DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
"DadMode" is a podcast where two gaming-loving dads discuss everything from live streaming to fatherhood in a humorous and relatable way. Join Josh aka Moorph and Bearded Nova as they share gaming adventures and parenting anecdotes, offering a unique blend of entertainment and insight for fellow gamers with kids.
DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
Australia's bold Social Media Banning Law
Have you ever wondered how technology in schools affects not just education but also safety and creativity among students? Join us as we step into dad mode and tackle the highs and lows of live streaming on Twitch, sharing our gaming adventures in Black Ops 6. We explore the fascinating shift in school policies over the past decade—where smartwatches get a pass while phones are under lock and key—and how students ingeniously find ways around these rules.
But that's not all! A hot topic on our radar is Australia's bold move to ban social media for under-16s. We delve into this contentious legislation, examining the enforcement challenges, age verification methods, and the broader implications on youth activities. With Elon Musk's critique echoing in the background, we also touch on the potential for similar regulations in the US, highlighting the debates around children's online safety, mental health, and the enormous support this bill received.
As we gear up for global tech trends, we proudly wear our dad badges, juggling family, careers, and our unwavering passion for gaming. Despite the challenges, our controllers remain firmly in hand, and no one is taking them away! Connect with us on social media and podcast platforms under DadModePodcast, and join our growing community as we continue to share insights, laughs, and thoughtful discussions about technology, education, and family life.
Josh aka Bearded_Nova
I'm from Australia and am what you would call a father who games. I have 5 kids so not as much time to game as I used to. But I still game and stream when I can. So come join me on Twitch in chat as we chill out.
Business Inquiries: Bearded-n0va@aussiebb.com.au
Josh aka Moorph
I'm a US-based husband and father of two boys. I work full-time and have been a content creator since 2000. I'm a YouTube partner, Twitch and LiveSpace streamer who founded a content creation coaching company called Elev8d Media Group (elev8d.media). I'm a blogger, streamer, podcaster, and video-er(?).
Business Inquiries: josh@elev8d.media
Turning off normal human male mode. Switching to dad mode. Welcome in to dad mode With your hosts Bearded, Nova and Morph.
Speaker 2:So here's how I know I have a habit problem. As soon as I hit, put this on I'm reaching for the bottle of whiskey. I don't need to do that. That is not what I need.
Speaker 3:I just have it. I mean I would, but I'm driving after this. I've got a lot of driving to do today, oh, I.
Speaker 2:I don't. It's 7, 30 in the evening.
Speaker 1:I'm not it is what is up you missed my stream so badly.
Speaker 2:I, you know, I I still know stuff. Not a lot, but I still know some stuff. Some stuff doing well, some stuff I haven't been paying a lot of attention to like the streamer space since I stopped doing so much of that. I've been doing a lot more of this dad mode stuff. So this, this is the second time doing it on Twitch.
Speaker 3:This is the second time doing live, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've been doing this podcast for a little over a year and Nova came up with the idea of hey, why don't we do it? And we kind of kicked it off for a while but why don't we just go ahead and do it on Twitch? We'll record it live and then, so we'll get a stream out there and then we can chop it down as our normal podcast. So we're going to give it a shot.
Speaker 3:Backing up Because we've had a lot of problems, technical errors on both sides of things, so this is like a safety way to cloud save everything.
Speaker 2:Rando, what is up? Man? I hope you're playing Black Ops 6. Spicy, I see you. How are you doing? My friend? It's good to see you. I've been playing so much Black Ops 6. Dude. I will probably hit Prestige 8 tonight. I think that's pretty far in. Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to get into it, but I've had some time on my hands lately.
Speaker 3:I mean we talked about your killings, the kills, the skills, the skills that are not shown on this screen anymore. Basically, you know you're a different person to what you were last time you streamed the game yeah, it wasn't great I had I was.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to post it on screen because on my phone, but I had a game and this is not representative of how good I, of how good or bad I am in the game, but I did have a game last week where I got 102 kills in in hardpoint I think it was. That is not my usual game. I just was going on boosted. Yeah, that was not my note, that was not my usual game. Um, doing well, yeah, I have thanks right thanks, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're gonna get started here in a second. But, eggroll, if you had a question that I can try to answer before we actually start, you know we'll do our best through the podcast.
Speaker 2:I'll be happy to answer for you. But yeah, we'll get started with our normal topics in just about a minute and the way it works is we, like we did last time, we're going to record probably two episodes. We kind of kick off each episode with saying whatever, and then we'll do it, and then after about 20 to 30 minutes we kind of stop that and then we'll take a short break to answer your questions and then we'll start the second episode and go from there.
Speaker 3:yeah, no, I was a totally different thing. For us though we're still working that out, I guess is the best way yeah to handle it, I will.
Speaker 2:If you have questions while or comments while we're doing it, feel free to put them in. I may or may not react to them. Live, it depends how it fits into what we're what we're doing it feel free to put them in. I may or may not react to them. Live, it depends how it fits into what we're what we're doing. We did last time and I I felt it was a little messy but you know, it turned out all right and we were also going in some weird directions yeah, we were, yeah, we were it's because we had.
Speaker 2:We had moose on here we had.
Speaker 3:We had, we had an influence affecting that.
Speaker 2:We did, but.
Speaker 3:I do want to bring up our first topic, though, because I think it's weird, Weird and good and it could mean a lot. What happens in this can actually affect the world, I guess, is Australia has passed a law now that all social media will be banned for under 16 year olds. So, as the law is passed, these companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, so forth they have a year now to implement a way that they can monitor and enforce the age limit.
Speaker 2:What's the driving age in Australia?
Speaker 3:and enforce the age limit is what's the driving age? In australia, you can get your license at 17 and your learners at 16 so maybe they have to.
Speaker 2:They should do something like you know you got to put in like some kind of state id or something you know, I think that's.
Speaker 3:I think that's one way to do it. I think the other way would be I've heard and give or take on what level you are about conspiracies. I guess is facial ID, using AI and facial ID with the camera to scan your face, to kind of scan age, age identify you. I guess the other one is using third party person, so you have to get someone else to agree that that person is of age, or something like that.
Speaker 2:There's been a few different, yeah, a few different ways to handle it yeah, if it's like online naked people, you know, versus are you over 18? Yeah, that's not gonna work, you know?
Speaker 3:no, definitely, definitely not that, that type of age identification. But the whole idea is getting the kids back outdoors. Okay, that's what. That's what the prime minister, our leader, wants to see. More is kids getting off devices and more outdoors and they feel like social media band will stop. But that's not saying gaming, that's not affecting, you know, your xbox lives and your fortnights, and that it's more affecting everything else that absorbs.
Speaker 3:You know tiktoks and that where the kids get absorbed in yep and there's a lot, it's a, it's a mixed bag. There's a lot of parents that say I don't want it, but there's also a lot of parents that say yes, and at the same time the prime minister mentioned this is the government saying it's now illegal. So instead of the parents having that hard choice with their kids coming of age and coming into high school and then going oh, I don't feel comfortable with my kid being on social media, but I kind of feel like I have to because their friends are on it, this is the way of you know, basically palming the blame off to the government saying, hey, sorry, it's not, I didn't choose the law, the government chose the law. They said that you're not allowed on it I, I like it.
Speaker 2:My kids are 13 and 11 and they do not. They do not have social media and we're probably not going to give it to them much before they turn 16, anyway, you know. But now we're the bad guys.
Speaker 3:So I uh, the interesting one that I'm really interested in seeing how it goes is actually, obviously I have a daughter that's over 16 now, so she's she's gonna scoot through life without getting into this. But the next daughter, who's starting to get into her phone and has snap you know snapchat and talks to her friends and etc on that she's not 16, she's 12. Oh shit, so she's gonna get caught. You know, I'm interested to see how that plays out. What does that life look like for her now?
Speaker 2:yeah, so she's probably like what the.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I can see, you know, she can see that she's frustrated, she's not happy with this, that it's happening, but it's, you know it's. The social media is a weapon for bullies. Now, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a weapon that wasn't around when we went to school, right? But yeah, yeah, you know, by the, by the end of my high school career life, we had, you know, msn messenger. Yeah, early, early one had icq or irc, etc. But it's a lot, you know, I don't remember seeing bullies on there because the people that were on those platforms at a time were nerds.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, um. You know, one thing we didn't mention at the beginning of this is we're doing this live now. We're recording these live where we have an actual audience. Sometimes we're going to get messages from people that we are or questions. We're doing this live now. We're recording these live where we have an actual audience. Sometimes we're going to get messages from people that we are or questions we're going to read out.
Speaker 2:And we just got one that I want to mention, if you're good with that Aerosol Rondo, saying my kid is 16 and I'm not at all comfortable with it. The problem was that it was really hard for me to control with having Wi-Fi at schools. She'd come home with cell phones that her friend had given her. We got into a huge argument once because I took one of the phones that her friend gave her because she had been hiding it from me at school. So it is a problem, right, my kids aren't allowed to have. The school tells them they can't use their phones on the bus. They can't use their phones at school. They can use them when they get home.
Speaker 3:But you can have it with you in case of some kind of an emergency. That's about it. So that's interesting. In my state it is actually zero mobile phones at school policy. So when the kids show up to school this their phones have to go into this little container this this case as such and it stays in there, basically like a blocker. I guess it gets locked and their phones stay in this couch the whole day. They can't pull it out at lunch. They can't obviously pull it out in class. Yeah, mobile phones are banned at all schools in Queensland, at least in my state.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one thing you mentioned a second ago is how your daughter is getting into TikTok, and you remember we brought this up earlier too. But US they passed that law that was going to ban TikTok if they didn't sell by a certain date and people kind of forgot about it. That date is about 60 days from now or less than 60 days from now. So if you're in the us, I mean we don't have a a total social media ban coming, but we may have a tiktok ban coming literally for everybody. So and it's the number one social media site in the us. So that will seriously affect kids too oh yeah yeah it's.
Speaker 3:It's crazy how long this tiktok ban has been going on. For you guys, though, yeah, like I was, you know, I think a lot of people were arming for the apocalypse and ready for it to be the end of tiktok two years ago, a year ago, I don't know. Now I feel like it was ages ago. Yeah, so I guess I'm bringing up. Moose here said when she was in high school 10 years ago, they weren't allowed to have phones on us whatsoever, even in the event of emergency. So yeah, did most students respect that? I guess it's a. I guess, in a way, nowadays kids have a different level of respect for authority yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess.
Speaker 2:I mean I never had respect for authority, which is part of the problem I had growing up, but I I do too.
Speaker 3:I guess what I'm trying to think more so is the kids. Either way, you know, there's an ass whooping attached to it or something horrible is at the end of it as us growing up compared to nowadays, is because my mom and I'm, you know. I think I've talked about this way too much over the past year. But my mom says I'm entitled, so you can't tell me what to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I grew up with nothing and still somehow had a sense of entitlement?
Speaker 2:I don't, I don't. It doesn't make any sense. You know, yeah. So who's the saying that she had to leave her phone in a locker? That's what my kids have to do, still. You know, yeah, you can have it on you, but you have to put it in your locker. If they see you with it in school, they will take it away. But here's the weird thing they let you have smart watches. You can't do the same thing in a smart watch, but you can still text, you can still make calls, you can still do a couple things.
Speaker 3:So yeah well it's that's interesting, like I guess that shows I don't know, in a way it's the best way to put it. I know with our kids and smart watches, they can have smart watches but they can't use any of the phone features. And I guess if the phones are in these little protective cases that don't allow them to receive signal etc, there's no way the phone, there's no way the, there's no way the watch is actually getting those features. I guess, unless you have a, a cell cell watch, not a wi-fi watch or something like that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I got a smart watch, uh, last last year and I got the lte, so it doesn't I don't necessarily need the phone with me. Yeah, and now I know the kids have my kids have. Their phones are banned. But I kind of want to get them an lte smart watch. In cases anything goes wrong at school and they can't run to their locker to grab it. They could make an emergency call to me, you know, and I could.
Speaker 3:I don't know what I could do but it's, it's funny, I didn't even think about that. In a way, I'm like why would you? What's going to go horribly wrong at school that you need your? You don't have mass shootings, and that's exactly what I realized where we're going now I'm like hold on, that's right, I don't, I don't have to, we don't worry about, that's not a.
Speaker 2:That's not a thing you have lockdown shooter drills in schools.
Speaker 3:It's freaking insane our kids have lockdowns. It's freaking insane. Our kids have lockdowns here in schools and that like, but that's only for I don't know. Like there's a suspect in the area with a knife or something and, yeah, the police are on the look, so the school will lock down yeah that's it.
Speaker 3:But all but all the schools have to keep some money. In Australia, a 10-foot high fear top fencing. Really, they call it perimeter fencing. It looks like, yeah, I don't know because you guys have different building standards so I can't say pool fencing. It's like a black aluminium, say, inch by inch square. Yep, that's four inches apart and they go 10-foot high.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And they run two, three rails across the middle so you can't really climb up it that's. That's really hard to climb up, but you can't really get through it. So all the schools most schools have got that around the whole thing nowadays.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so active shooter drill. So so in our chat someone was saying that they had a shooter drill at at their kid's school. Didn't warn the parents first, so I get. Parents were probably upset about that, but I'm fine with it, because if you tell me that's reality of a drill, I'll tell the kid and they'll be ready. You want them to kind of be surprised, you know, so you kind of get a real reaction.
Speaker 2:That's yeah that's what I was thinking, kids but you, you, they have to understand what that feels like so they can be prepared for that emotion when and that when it happens. If it happens when, yeah it's like.
Speaker 3:It's like a fire drill. I guess there's no point if you know any, any drill, it's like a test, etc. If you know it's going to happen, then you're prepared. Something like that you shouldn't be prepared for it, should just be spontaneous. Maybe two people in the school know about it, a handful of teachers know about it.
Speaker 2:That type of thing, practice it, cancel it afterwards and good job, you did it right yeah, yeah, um, so back to the original topic there, before we get any further down this road. So I'm wondering how kids are going to get around it. Right, because, like my kid, my older kid you know we have, like we use google family link because we have android phones and a lot of things are locked down he has still found a way around it, like youtube. We said you can only use youtube two hours a day because he's sitting, sit there forever just doom scrolling youtube. What he found out is if he goes and uses the chrome browser and looks at youtube, that way he can look as long as he wants, because you, the family link doesn't allow you to set limits on the browser. Yeah, so you gotta run it that way. So I feel like the kids unless they put in some kind of age, real age verification, these social media sites, the kids are just going to find ways around it well, I'm going to go for a couple of comments around that.
Speaker 3:I've that I came across in the news. So a mother over in perth you know she's a mother of 15 and 20 year old she calls the band a toothless tiger, like a blunt tool. Ultimately it won't work because the kids will just find another platform to move to, which I guess. Yeah, new platforms are always popping up, but if this law is in place, that shouldn't force any platforms to pop up over the given time. You know what I mean. Unless, I guess, the only platform I can think of that probably isn't caught up in the social media band and it might be is Discord. Really, I'm going to look it up.
Speaker 2:I mean for a long time Discord and for some people Discord is my main chatting tool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, discord is my main chatting tool to everyone. If you want to talk to me, that's the way to talk to me. So I'm just going through just to see what platforms are actually caught up and see if I can get the full list of platforms. 77% of Australians, though, do support the band apparently going off polls. Elon musk did say that it's submission to inquire about the platforms. It's not wide twitter is not widely used by minors. I don't know, I don't know that twitter's I don't possibly, possibly, I I don't know what about.
Speaker 2:What about youtube? Because youtube it's not, it's not traditional social media, but it's still a time suck. You can still go on comments and and do shit. Yeah, you know, there's there's, there's the, the messaging message boards that every site over like 500 users can have, where you can go back and forth and stuff. So it's not traditional, but it's still, you know okay, here we go.
Speaker 3:The ban aims to address impact and excess social media use of children's physical. Anyway, the impact on excessive social media use for children's physical and mental health affects social media platforms, including twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat. Including Twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, snapchat and Reddit, but not YouTube. So there you go. Youtube's not affected into this.
Speaker 2:And you know, I wonder what it is they're looking for on a site to consider it social media? Because if it's video, if it's chatting, why not Twitch, why not Kik, right Well, yeah, I guess maybe the fact that video.
Speaker 3:It's hard to say You're putting a ban on a company such as TikTok, but not YouTube, who offers shorts. Right, right, yeah, but at the same time, youtube does very much focus on long-form content. I don't, so maybe.
Speaker 2:If YouTube is exempt because of that, because they have a site that does other things, tiktok will say all right, well, we're going to redesign our site to be like youtube and then we're going to skip, we're going to get out of the band. So I get the purpose of the law I.
Speaker 3:I agree it's going to be hard to control it, hard to regulate it and hard to hard to enforce it yeah, facebook has has Australia to delay the legislation passing, saying it needs more time to assess the potential impact of the ban see Bright Dance said they need more time as well. Elon Musk blasted the ban last week as a backdoor way to control the access of the internet to all Australians. So I'm sorry, I don't agree with that. It's not definitely not trying to control access for kids to use the internet. You know, I mean every.
Speaker 3:They've still got access to the internet um, but yula musk, he doesn't care about the welfare of kids, he just he's got like 21 of them he just wants I know he just wants to make money that plans to enforce the age card by trialing an age verification system could include biometrics or government id. So what we thought about up at the start, which no other country has tried, raising privacy concerns yeah, yeah, that's true but you know, australia, we're doing this.
Speaker 3:We are also the one that forced online returns for digital games yeah but the world, the world would not be able to get refunds yeah, for digital games if it wasn't for australia, where australia said fuck off, that's not fair, you can't do that. So and we got that through. Every you know but dare say, this will go through, they'll work out a way for it and then other countries will use it. There there'll be people that'll say no, but I guarantee you, once it gets through, other countries will move on.
Speaker 2:We'll move on it so you know I was talking about the tiktok, upcoming tiktok ban in the us. That law actually gives the government now, now that it's passed, it gives the government the right to add pretty much any other site they want to that list, even though it's already passed, like they left that open for themselves. So if they said, hey, we like what Australia is doing and we want to go and add Facebook and other sites to our ban, they can just do it. They don't have to get it passed again.
Speaker 3:So the platforms bear the sole responsibility of enforcement. They have one year to figure it out, like I said, and how to implement the age limit, which is the highest set by any country. If there are systematic failures, if the platform fails to keep children from having the accounts, the platform is liable of fines up to 50 million australian 50 million. Wow, so about 30 35 million us. This bill was largely supported by everyone in parliament that it passed in the house of representatives, of Representatives, with a vote of 102 to 13. Wow, so that was very easily put in place. Yeah, but I said we've got a lot of days in our school system already about social media bullying for kids. Like nearly every month there's something there they're always going on about social media banning and our kids not banning, but kids on social media banning and our kids not banning but kids on social media and bullying and stopping suicide at a young age yeah this is just another step to just be like nah, we've had enough of this.
Speaker 3:We've had enough of our children going down this rabbit hole. We've lost way too many children to digital online bullying and and how they're treated. So yeah, this is, this is a way to protect children, I guess yep, um, I was just looking up.
Speaker 2:So there is a bill in our congress that I think that they're looking to try to pass, called kids off social media act, where they're looking for kids 13 or under and they want anyone under age 17 to social media companies to change the algorithms so they only get a certain kind of content. So the US is trying to do something similar already, but it doesn't sound like they've had the same success.
Speaker 3:Here we go. I'm just looking at, I'm trying to find an exempt rule here for the kids. Those six are the only ones. Roland said there are going to be more, so it's not just them. Now here we go again. We don't have an exhaust, uh, an ex, a massive list, but the government has flagged facebook messenger kids, whatsapp, reach out, peers kids, helpline, my Circle, google Classroom and YouTube will be exempt. So they're looking at the ones that actually and I guess in a way I think Facebook does have that ability, not Facebook.
Speaker 3:Youtube has that ability to have kids. You know how you got YouTube kids. Youtube kids can't have ads in it. Youtube kids can't have. There's a lot of features in YouTube kids that they don't have and I guess that's probably what they're looking at. Same with the facebook messenger kids. I brought that up in the early days of our the early days of our podcast. Here is that what my kids all started with their social media was facebook messenger kids. So they're looking at apps that actually do have a proper kids platform attached to it that can protect children. As I said, in facebook messenger kids they can't send each other photos. They can't send each other. They can't send each other photos. But there's a lot of things they can't do and it's and it's all up to agreeing on parents, the kids, etc. It, it's easy way to the kids to protect themselves and so forth yeah, there's.
Speaker 2:There's an app I think I mentioned it a long time ago called bark and it's it's meant to you install it on your kid's phone and what it does is it looks at, among other things like blocking sites, but it looks at emails they get and it looks at text messages they get and it evaluates the context and the content of those. So, like, if it sees something that sounds like bullying or sounds inappropriate, it'll then message the parent so that technology they could perhaps keep these things available for kids, but kind of take that technology and apply it to it. If the account is like under 15, it's kind of evaluating all the messages and when it sees something, like you know, problematic, then it shuts it down, alerts the parents, whatever, but it still gives the kids access to enjoy it.
Speaker 3:Maybe that's the solution for these companies. It's not. How do we implement a solution to no matter what. They're going to have to put in an age verification system in some degree. But if they don't want to lose those viewers, those users on the platform, then they need to look at how do they create an e-safety. I guess, in a way, not just safety, we'll call it e-safety.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's also here video games and some messaging services will also be exempt. So all video games are exempt, obviously because you don't have to have voice chat. You can just not there's. You don't need chat or communication in games. If you want to play right multiplayer, you can turn all that shit off. That's a, that's a personal. That's, I guess, protected on your end. I know, I know we talked about kids, how they should learn how to ban, block and etc. But people just create new accounts etc, etc. Those kids are gaming and they don't want to hear people bullying. They can just turn off communication. You can say I only want to communicate with my friends and and no one can once you've clicked that, I only want to talk to my friends, no one can interfere with that. There's nothing they can do to communicate to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I you know. We both know how toxic video game voice chat is Like even. I like I play Call of Duty and I've had. I've had every all the game chat turned off for like six or seven months now, cause I just just I don't want to hear it anymore.
Speaker 3:yeah, so very, so, very often you just turn it back on here one word and go yeah, that's why turn it back off again, exactly, exactly, I love it.
Speaker 3:When I was doing vr and hardened to vr, a lot of people would turn the voice and voice chat off in vr because when the Quest 2 came out and went so widespread and mainstream, it introduced what they called squeakers. So every other platform you're used to hearing people being abusive and angry and all that. In VR it's the opposite. There are people that do that, but the biggest problem is squeakers, which are kids that are like 10 years old, jumping off these headsets and they've got that squeaky loud voice and they just get into the voice chat and just start going off. So that's why most people in VR don't do voice chat is because of squeakers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I've had some young people in my chat from time to time and I'm just like why are you here, you're annoying, go away. So in my chat from time to time, and I'm just like why are you here, you're, you're annoying, go away. So anyway, I think we should wrap this one up. Anything you want to say about it? Any last words on it?
Speaker 3:no, I mean I'll chat back in. You know, over time I guess we'll probably check back in on this and just see how it's going.
Speaker 2:I'll bring updates as as soon as they start coming through from my end and what I see with my own children and if we, if I hear anything more about what's going on with the tiktok band, we'll definitely make another episode of that.
Speaker 3:So yeah, just, I guess the only thing I can say is be ready, world, because now we've done this it's banter, it's bad. I can see it rolling out in other countries. You know uk, europe, us, that, canada. It's only a matter of time that other countries will be like stuff it. It's give it two years. It's right for australia, we'll do it here yeah, yeah, thanks, australia thanks you're welcome you've been listening to dad mode.
Speaker 1:our passion is navigating this wild journey of parenthood and modern life, from balancing family time to managing your career and still squeezing in some gaming and content creation. And no matter what the women say, they will never be able to pry the controller out of our cold dead hands. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, find us on Twitter, tiktok and YouTube at DadModePodcast and we can be found on every podcast site at DadModePodcast. Y'all be cool. See you next time.
