Maybe if the age limit was lower, and maybe if the law was less strict. But the delta between this law and the society its being imposed on is way too big to not cause serious unintended consequences. The younger kids will find ways to achieve many of the same interactions, only totally unregulated, and in doing so will be forced to create distance between themselves and 'adult' society.
Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
131–140 of 580 posts
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#132Under, say, 10-12 or so, I can understand a blanket ban. In general, the YouTube content aimed at children is pretty vapid and encourages too many parents to use it as parenting auto-pilot. But so much YouTube content is educational or otherwise has significant utility for older children or adults. Seems like a pretty big misstep to outright ban it. And that doesn't even get to the thorny question of how this is supp…
Ridiculous. Would we have had a similar ban against flash video and game websites growing up if it were today? Against AOL Instant Messenger? I already had a local net nanny software to contend with, if the government had also tried preventing me from participating in online culture, assuming I didn't kill myself because of a lack of escape from my abusive situation, I would 100% have ended up being an absolute menac…
We're talking about 8-year-olds here not 15-year-olds, and a website intended for passive consumption, not active participation.
I would say the circumstances are pretty different.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#133I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels.
I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able to search for more content or if the content is just getting worse, maybe both, but I'm probably just going to cancel the sub so they at least have to put up with terrible ads if they try to access it.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#134Under, say, 10-12 or so, I can understand a blanket ban. In general, the YouTube content aimed at children is pretty vapid and encourages too many parents to use it as parenting auto-pilot. But so much YouTube content is educational or otherwise has significant utility for older children or adults. Seems like a pretty big misstep to outright ban it. And that doesn't even get to the thorny question of how this is supp…
If you substitute the word “television” for “YouTube” or “social media”, you can almost exactly replay the arguments of the 1970s.
Except in this case the content is basically totally unmoderated and mediated through an algorithm designed to keep the childrens attention permanently, so I would say the circumstances are at least a little different than back then.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a parent (who also btw uses Google products every single effin day) I just can't agree. This is entirely Google's issue to fix. Yes, YouTube has amazing educational content. I'd really like to make it available for my kids to see. YouTube, however, makes it completely impossible to permanently filter/hide/disable the bane that is YouTube Shorts. I don't let my kids on TikTok not because it's Chinese, but because i…
You can completely disable Shorts by turning off your YouTube history. No idea why, but it works and it's blissful. Plus you can still like videos, subscribe to channels and curate your own lists if you want to bookmark stuff to come back to.
OK, I didn't know that, though it's not very intuitive. Thanks!
Now, as a parent, I face a tough choice: I have history on the kids accounts precisely because I want to check on it and discuss with them what's good, or less so, to watch.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is mechanics of enforcement really a government thing tho?
Um... its a law. And yes, law enforcement is widely considered a government thing. See also: police.
Good thing the internet police will be there to ensure those laws are enforced. Great job, Australia!
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#137Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media. There are tons of great instructional videos. The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.
> It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.
It's not. Much of the world's governments (particularly those that follow the UK system) implement smaller laws and then delegate the implementation to statutory instruments/secondary legislation, written by experts and then adopted by ministers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_legislat...
(Australia included)
It seems suboptimal, but then so does the alternative of a "big beautiful bill" full of absurd detail where you have people voting it into law who not only haven't fucking read it but are now not ashamed that not only have they not fucking read it, nobody on their staff was tasked with fucking reading it and fucking telling them what the fuck is in it.
Lighter weight laws that establish intent and then legally require the creation of statutory instruments tend to make things easier, particularly when parliament can scrutinise the statutory instruments and get them modified to better fit the intent of the law.
It also means if no satisfactory statutory instrument/secondary legislation can be created, the law exists on the books unimplemented, of course, but it allows one parliament to set the direction of travel and leave the implementation to subsequent parliaments, which tends to stop the kind of whiplash we see in US politics.
ETA: for example, the secondary legislation committee in the UK, which is cross-party, is currently scrutinising these:
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/255/secondary-leg...
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#138Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media. There are tons of great instructional videos. The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.
It should at least be possible to ban YouTube shorts. I wish those were served from a separate domain to make it easier to block just those.
I would love to see more scrutiny of short content because it is without doubt the most manipulative.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#139I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels. I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able…
Ads as effective parental controls is wild, hilarious, and somewhat dystopian to me.
Re: Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
#140Completely 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 woul…
> Have a "show me more content like this" button, but again, no auto algorithmic feeds
What kind of content would you envision to be shown? Says if I want to watch more car review videos