But yeah, there was that thing where we just missed this like incredible opportunity to do something less powerful to big tech.

Let's actually force you to, if you want to like, you know, have youth users and perhaps even users who are older to work in these ways to our expectations.

To me, that's actually harder on big tech than it is just to say, I won't get banned.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Cam Wilson.

Cam is an associate editor at Crykey and writes the Sizzle newsletter.

He's also the co-author of Conspiracy Nation.

As I'm sure you've seen in the news, Australia has this new age limit on social media, limiting anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media platforms in various ways.

And that has stirred up a lot of discussion, both, of course, within Australia, but around the world, as many other countries and governments have looked at pursuing a similar policy in large part because of Australia's

leadership, because it has moved first and, you know, kind of set the mold for what this might

look like. And after a year of discussion, that age limit has finally taken effect. So I figured

it would be a great opportunity to have Cam back on the show so we can discuss what this actually looks

like, how things have developed over the past year, whether it looks like this age limit is

actually going to be effective, and what we would really need to do to take on the harms that

social media has caused, the concerns that we have with how these platforms work and the

impacts that they have on their users,

and whether, you know, the age limit is the right way to go about it, or whether we should

be looking at other regulatory or policy measures if we were serious about trying to rein

these things in. And because I had Cam on the show, we also talked about some other issues

in Australian tech policy, in particular, you know, whether chat bots have affected this discussion in any

kind of way, how the digital sovereignty discussions are playing out in Australia, and what the

effects and the kind of bullying from the Trump administration are looking like down there and how governments

...