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Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

reuters.com

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Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#61

Post by SoftTalker »

jon-wood wrote: post #50
SoftTalker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only entities that can possibly control Facebook and Google are nation-states. If there is to be any regulation of them (or the content they push) at all, that's where it has to happen. These giant tech companies have demonstrated that they don't care to do it themselves. Of course individuals can decide to use these platforms or not, but if that was good enough to achieve the society most of us want to live in,…

Sadly nation states, or at least the ones acting currently, seem to think the only thing available is a banned or not binary. There’s no nuance to laws because nuance is hard to get into a 1 paragraph sound bite for the media. We’re seeing the same thing in the UK currently with fuzzy definitions of what does and doesn’t need age verification, and even what verification means, and that’s leading to completely harmles…

Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#63

Post by sirwhinesalot »

somenameforme wrote: post #56
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That edible meat is close to being the only edible thing around though. Can you really name anything on the level of 3Blue1Brown available for free? Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.

Most (all?) top universities have free educational content, often including entire courses, available. For instance here [1] is MIT's open courseware site where you can download all the required media, including lecture video/notes/problem sets/exams/etc, for courses - completely for free. Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video. [1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/

Sadly I disagree. Those resources are great but they don't come close to the visualization work 3Blue1Brown makes. Many subjects only clicked for me after watching his videos.

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#65

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #8

Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…

My thought was that a version of YouTube that:

1. Had no opaque algorithmic feeds

2. No comment sections

3. Have a "show me more content like this" button, but again, no auto algorithmic feeds

4. Filter out age inappropriate content.

would be great for teenagers. I think the problem for YouTube is that it would be great for everyone else, too, so they'd get bombarded by "Hey, I want that version" requests, which would clearly make them less money.

There is no moral high ground with basically any online platforms, it's all solely based on financials, and people should realize this.

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#66

Post by blast »

asyx wrote: post #3

I think that’s a really bad idea. I owe my career to YouTube and I think especially these days it’s much more useful for learning than it was back then. The whole internet moved to bite sized content but on YouTube you can find hour long videos of people doing really cool and sometimes super niche stuff.

> I owe my career to YouTube

That's interesting. How so?

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#67

Post by dang »

Related ongoing thread:

YouTube to be included in Australia's social media ban for children under 16 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44732683 - July 2025 (117 comments)

(I haven't merged that one hither because it's quite a bit more generic than this one.)

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#68

Post by guywithahat »

simpaticoder wrote: post #8

Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…

Yeah but how do you decide who's educational content and who isn't? Mr Beast does tons of "educational" videos in the context of "$1 vs $10,000,000 house" or "living in Antarctica for a week". Same with Jubilee.

The real big-brain move is understanding this isn't about protecting kids, and there isn't really anything YouTube can do long-term. Australia has been going after US big tech for a long time

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#69

Post by azemetre »

general1726 wrote: post #7
WantonQuantum wrote: post #2

It's important to note that this ban is for having an account - it does not ban people under 16 from watching youtube videos.

So you can just log off to bypass it? That seems short sighted.

Not really. It means it's no longer profitable to advertise to teens on most corporate social media.

Anything that moves the needle toward dismantling the advertising and marketing industries will always be a worthwhile endeavor.

Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

#70

Post by CoastalCoder »

Arubis wrote: post #40
JJMcJ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want mere children exposed to David Attenborough and Mister Rogers?

Can’t speak for the Aussies, but if you’re a US-inflected conservative today, probably not!

I wish people wouldn't conflate conservatives per se with the Republican/MAGA definition of that term.

I consider myself somewhat conservative in the traditional sense, and yet the Republican platform is almost diametrically opposed to my values.

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