From the Brownstone Institute

By  Rebekah Barnett  

The Australian Government is set to impose social media age limits, amid increasing concern over the effect of social media on youth mental health, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced today.

Legislation is to be introduced later this year, and is expected to gain bipartisan support after the leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, called to ban social media for under 16s earlier this year.

“We know social media is causing social harm, and it is taking kids away from real friends and real experiences,” said Albanese in a statement today, which also happens to be World Suicide Prevention Day.

“The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount.”

“We’re supporting parents and keeping kids safe by taking this action, because enough is enough.”

The federal commitment to legislate social media age limits follows similar announcements from the Victorian and South Australian governments, both of which want to ban social media for kids under the age of 14.

The new legislation will build on a report by former High Court Chief Justice, Robert French, released on Sunday. The report, commissioned by the South Australian (SA) Government, includes draft legislation banning children under 14 from social media outright, and requiring companies to gain parental consent for 14 and 15-year-olds to use their platforms.

Recent polling shows strong public support for an age-based social media ban, with 61% of respondents agreeing that the government should restrict the use of social media platforms for Australians younger than 17. Unsurprisingly, support was lower among younger Australians. Only 54% of respondents aged 18 to 24 agreed with the ban.

The potential harms of social media for kids have come to prominence in the past decade, particularly with the ubiquity of the smartphone.

Author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said social media is “more addictive than heroin,” causing the “great rewiring” of childhood. He is one of many researchers who suggest that the increased uptake of social media and smartphones has created an “international epidemic” of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people.

Research by Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, found that 75% of 16 to 18-year-olds had seen online pornography – of those, nearly one-third saw it before the age of 13, and nearly half saw it between the ages of 13 and 15.

In other research, eSafety found that almost two-thirds of 14-17-year-olds have viewed potentially harmful content in the past year, such as content relating to drug taking, suicide, or self-harm, or gory or violent material.

There are also concerns about children being preyed upon online. Sonya Ryan OAM, the founder and chief executive of the Carly Ryan Foundation, has experienced this personally. Her daughter Carly, was killed in 2007 at the age of 15 by a predator she met online.

Ryan has voiced her support for new laws to protect kids, stating, “In my opinion the only way forward is to create appropriate legislation to protect our children from these harms and regulate big tech companies to include mandatory age verification across all platforms.”

Others are worried that banning children’s access to social media will cause unintended harms.

“Social media is one of the only public spaces where children can communicate directly with their friends – often maintaining connections with distant friends and loved ones that would otherwise be impossible,” said information and technology expert Dr Dana McKay of RMIT University.

Instead of banning kids from social media, the focus should be on making social media safer, said Dr McKay.

“Many of the problems can already be addressed by minimising advertising and detecting and addressing harmful interactions through behavioural analytics, for example,” she said.

Details on how the new age assurance laws and technology will work are hazy until legislation is tabled later this year, but the concept has already been in development for some time.

The Federal Government has invested $6.5 million in a trial of age assurance technology which will be used to enforce the social media age limit, with the technology aspect of the trial currently out to tender.

At the same time, Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety has given digital industry associations until the end of this year to propose improved industry codes that will be enforceable by eSafety to limit children’s access to inappropriate content online, including pornography and self-harm content.

Both of these initiatives are tied in with Age Verification Roadmap, which in turn is tied in with Australia’s recently legislated Digital ID framework, to which the government has allotted $288.1 million over the next four years.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Rebekah Barnett

Rebekah Barnett is a Brownstone Institute fellow, independent journalist and advocate for Australians injured by the Covid vaccines. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of Western Australia, and writes for her Substack, Dystopian Down Under.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Rep. Tim Burchett

It is common knowledge that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a complete disaster, but lots of people do not know that the Biden administration has been sending cash to the Taliban every week since then.

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, our troops were ordered to leave behind $7 billion worth of military equipment which ended up in the hands of the Taliban. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the Taliban also likely gained access to approximately $57.6 million in funds that the United States had provided to the former Afghan government. But that was just the beginning of the financial atrocities.

“According to an August 2023 World Bank report, the UN has purchased, transported, and transferred $2.9 billion in U.S. currency to Afghanistan since August 2021,” said a SIGAR report published in January. “This included $1.8 billion provided in 2022 and $1.1 billion provided in 2023, as of August 2023.”

“The U.S. is the largest international donor to Afghanistan, having provided about $2.6 billion in funding to the UN, other international organizations (PIOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Afghanistan since August 2021,” said the SIGAR report.

The U.N., which handles the transportation of these payments, claims it needs to send cash because the country does not have the infrastructure to wire funds.

I recently hosted a guest on my podcast who goes by the name of “Legend” to talk about these payments. He is an Afghan American and former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer who has deployed to Afghanistan multiple times, and who traveled to Kabul during the Afghanistan withdrawal to rescue individuals left behind.

Legend confirmed: “Yes, the money does end up feeding and supporting the Taliban.” He explained that the United Nations flies the cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan Central Bank which is managed by a terrorist who is on an active U.S. sanctions list. That bank then holds an “auction” where groups bid to take those dollars and convert it to the local currency. Every week the winner of that auction is someone associated with the Haqqani Network, a terror group with ties to Al-Qaeda.

These terrorists take the money and convert it to Afghani to distribute. Some of that money stays with the Haqqani Network, some goes to the terrorists running the bank, and the rest of the money is given to the local implementing parties or non-government organizations (NGOs).

However, the Taliban is the group handing out NGO licenses in Afghanistan. If a Taliban sympathizer asks for an NGO license, they get it. So, many of these groups send money directly to the Taliban or to support the families of suicide bombers.

Legend also said if the United States suspended these weekly payments, we would see signs of the Taliban and other Afghanistan-based terror groups crumbling within a year. The $40 million weekly cash shipments have stabilized the Afghani, making the Taliban’s newly printed currency the world’s best performer, beating the U.S. dollar in September 2023.

It is not like this administration doesn’t know who they’re dealing with. President Joe Biden was a senator and Vice President Kamala Harris was an attorney in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan with an iron fist. During that time, women were stripped of their rights and treated as prisoners, and the Taliban provided safe haven to al-Qaeda in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, their spokesperson said: “Nobody will be harmed in Afghanistan. Of course, there is a huge difference between us now and 20 years ago.” It was a laughable statement, and no sane person should have believed it. Terrorists don’t change.

The Taliban’s return to oppression started slow. First, they banned women from driving more than 45 miles without a male relative. Then they stopped them from going to school. Then they banned women’s faces and voices from being displayed in public, and prohibited women from looking at men they are not related to. These women are now prisoners in their own country as much as they were in the 1990s. And we are funding their oppressors.

The fact that a single penny of American tax dollars has ended up in the hands of terrorists is a disgrace. I introduced a bill that would do three things to stop it:

First, my bill states the policy of the United States is to oppose support to the Taliban. It also calls for a report on any foreign countries that have given support to the Taliban and calls for the secretary of State to develop a strategy to discourage foreign countries from providing support. Second, it calls for a report on cash assistance programs in Afghanistan and the safeguards in place to prevent the Taliban from accessing it. Third, it requires a report on the Afghan Fund and the Afghanistan central bank and what controls are in place to make sure those funds are not diverted or misused.

The House passed my bill earlier this year, but unfortunately the Senate won’t vote on it. This should be a bipartisan issue, and we need to keep pushing for it.

Many people lost everything because of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Women lost their freedom, Afghan citizens lost their lives, and 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed. One of those servicemembers was my constituent, Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss. He had recently finished a deployment in Afghanistan when he heard we were evacuating and he volunteered to go back to help. He was 23 years old when he was killed.

We need to honor their sacrifice as best as we can. That starts by halting the payments we have been sending to the Taliban. No more American money for terrorists.

Rep. Tim Burchett has represented Tennessee’s 2^nd District in the U.S. House of Representatives since January 2019. Prior to that he served for eight years as mayor of Knox County, 12 years in the state senate and four years in the state house.