A bigger impact found by the research was that parents are now increasingly in the dark about their teens' social media use, with those who were unaware their teens had used social media going from 23 per cent to 33 per cent.

If I remember correctly I had soft reservations about the effectiveness of this ban, I definitely felt a better path was a better social media.. like the fediverse.. where 'healthy by design' isn't something that must be begged and pleaded for, but could just be built and delivered for families. But I also don't remember considering a 'black market' of sorts forming from a ban, but it makes sense.

One particularly prescient submission warned that age restriction efforts on platforms were already ineffective in practice and that bans by themselves would not teach young people to use the internet more safely.

That was a submission from the eSafety Commissioner, the regulator who's now been tasked with enforcing this law.

This is a case where use should be taught, not bans enforced. It's like driving. In the world young people are joining they're going to need to function in society with these tools and forums. Better teach them good and effective use.

i recently came across Google's 'family-link' and iphone's 'Screen time'. seems this would be more effective? these aim to lock your child's phone so that they cant install any new app without permission. feature also include only allowing the web-browsers on your child's phone (and phone-wide, i believe) to access websites that you approve of (using a 'white-listing' process).

References: -https://www.bitdefender.com/... -https://www.techlockdown.com/...

It's truly worth it to protect young minds from the Internet these days, it's full of crazy (bad) things :-(.

The age ban is a poorly thought out policy by a tech illiterate bunch of fossils that does nothing but erode everyones privacy. Which is why there are also attempts being made to use phones to authenticate users so they can be more thoroughly tracked wherever they go as the secure chips cannot be modified. It is also why privacy operating systems like linux and graphene OS are being targeted by google and co because they remove the ability for google to have super user status on your phone and thus not be able to be shut off when you don't want it running. GrapheneOS allows you to control what access google has to your phone and they don't likey.