Landmark legislation sees the Australian government committed to the novel step of child protection by banning social media for under sixteens.
this isn’t for the safety of kids; it’s to eliminate the ability for queer kids to find a community.
Are you Australian? That just feels like kind of a US centric lens to analyze this through, though you’re right that loss of community is a byproduct.
Like, I’m not exactly happy with the Albanese government, but I would say that most negative LGBTQ things they have said or done have been cowardly attempts to avoid drama from the Liberals, not active bigotry
What community? This is social media we’re talking about. Have people really convinced themselves that these things are communities?
Social media is not a good replacement for real life community (look through my comment history and you’ll see me expressing exactly that repeatedly), but we can’t be oblivious to the fact that for many children their only connection to fellow queer people may be online. If you live in a small town or community where there are no other openly queer people, or if your school, peers, and parents are hostile to queer people you won’t have much choice in where you find community.
No offence but that’s shortsighted to be generous. I feel like half of lemmy will carry on about social media being cancer, the frequent articles citing negative effects of SM on mental health and the fact that multiple social media companies are accused of propagating misinformation (Zuckerberg face sure is in lemmy a lot lately for some reason). Like Zuck has all but greenlit harassing lgbt+ people on FB and the SM ban is to stop gay kids finding a community? Please. Corporate SM is a blight and before someone says lemmy/reddit check the mod logs or the fact that lemmy only got CSAM under control relatively recently before suggesting it’s fine for kids.
Besides, LGTB kids aren’t the only ones who need the internet to find refuge
