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Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

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

#261

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…

I think a practical problem with this is that even if you offer this tech you will inevitably get groups of parents insisting the government use this power enforce their values on the other parents as a matter of course. We see this already with the erosion of cultural norms for free speech.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whitelisting and YouTube Kids are not viable solutions for the 12-16 age group, which is the group this legislation is targeting. Whitelisting: There is way too much appropriate content out there to whitelist it all. It's totally infeasible for a parent, unless you're planning to only approve a handful of channels, which makes YouTube pointless. YouTube Kids: Teenagers are not "kids" and are not going to go onto YouT…

[dead]

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

#263
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens. And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.

> most people do have mygov id

It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it.

> no logging

If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.

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

#264

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…

> 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 because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.

I get your point but I don't agree.

I mean, politicians back then were actually right in assuming that danger looms on the Internet. They just were completely wrong about what was the danger. Everyone and their dog thought that the danger was porn, violent video games (Columbine and Erfurt certainly didn't help there), gore videos (anyone 'member RottenCom), shocker sites (RIP Goatse), more porn, oh and did I say they were afraid of boobs? Or even of cars "shaking" when you picked up a sex worker in GTA and parked in a bush?

What they all missed though was the propaganda, the nutjobs, the ability of all the village idiots of the entire world that were left to solitude by society to now organize, the drive of monetization. That's how we got 4chan which began decent (Project Chanology!) but eventually led to GamerGate, 8chan and a bunch of far-right terrorists; social media itself fueled lynch mobs, enabled enemy states to distribute propaganda at a scale never before seen in the history of humanity and may or may not have played a pivotal role in many a regime change (early Twitter, that was a time...); and now we got EA and a whole bunch of free to play mobile games shoving microtransactions down our children's throats. Tetris of all things just keeps shoving gambling ads in your face after each level. The kids we're not gonna lose to far-right propaganda, we're gonna lose to fucking casinos.

We should have brought down the hammer hard on all of that crap instead of wasting our energy on trying to prevent teenagers from having a good old fashioned wank.

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

#265
this really sucks. but (and i know this is gonna sting some people) but this has always been coming. this is the absolute inevitable result of these companies refusal to meaningfully self-regulate.

anyone who has been online for more than 5 years and didn’t see this coming from a mile away weren’t putting much thought into it.

we’ve heard nothing but laughable excuses from these companies for years ‘oh, we can’t, it would cost money…’ well, you’re some of the richest companies in history…

if these companies had done even a mediocre amount all of us wouldn’t be getting screwed.

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people wh…

Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist. It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are m…

Because it's YouTube kids. Not YouTube

YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.

Another approach... Is to mark their kids account as a kids account or something, and have that just be on the regular YouTube website and app.

Or what every parent really wants.

To whitelist content your kid can watch like in YT Kids. But also include blacklisting shorts.

The more this looks like regular YouTube. The better your chances of your kid not just signing out of the app. Or using a web browser with a logged out account to circumvent it.

You have to give some illusion in order to maintain the control.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whitelisting and YouTube Kids are not viable solutions for the 12-16 age group, which is the group this legislation is targeting. Whitelisting: There is way too much appropriate content out there to whitelist it all. It's totally infeasible for a parent, unless you're planning to only approve a handful of channels, which makes YouTube pointless. YouTube Kids: Teenagers are not "kids" and are not going to go onto YouT…

Give parents the ability to turn off shorts and watch most of the AI slop they watch go away.
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