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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

#211

Post by sellmesoap »

ncruces wrote: post #39
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…

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…

I feel you about short content, I've taken to using uBlock origin with a custom filter to eliminate shorts from the front page. On the other hand when a youtuber makes a video 10-40 minutes long when the brunt of the information could be 1-5 minutes that gets my goat as well. My children do benefit from the amazing assortment of educational and entertaining options, but we watch together and talk about what we see, they're becoming media savvy and complain when sponsor block misses a segment. If we all skipped the ads we would see a new internet emerge.

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

#212

Post by Barrin92 »

binary132 wrote: post #95

I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody has ground to stand on in asserting that minors have a moral right to an “online life”. On the other hand, there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons. I’m not saying I necessarily support it in all cases, but I definitely don’t think it’s necessarily a bad or immoral thing either, and it’s a bit surprising that a bunch of ex…

> there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons.

there isn't unless you're a neurotic helicopter parent who wants to infantilize people up until they're adults.

I'm only in my early thirties but I thank god that I have a dad who bought me Doom when the store owner didn't want to sell it to me, we shocked the crap out of each other with gore sites in school and when our parents caught us looking at boobs they didn't have a moral panic because unlike now teenagers being hormonal was still considered normal

I literally pity the kids who are raised by people who give Victorian Englanders a run for their money. Forget this argument that the adults are the ones suffering under "legitimate concerns for kids", the kids are the actual losers here

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

#213

Post by thewebguyd »

jjangkke wrote: post #108
forgotoldacc wrote: post #46

A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…

When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz" In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games bec…

Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles.

We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.

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

#214

Post by hollerith »

Barrin92 wrote: post #212
binary132 wrote: post #95

I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody has ground to stand on in asserting that minors have a moral right to an “online life”. On the other hand, there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons. I’m not saying I necessarily support it in all cases, but I definitely don’t think it’s necessarily a bad or immoral thing either, and it’s a bit surprising that a bunch of ex…

> there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons. there isn't unless you're a neurotic helicopter parent who wants to infantilize people up until they're adults. I'm only in my early thirties but I thank god that I have a dad who bought me Doom when the store owner didn't want to sell it to me, we shocked the crap out of each other with gore sites in school and when ou…

I think most people abandon views like yours when they become a parent. Are you a parent?

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

#215

Post by XorNot »

ncruces wrote: post #39
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…

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…

Except this is something the government could practically fix.

We could actually mandate that certain types of filtering features be implemented and available to users.

You can absolutely write laws which are aimed at ensuring user choice and agency are preserved.

This legislation and the broader idea of bans are none of that.

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

#216

Post by BLKNSLVR »

m101 wrote: post #20

Perhaps this will mean a version of YouTube comes out without YouTube shorts integration. YouTube shorts, imo, legitimises the govts complaint.

Even on an incognito tab, the first set of shorts always includes at least one semi-soft-porn cover image for a short that doesn't actually contain that image.

I mean, for one, it's false advertising, but mainly it's pushing this exploitative (in multiple ways, all disgusting) behaviour.

I use ReVanced because there's no other way to get shorts out of my face. It's just great.

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

#217

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #191

Adding some context which is sorely missing: Our government intends to spruik this at the UN and get other countries on board. Our government has said there will always be a non id method Youtube will still be accessible it is just the account making/usership which will be banned Posting my threaded comment higher up: I'm an australian who completed the esafety survey which helped guide this policy. I pushed for anon…

Your admiration for the nanny state is actually revolting.

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

#218

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

sandworm101 wrote: post #190
ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #133

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…

Yup. Id pay money to lock down the 24/7 Bluey youtube channel for the kids... at least until the next trend comes along. https://www.youtube.com/live/cN4EPsfBnq0?feature=shared

Another commenter has just pointed out that this is actually possible in the YT Kids app now. You can select approved channels and Bluey Live is one of them. I still need to see if I can approve other channels though.

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

#219

Post by viraptor »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #46

A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…

Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number.

> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

This is BS and not productive. We can do better.

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

#220

Post by _jackdk_ »

giantg2 wrote: post #112

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.

I was in Melbourne Central the other day and there were big ads up for identity verification platforms, where consumer brands normally put up their ads. That'll prime the brand recognition for everyone so that when the identity checks come in, people will feel more comfortable complying.
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