Australia's Planned Social Media Ban Won't Include PSN After All

Yeah, nah, don't worry about it, mate

by · Push Square

Last week, we brought you troubling news from Down Under, where in the far-off land of Australia, an unfortunate precedent is coming to pass: the banning of "social media" (which has since been legally defined) for under 16s. This revolutionary concept is quickly catching on and is apparently "already on the table" for you poms in the UK; sorry about that. And while it may already be too late for unfortunate Aussie teens, we are at least happy to confirm that the ban will not impact their ability to play violent, debaucherous PlayStation games to their heart's content, an issue of vital import to this young-at-heart Aussie scribe.

Thankfully, Australia's little grommets will still be allowed access to the PlayStation Network, as the proposed ban will not apply to "online video games" - despite the PSN's potentially scary messaging capabilities. Services like TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram and X will be prohibited, but bizarrely, YouTube is allowed due to its educational benefits.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's Labor government introduced the bill yesterday, which enjoys popular support from both major parties and is expected to pass. Albo and the politicians supporting him cite spurious evidence and are flying in the face of the recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission, which has "serious reservations". The Commission fears that these proposed laws would "significantly interfere with the rights of children and young people".

There are concerns the move will require all Australians to submit to age and identity verifications to determine who is actually underage, which does seem just a tad authoritarian. The cherry on top? If you have any concerns of your own, the Albanese government has allowed just 24 hours for submissions, starting yesterday!

Related Articles

News Australia's Planned Social Media Ban to Include PSN

Albo, you've got to be joking, mate

Are you as glad as we are Australia's proposed social media won't extend to "online video games"? Are you concerned these radical Aussie ideas of alleged internet safety could be transmitted to your own country? Let us know in the comment section below, mate.

  • Share:
  • 56

About Khayl Adam

Khayl Adam is Push Square's roving Australian correspondent, a reporter tasked with scouring the internet for the richest, most succulent PlayStation stories. With five years of experience as a freelance journalist and mercenary wordsmith, RPGs are his first great love, but strategy and tactics games are a close second, genres in which he is only too happy to specialize.

Comments 52

Crazy times. I think they're going to have a hard time enforcing that and will wind up turning it into a forbidden fruit, making it more appealing than ever.

Don't worry, Kier Starmer is already convicting people for thought crime in the UK. 1984 is here if we didn't already know it.

Sending my didgeridoo messages to my special little friends now. Ugh!

I wasn't been flippant, I grew up in a deprived area and suffered much abuse growing up. But I see kids like myself on such estates can be easily enticed. It's them I'm thinking about.
Ban kids.

I dunno, does this not just make PSN now groomer city? Like YouTube doesn’t have the ease of access with messaging features so I can understand that being exempt (even if there’s no reason to have an account for general use) but PSN is widely available and now being reported everywhere that it’s exempt. Just enforce child accounts with closed inboxes, it’s not all that difficult. Removing all access is absurd but also things can’t continue as they are, middle ground people!

@nessisonett
Practically impossible to police though, surely?
It sounds great in theory imo, but that's theory.

sorry but i actually think its a good idea

@Michael2008ish Require a bank card to be paired to adult accounts. Not as much of a massive data processing and privacy disaster that the nonsense passport level ID requirements being touted for porn sites are, especially given 99% of accounts are paired to bank cards anyway. If the parent goes ahead anyway and gives their kid an adult account that’s both their right and their problem by that point. State can’t control everything but they can act as a helping hand.

@nessisonett
Good thinking my friend. 1st defence is the state, but ultimately it's down to the parents.

So now if a teen gets bullied or something, he/she won't seek help because technically they are not supposed to be using it anyway. So now if a teen is using social media when they are not supposed to, like they got through a loophole as an example, anything can be done to them online and in theory its that teen breaking the law. The court will just say to that Paedophile "its all good, he/she the victim wasn't supposed to be on it anyway"
Not certain if I'm reading all this new law correctly, but that's how I assume it will be. It will stop teens asking for help since they would be scared to get in trouble for still using the system.

Wow - who would have thunk it?!?! That we should wait until detail comes out, before yelling the sky is falling. I think it's still early days yet, and I suspect whatever legislation that is put up, won't be the final version put into law. If it even makes it that far...

Take the slur "poms" out of this article. It's derogatory and offensive.
Secondly, us Brits living in Britain can't be poms because the word is used as a slur for British Immigrants who migrated to Australia

They could ban that sh1t for everyone on the planet, for all I care.

@Zemo55 Sorry... now I maybe biased... but the term "pom" in modern Australian parlance is not a slur...it is a term of familarity - but distance. It's generally considered good-natured (and not even that cheeky if I'm being honest). I think the term was used in the 50's for british immigrants being flooded into Australia (during the White Australia years) displacing jobs/opportunity... and it's derogiatory term is normally "wh*ng*ng pom". Those days are long gone (I thought).

Edit - to be fair... Australia's population is so diverse now, I suspect most people wouldn't have a clue what "pom" meant, or who it was referring to.

So - it's fine if you think it's a slur. From your perspective it might be... I'm just saying as an Australian, no one actually gives a flying <insert appropriate f word> about slurs when they say "pom". It's almost always used in sporting terms, as a term of competitive-endearment.

But on behalf of Australia... we withdraw any bad/offensive thing that may have been imported or said by anyone from Australia ever (Edit - Not including Neighbours... seriously, you can have that one).

And before anyone arcs up... this is all in jest. [post-script - apart from the Neighbours comment... that was 100% genuine... I promise]

This is the absolute most English thing I’ve read on this site. Well done.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare @Zemo55 Or maybe the article is written for Pomeranians. Fluffy dogs want to know this information too!

@LavenderShroud never trust the fluffy ones... never....

What do they hope to accomplish here other than reintroducing boredom to childhood? Maybe just go all in and ban anyone over the age of 17 from using social media to, get all these crazy old farts back into model trains and ham radios.

@Fartingale it's ok... you will always have your farts.

Nothing to do with protecting children, and 100% to do with ID’ing adults.

If it were about protecting children, it would include games as certain games seem to be riddled with creeps.

Suspicious that it seems to be limited to places where adults share information and ideas that Governments would prefer they didn’t.

Noting Zuckerberg’s admission and regrets that they censored true but inconvenient information on behalf of the US Govt a few years back, and given how we’ve seen the UK Govt behave.

mandatory digital id for all Australians. the first steps into tyranny. next steps for globalists to do: cbdc and social credit. this must be stopped! only 24 hours to form a opposition document and no public hearings. i sent a doccument and did my part. labor trying to quietly push Orwellian measures.

@LavenderShroud Well it should be the least English thing since he's using Australian slang (and is Australian, but he's playing it up here because the article's about Australia) whereas the other writers are English. 😄

16 is how the people running the world act

It may need a bit more thought, but at its core, I think this is a good idea.

Removed - trolling/baiting

@Matroska unfortunately they all write in American English even though they were taught correct spellings at school.

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare bingo don't tell him what we call our new Zealand mates the sheep f....

@BrettAwesome Agreed. While I appreciate the irony of responding to you over the Internet, unknown to one another, I think social media is one of the worst things the Internet brought with it.

There does need to be SOMETHING done about the amount of social media used, and abused, by kids. But i'm not sure an outright ban is the right answer either. That will likely create as many problems as it solves. Law of unintended consequences and all that.

Removed - inappropriate language; user is banned

@Zemo55 It's a jokey word used in a lighthearted way, like yank and limey. Also, remember, a word is only offensive if you find it offensive. Australians use it in a bantery way, I can't imagine a British person in Australia being surrounded by Aussies as they're taunted with "pom" while crying. It's just a little fun jab, and we do the same back. Like how you're cheekier with your friends than you'd be with a stranger.

@riceNpea I know, every time I see "tidbit" and stuff like that... I guess that's the issue with being an internet journalist, you're just embedded so much in American culture.

@Matroska
I don't allow that as an excuse. Journalists are meant to be professional writers, so if I can tell the difference, they certainly should be able to.

I guess it's like any industry, you have the cowboys at the bottom, then the standard, entry-level, know the bare minimum, then the experts and then the masters. If you're constantly mixing Americanisms with English you're at level 2 of that scale and unlikely to go higher.

It is quite disappointing they don't include game's chats, but at least it is something. Hope it comes to Europe soon.

This is just another nail in the coffin of our freedoms being killed off! The world is more and more becoming a nanny state! More and more control by the government's of the world it's fast becoming a world wide dictatorship! Two-tier Keir in the UK is hated by the majority of his citizens!

@BrettAwesome While I think it would be great to get rid of social media, where do you draw the line? Would sites like this have the forums and comments removed? Forums are considered social media too.

@PorkChopExpress
This isn't social media. It's a news paper. And we're discussing an article. Might as well have done it at the bus stop or something similar 😄

@Lanmanna
They are? No. Just get rid of dedicated platforms, like Facebook and Instagram...but let's...keep Snapchat. I like that one 😏😂

I'm a parent with teenage children in Australia and the amount of bullying that occurs in group chats on apps like WhatsApp is quite damaging. From a perspective of a parent, the ban is needed. For those that say freedoms are being killed off, there was no freedom of social media in schools twenty years ago because it did not exist - kids weren't taking phones to school and group chats weren't occurring. This is a new phenomenon that needs to be regulated appropriately.

@riceNpea no he not

@KillerBoy Me Tarzan. You Jane.

Considering how toxic social media is, made worse by the far-right takeover of sites like Twitter and the increasing "normalization" of ignorance, baseless conspiracies, intolerance and hatred, it's no surprise to see moves like this to address youth bullying. I myself was bullied horribly in my primary school days, and that was without social media. I couldn't even imagine how much worse it would be for kids now with the advent of social media, hence another reason why I would never want kids of my own and deal with all of that again...
It just seems nearly impossible to actually enforce something like this though.

@ChimpMasta Don't forget Twitter, they've surpressed info under muskrat that was inconvenient to the far-right... Now the site is just one giant arm of maga.

@EVIL-C what did they suppress. I only know about the laptop story from 2020, plus the Biden era Covid stuff that Dorsey has expressed regret over.

@ChimpMasta The recent Vance dossier, for one.

@Zemo55 Yeah sorry mate, the meaning of words change, and its meant in good fun; pom is used frequently on broadcast television. The Guardian puts it in headlines, not something you do with slurs I found this article quite helpful:

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/comment-opinion/curious-questions-australians-call-british-poms-200250

@EVIL-C the one with hacked information that all the social media firms have policies against following the Hillary/Dem hack?

Hence the Macron leak was suppressed.

Common practice, introduced ironically at the request of the Dems. If the other sites like Facebook allow it, then they are the ones deviating from policy, not X.

@ChimpMasta The irony is don't pretend to be something that one clearly isn't. I personally don't care where information comes from, as long as it is accurate and verifiable, it should always be revealed, no matter who the guilty individual or group is. Twitter and muskrat are no neutral arbiters of free-flowing information. How quickly one changes their stated tune from 2022 saying the platform needs to be neutral, to the current ceasepool after getting fully into bed with chump in 2024. There was also the caving in by muskrat to government demands by both Turkey and Brazil. It's just a ruse and pandering to the hard-right audience the platform has turned itself into and now artificially boosts. And we see the result; the "X-odus" (Tw-xodus? 😂) as it were, lol. 😋 That's purely on muskrat for why his platform is failing. Dudes getting what he deserves, and he needs to take personal responsibility. Can't blame anyone else for that.

@Khayl no need to explain yourself on it, mate. He spoke for the one Brit that inexplicably found it offensive, rest of us took it for exactly what it is.

@EVIL-C You are STILL confusing two types of censorship. Although I suspect you aren't really confusing them, but rather came here to deliberately shove your political views down peoples throats rather than discuss the topic at hand.

There is the political censorship that we saw during Covid, US Elections and that you also see in the deliberate curation of search/trending results. Dorsey's Twitter, Google and Facebook were all involved but doing so covertly. Dorsey and Zuckerberg have since expressed regret for some of it (although the latter is still doing it in other areas).

Then there are the public gentleman's agreement censorship that all the firms have agreed to keep regulators/Govts off their backs.

That would be censoring stuff like doxxing, information obtained via illegal hacking, and material involving minors etc.

The example you gave was a part of the latter (illegally hacked material), that all platforms have signed up to, and so all platforms should censor if they are being consistent.

Therefore your accusation of bias-based censorship against one firm is false, as it's material deemed illegal/rule breaking across all mainstream platforms.

@ChimpMasta Then we'll agree to disagree. My point still stands that twitter has turned into a republican propaganda arm, and the platform is only going to continue to bleed money and users. FAFO, free market decides, etc.. as they say, lol. 😉 Good day.

Interesting, from the misinformation one to this one I wasn't sure what to expect. Hmm. Is it no further hints to Sony/others for moderation too? Do they think PSN has good enough parental controls as well to offer? If those cover chatting online as well?

They only going after the major social media platforms I guess.

Still reminded of that Tik Tok parental control ad I've seen or whatever 'connection' nonsense they want to say in that ad. XD Every kid's favourite thing to hear and why they have different words used for a reason among other generations.

Will it be like the MMO days but PSN & such instead to speak if other options are limited? Hmmm....

Show Comments

Leave A Comment

Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...

Related Articles

PS5 Consoles, Controllers, and PSVR2 Discounts for Black Friday Seemingly RevealedNot official prices, but as good asLiam Croft, 16 Nov 2024Huge PS Store Black Friday Sale Live Now, 500+ PS5, PS4 Games on OfferAstro Bot! Silent Hill 2! Rebirth!Liam Croft, 22 Nov 2024