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Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

reuters.com

151–160 of 580 posts

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

#151

Its 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.

> There are tons of great instructional videos.

Yes, but its also unregulated and full of shit, Moreover its designed to feed you more stuff that you like, regardless of the consequences.

For adults, thats probably fine (I mean its not, but thats out of scope) for kids, it'll fuck you up. Especially as there isnt anything else to counteract it. (think back to when you had that one mate who was into conspiracy theories. They'd get book from the library, or some dark part of the web. But there was always the rest of society to re-enforce how much its all bollocks. That coesn't exist now, as there isn't a canonical source, its all advertising clicks)

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

#152

Its 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 include…

There is a happy medium. The big beautiful bill stuff is not normal. There are some states that have single issue clauses where the bill must be a single issue, resulting in more concise bills. Enforcement and rules can be made by agencies too. I think the whiplash is more of a two party thing since the bipartisan ones rarely flip-flop. The other stuff barely passes. We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.

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

#153

I 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…

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I self host my own Jellyfin(1) instance, and I've had it recommended to combine it with pinchflat(2), which will auto download and label entire youtube channels, as they publish new videos. So then you could use it to archive and provide access to the channels you want without worrying about the recommendations and other channels.

1. https://jellyfin.org/

2. https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

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

#154

I 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…

Presumably for the same reason Google doesn't let you block or filter shit sites. If you genuinely let user's preferences be taken into account, it's incredibly hard to make money from ads if the user's true preferences are not to be shown them. The entire point of ads is to manipulate and change user preferences and behaviours. So any preferences or customisation has to be minimal enough that their use can only part…

Agreed but ElCapitanMarkla is paying for an ad free service so at that point (as far as I can see) there shouldn't be any reason they can't have what they suggest.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 include…

There is a happy medium. The big beautiful bill stuff is not normal. There are some states that have single issue clauses where the bill must be a single issue, resulting in more concise bills. Enforcement and rules can be made by agencies too. I think the whiplash is more of a two party thing since the bipartisan ones rarely flip-flop. The other stuff barely passes. We would still have whiplash even if implementatio…

> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.

Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.

Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.

From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.

So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.

The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.

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

#156
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?

> Maybe they target content production, not content consumption? How can you do that on the internet? What Australia did may be a bit shortsighted but it's a step in the right direction together. Other countries did all sorts of measures such banning smartphone use in classrooms and such. We will figure out what works and what does not, but at least something is being done.

>How can you do that on the internet?

Well to upload YouTube videos you obviously need to log in.

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

#157

I 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…

Presumably for the same reason Google doesn't let you block or filter shit sites. If you genuinely let user's preferences be taken into account, it's incredibly hard to make money from ads if the user's true preferences are not to be shown them. The entire point of ads is to manipulate and change user preferences and behaviours. So any preferences or customisation has to be minimal enough that their use can only part…

Try Kagi. You can filter out the shit sites. It's great!

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

#158
post #121

Its 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.

It's not too much effort to find µBlock Origin filter lists that hide them. The only time I see YouTube shorts is when I deliberately navigate to the shorts tab on a channel page.

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

#159

I 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…

YouTube kids has a feature to only show whitelisted channels and videos. It's been there a few years now. You can share videos to your kids directly from the YouTube app.

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

#160
post #29

Teens are old enough to find their way around any content bans. This seems like a good way to introduce teens to VPN's and skirting content regulations early. It's also dumb because YouTube can teach you almost anything, I'd say it's the "best of the worst" when it comes to social media on the internet.

My teens, and each one I have encountered through them, cannot discern a pixel from a wallsocket. They are tech consumers. Not tech savvy. My dad (82) is more tech savvy.

Your kids don't need to be savvy, just a small number of kids will create the culture and technology to circumvent these laws and other kids will consume it. And the sharpest kids will always outflank the adults because their perspectives are fresher and their motivations are far more personal and urgent.
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