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

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

#461

Post by HPsquared » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:54 AM UTC

Dilettante_ wrote: post #341

opan wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement. To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother post…

>it's not the same people complaining in both instances I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1] [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

That's brilliant. I suppose the same issue exists in polling and politics in general. You can't please all of the people all of the time.

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

#462

Post by hobs » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #458

johnnyanmac wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want to operate at "dominant player in the industry" there's a lot of reasons you have to do stuff that has reasons not to be done, saying "its hard" isn't a good enough excuse if you want to get the lions share of the market.

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

#463

Post by OhioMan2943 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:59 AM UTC

alt227 wrote: post #427

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to share the other side for once.

As usual 'the other side' is exactly what we all knew it was. It is people who dont understand technology getting frothed up by media scares into believing government promises about censorship. > They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured And you believed them?

Careful I think you might be choking on all that strawman.

Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.

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

#464

Post by __jochen__ » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 10:59 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #285

inopinatus wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There needs to be some terms clarified. mygov vs mygovid vs myid. Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid". But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion. mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report. Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article. Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you. I don't want this. I d…

I agree the naming is a mess. There is the Australian Digital ID system (https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/how-the-system-works) which allows third party providers.

Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).

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

#465

Post by brushfoot » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:01 AM UTC

skeezyboy wrote: post #429

zippo_the_zippo wrote: post #255

YouTube Kids is exempt from the ban, this one should have been banned first because the sheer amount of smoothbrain content. Channels like cocomelon and AI-generated songs with weird visuals are played on infinite loop with a mobile stand holding the phone in front of the child's pram while the parents pay no attention- and the children are hooked onto it as if they are hypnotized. These videos in early stage of chil…

they said the same thing about books, "young people are hypnotised!" And I agree that it has an impact on vocabulary, it widens it. You learn to talk by hearing other people do it, and youtube is full of different accents and ways of talking. How many parents would take them outside to meet that many different people?

> they said the same thing about books, "young people are hypnotised!"

It really doesn't matter what "they" said about books. We are talking about screen time. And screen time has measurably harmful effects on child development.

It leads to worse outcomes across the board. Sleep disorders. Obesity. Mental health disorders. Depression. Anxiety. Decreased ability to interpret emotions. Aggressive conduct. And this is to say nothing of ADHD (7.7 times higher likelihood in the heaviest screen users) or social media's effects on adolescents. [1][2]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/

[2] https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/childhood-adhd...

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

#466

Post by OhioMan2943 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:02 AM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #351

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…

> Yes they did bring families with children who had passed from social media abuse on stage but it felt genuine. There is a name for this tactic - emotional blackmail

Not when the parents whose children lost their lives are the ones who organised the campaigns. These aren't the hypothetical wolves in sheeps clothing that emotionally vacuous and selfish digital libertarian types love to salivate over but are real people who have suffered real consequences.

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

#467

Post by __jochen__ » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:02 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #301

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…

> 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 The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens. If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the to…

The proposal is for SIGNED tokens i.e. only the govt can issue them, and you need a govt issued ID to generate them. The latter mechanism allows rate limiting. This fixes the problem you outline.

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

#468

Post by gambiting » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:03 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #292

frereubu wrote: post #185

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…

I want the Netflix version of this. An account that is completely empty except for shows that I add. And not for kids, I just want an empty library that I can fill myself.

I was going to say - Netflix has functionality to do exactly this but only for kids accounts. You can hand pick which shows appear on each child account.

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

#469

Post by __jochen__ » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:05 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #234

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.

> 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 its mechanics or feasibility. I predict it won't even matter. This law is unenforceable in practice. There is nothing that a bored and highly-motivated teenager who has hours after school to fuck around, won'…

Amazing! Do you have some spare time? Can you quickly mint me a BTC token please. kthxbai ;)

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

#470

Post by OhioMan2943 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:07 AM UTC

isaacremuant wrote: post #390

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…

> Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development and institutionalising a culture of infectious insecurity. I support this- YOU are undermining the fabric of society. With the excuse of "protecting children" you're trying to destroy the last semblances of privacy and the ability to dissent. Fuck your using children as a shield. You're hurting them like…

I don't want privacy to be gone. I want a free internet to still exist for those who are educated enough to bypass firewalls and monitors, I would kill to have a knowledge gated internet again, but I want barriers to harm for children. Why do we card kids for R18+ games but not the internet. It's fundamentally stupid and unhealthy for our society.

If everyone moved back to non algorithmically addictive forums and self segregated by age I would have no issues with that and wouldn't see the need for regulation. That is not the world we live in and we have so obviously seen people self select a terrible and damaging digital world that gives idiocracy a run for its money. Hysteria is sometimes a warranted reaction.

I think it is an important step making social media illegal for children to them reclaiming reality, and re seperating the adult and child social worlds like they used to be. The implementation is the main part for many and I get that.