users choose their own timelines, whether it’s an algorithmic For You page or a feed of photos entirely of cats.” Until last week, that promise had come true. 22 million users.
In They tweet so much that there is not much room for news. I’m seeing fewer and fewer tweets with news articles and others have complained about similar experiences. Musk’s advice: just accept it. When venture capitalist Paul Graham complained that X was deprioritizing tweets with links, Musk responded: “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This simply stops the lazy links.”
after newsletter promotion
Meta X/Twitter competitor Threads is testing options for users’ default feeds: the algorithmic For You feed, which is the current default; a feed of posts only from the accounts you follow; or a custom feed designed by you. You can choose any one as the feed that appears when you open the application. In the past, Meta managers have said that users overwhelmingly prefer curated feeds, no matter how much they complain that they don’t see enough of the people they follow. Mark Zuckerberg saying He is “interested in seeing how and if people use this.”
This week on my iPhone
My birthday is this week and I was off work for the Thanksgiving holiday for most of last week. In the spirit of joy, what follows are some things online that I consumed last week that made me happy, plus a little why:
Ridiculous Cocktail Recipes: Cocktail recipes have been slower to develop a distinctive aesthetic online than food recipes. There isn’t much to write about the process of dunking some vodka with ice, but rather about the best way to temper the chocolate. Not as many people drink alcohol as eat food. However, food and drink blogs have pivoted to short-form videos with TikTok and Instagram Reels, and watching sublime liquids pour into one another makes for a great clip. Cocktail recipes are booming.
First, there were the videos on how to make the classics. How to order a martini, for example. After saturating feeds and search results, cocktail influencers needed to get creative to stand out. As has happened with the strange foods that we can’t stop looking at, the cocktails have become crazy. TO margarita with sauceto Snow Globe Cocktailto “tapeworm vaccine“, to spicy pepperoncini pour-over martini, wine cake. Observing the disgusting and fascinating creation of a French onion soup martini Pairs well with a regular martini enjoyed at home. I also made the pepperoncini one, without the pouring device, and loved it.
Glicked: Another dual movie release when the “two genders” meme comes comically to life. May Barbenheimer never die. An exciting week of movies for the heterosexual couple in your life. Cinema for him and her. Both fun and exciting movies, but I prefer Wicked, mainly because of the movie but also because of the memes. They were inescapable and fun. There is the groom’s guide to Wickedhe skeptical view of Wickedand the skeptical boyfriend before and after watching Wicked.
Gossip Podcasts: The secret sauce of the podcasting medium—an intimate, engaging chemistry between friendly hosts—is most at home when two friends enjoy small talk about each other’s complicated issues. Whether it’s the celebrity variety or the taste of ordinary people’s gossip, I’m in for a pretty penny, for a pound. I have been getting drunk WHO? Weekly and normal gossip.
Decreasing my IQ: The Oxford University Press has named the word of the year 2024: “brain rot”, defined as: “Alleged impairment of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially seen as a result of excessive consumption of material (now particularly online content) considered trivial or unchallenging.”
A new technology podcast: pixel perfect. Three insightful Chinese journalists analyze news and technology trends at the intersection of the United States and China. Two of his first questions: “Have web novels become high culture?” and “What is NOT in Xiaohongshu?“