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Speaker 1: Listen, I've got an update for you on the social

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Speaker 1: media ban for kids situations. So over in Australia, the

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Speaker 1: social media companies have now admitted they can kick underage

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Speaker 1: kids off their platforms, and they've admitted that they will

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Speaker 1: they will start enforcing the band when the band in

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Speaker 1: Australia comes into effect on December tenth. Now, this is

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Speaker 1: not a surprise to me that they can actually do it,

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Speaker 1: because I never believe their nonsense when they said, oh,

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Speaker 1: it's impossible to age verify. How we couldn't guess they

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Speaker 1: can read it over in the UK. Does it it

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Speaker 1: age verifies and stops people seeing content. It's completely possible

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Speaker 1: to do. And it's pretty obvious that they already have

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Speaker 1: a rough idea of roughly how old the kids are,

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Speaker 1: because you know, that's why they feed teenage content to

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Speaker 1: teenage people. What I think we should take from this, though,

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Speaker 1: is that we should never believe the social media companies

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Speaker 1: when they say they can't stop kids using their products. Well,

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Speaker 1: I think you should do is kind of take the

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Speaker 1: approach of treating them a little bit like the tobacco

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Speaker 1: companies of old, completely untrustworthy, want to peddle their product

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Speaker 1: do not want to stop peddling their product. In fact,

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Speaker 1: I think, to be honest, that there is a useful

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Speaker 1: parallel here with the way that we treat Siggi's and

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Speaker 1: how we should be treating social media companies. We bann

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Speaker 1: kids under the age of eighteen from buying Siggis, We

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Speaker 1: ban them from buying booze because we know it's bad

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Speaker 1: from them. When they're older, they can use it, hopefully

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Speaker 1: they use it wisely, but not when their little brains

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Speaker 1: and their little bodies are still developing. And I think

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Speaker 1: the same is true of social media. And yes, like

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Speaker 1: the Siggi's and the Booze, the kids are going to

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Speaker 1: find a way to get their get around it and

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Speaker 1: get their hands on it. On in New Year's Eve

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Speaker 1: when they are sixteen, they're going to get completely drunk,

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Speaker 1: but hopefully it'll be a rare occasion, not in every

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Speaker 1: weekend type of thing. And in the case of banning

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Speaker 1: the Booze and the Siggies, we could have left that

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Speaker 1: up to the parents. We could have said, nah, it's okay,

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Speaker 1: you decide if your kids want to smoke and drink

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Speaker 1: under the age of eighteen, and parents should play a role,

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Speaker 1: right but I think we all decided as a group

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Speaker 1: that this was worth banning, and I think we need

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Speaker 1: to do the same thing with social media. And I

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Speaker 1: think we need to do it mainly for the social

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Speaker 1: media companies because they are not prepared to do it

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Speaker 1: themselves until they're fulls to just like in Australia. For

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Speaker 1: more from Heather Duplessyellen Drive, listen live to News Talk

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Speaker 1: sai'd Be from four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast

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Speaker 1: on iHeartRadio.