Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

jedimastert wrote: post #308

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.

> Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media. Is it? As far as I can tell, the definition of social media is a platform where it is trivial to publish to it. That definitely fits YouTube. The fact that there is great educational content on it (and I 100% agree that there is great educational content) I pretty much solely due to a passionate community, not really anything YouTube itself does to priorit…

Even a very 'light' definition would catch YouTube, I'm convinced of this. The UK's definition is—broadly—any site that a user can take an action on that would affect other users. This would definitely catch a forum like HN, any site with comments, etc. Personally, I feel that, combined with draconian identity requirements, that goes way too far, but I think I'd struggle to draw a line that better fits the alleged intent of these political moves.

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

#452

Post by prmoustache » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

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…

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids.

The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computers and by doomscrolling all day on instagram and tiktok.

I don't understand how these people are all acting as if only children need to be saved. Banning stuff to children won't even work if the only example they have of adulthood are people with a hunchback staring lifelessly at a small screen on the palm of their hand all day.

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

#453

Post by turkishmonky » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:27 AM UTC

sharperguy wrote: post #153

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…

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/kiera…

I have this workflow with the ytdl-sub docker on my k8 cluster, is pretty powerful at filtering to specific videos and includes sponsorblock - everything is configuration driven, no ui, which can just be dropped into a yaml configmap

I rarely have to touch it unless I'm adding a new playlist or channel

https://ytdl-sub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html

It's been great, the kid can watch any channels on there she wants on her ipad with no ads or sponsored segments

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

#454

Post by meindnoch » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:40 AM UTC

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…

HackerNews: This will be a perfect use case for my federated, zero-knowledge, GPG-based, homomorphically encrypted web-of-trust (written in Rust)!

Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)

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

#455

Post by debo_ » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

abduhl wrote: post #313

shakna wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's in charge here, you or your kids? As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore. If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control…

You are, in fact, in charge of your teenager as a parent. They are, in fact, still a kid. Controlling your kid’s access to things which you deem harmful is, in fact, not abusive. Setting appropriate boundaries does not, in fact, mean you are not treating your kid as a person who has their own sense of self. Most kids will not, in fact, hate you for setting boundaries and being their parent. It is quite impressive tha…

My parents did this to me, and while I loved them, I left home as quickly as I could at age 17 despite them more or less begging me to stay.

We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.

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

#456

Post by williamdclt » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:45 AM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #452

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…

> A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. The funny thing is hearing adult people shouting aloud that kids suffer from social media use and bla bla bla let the same people have been ruining their own relationship with their life partners, family and even their whole life for years by spending way too much time in front of TV, computer…

How is this funny? You make it sound like it's hypocritical or self-unaware. I'm finding the opposite: it's exactly because these people are aware of what social media does to them (and/or close friends and relationships) that they want it to be out of kids hands who'd be even more impacted by the negative aspects of it.

In other words, they're not saying "it's okay when I do it but not kids", they're saying "even as an adult it's impacting me, let's not poison kids"

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

#457

Post by mindwok » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:47 AM UTC

runsWphotons wrote: post #355

boudin wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple studies showing the negative impact of social media on teen's health. It's not about censorship but about forcing companies that don't care at all to be held accountable. I'm not sure the approach taken by Australia will be effective (i'm not sure how it can be implemented), but i don't see the problem with doing something against harmful companies like meta, tiktok, x/twitter One of the study http…

If you don't want your kid using the internet then don't let them. No need to throw the whole society under the bus.

The decision Australia is making is not an individual one. It’s a societal one. It’s “do we want our kids to grow up in a society free of social media”.

Australia tends to be more willing to make collectivist decisions like this, unlike America which places immense value on individual choice.

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

#458

Post by HPsquared » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #408

Aurornis wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error…

Something being hard shouldn't be a reason to not do it. Put the features in and punish those who abuse the system. That's what regulation should be for. I think in general we need a wider solution to rampant botting as AI makes it even easier to bot.

If the cost exceeds the benefit, that's a reason to not do something.

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

#459

Post by viraptor » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

RpFLCL wrote: post #287

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…

> give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging Awful idea. This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms. "Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry…

> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication

They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.

> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part

That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.

> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.

What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.

> An even better idea is to not do any of this

Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.

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

#460

Post by uyzstvqs » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC

qcnguy wrote: post #444

uyzstvqs wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does. I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist e…

Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA? There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a…

Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.

The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.