Wall of text incoming.
1/ it will show the social media companies that, Australia at least; has tools that they can use to reduce their power.
Holding platforms accountable to a bare minimum standard of moderation against misinformation, bullying and harassment might be a starting point.
This would be great; but it is also too little too late. They have tried, and failed at exactly this for years.
I don’t see how both these claims can simultaneously be true. Either Australia has tools to hold these companies to account, in which case, how would they have previously failed if they’d already tried? Or it doesn’t, and this is just one more completely futile policy that won’t give companies any more than the usual slap on the wrist if it ever goes to court.
I argue that they didn’t try, because they never actually cared about children’s wellbeing, because if they did they’d have done better than this, ergo this policy isn’t really about that and is actually about making citizens more easily identifiable online.
Additionally, it does nothing to reduce the power of seppo tech giants. On the contrary, they’ve got money, they’ll be fine. Independent social media sites however, don’t all have the resources to implement verification systems, so some will feel the financial burden of compliance a lot harder, and others will simply cease serving Australian users, further strengthening Silicon Valley’s hold over the internet.
As I have said over and over again in this thread, what the ban will do is cut children suffering domestic abuse (a problem that is absolutely rife in this country) off from their support networks. It’ll cut minority kids that’re subjected to bullying by their peers off from their communities. It’ll drive more kids to shadier corners of the internet where they’re at greater risk of predation. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is going to get children killed.
Furthermore—and again, as I’ve been repeating all over this thread—everyone—yes, that includes adults—will be required to submit personally identifiable information to private organisations just to communicate with other people online, making anyone in this country who uses social media a potential victim of identity theft the moment a data breach happens. And happen it will. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.
What’s more, knowing that the platforms they’re using have their identities will make a great many people more hesitant to speak critically about existing power structures, especially the government. This is bad.
I stand by my previously stated opinion that all this is worse than the status quo, but even if it weren’t you should be asking why this is the solution that the government came up with.
Pretty sure Chauvin had fent in his system, and this caused the 22 stab wounds—the fact he was shanked at the same time was just a coincidence.