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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

#241

Post by ncruces »

sellmesoap wrote: post #211
ncruces wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

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, t…

Let's watch together starts to fall flat when the primary use they have for a device is to chat with family and friends, where it's natural to want a modicum of privacy. I wanna know who they're talking to, not everything they say.

Then, they start watching what their friends share in group chats. I can mostly avoid social media doom scrolling by preventing them having accounts, but not so YouTube.

And it's a tough decision to blanket ban YouTube, since it is used for educational purposes, including by teachers (a teacher wouldn't point a 13 yo pupil to TikTok).

YouTube didn't need to compete with TikTok or Reels; they chose to.

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

#242

Post by a_bonobo »

nojs wrote: post #237
viraptor wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 med…

> 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 Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.

Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app

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

#243

Post by LexiMax »

28304283409234 wrote: post #37
non- wrote: 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.

They're not tech savvy because they didn't need to be.

That will change. One thing that has not changed from our parents generation to our generation to the upcoming generations is that teenagers will be troublemakers, push boundaries, get caught doing a number of things that displease you, and get away with many more things that you won't find out about for decades - if ever.

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

#244

Post by jorvi »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #148
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…

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…

Well, that didn't or wouldn't have mattered when Google only had a top box and sidebox with sponsored sites.

Once they started masquerading ads as results, yeah any ability for user down or upranking became unworkable.

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

#245

Post by Avamander »

general1726 wrote: post #64

So they will start using YouTube Revanced. What now?

Revanced will unfortunately not last long. Ten years maximum. The moment YouTube can, they'll jump on the WideVine ship. They've already tested it. It won't be long until it's all DRM-ed, no mainstream custom client is going to work.

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

#246

Post by lstamour »

modeless wrote: post #233
lstamour wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United State…

An unfiltered web browser has stuff a lot worse than YouTube. That's on you if you give your kids access to that.

Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.

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

#247

Post by insane_dreamer »

andriamanitra wrote: post #158
y1426i wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right but the point is to be able to block the shorts on my teens phone while still allowing him to benefit from all the useful stuff on YT

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

#248

Post by NegativeLatency »

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…

You might be able to rig something up with invidious? https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

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

#249

Post by andsoitis »

> "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

That’s disingenuous. YouTube about page exclaims:

” Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.

We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.”

If that isn’t social media, I don’t know what is.

https://about.youtube/

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

#250

Post by jamiek88 »

upboundspiral wrote: post #210
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…

I would like to note that I am probably grossly unqualified to talk about such topics, but one idea that I've had rolling around is that inevitably, if you ask people "should kids be able to watch/read/be exposed to [insert adult thing here]" they will inevitably say no of course not. I feel like this is pretty reasonable. For advocates of privacy to succeed I believe that they will need to not just oppose censorship…

Please use paragraphs.
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