Live data from Hacker News

Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

reuters.com

301–310 of 580 posts

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

#301

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 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 tokens they want.

So then the goalposts move again, and now there’s some logging in this hypothetical solution to prevent abuse, but of course this means we’ve arrived at the situation where accessing any website first requires everyone to do a nice little logged handshake with the government to determine if they have permission. What could go wrong?

The real workaround is for people (including kids) to buy themselves a VPN subscription for a couple bucks per month and leave all of this behind while the old people are letting jumping through hoops.

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

#302

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. There are tons of great instructional videos.

It’s clearly social media. It consists of user-generated content and has discussion features.

There’s a big problem with tech people coming up with their own definition of social media that exclusively includes sites they don’t use (TikTok, Facebook) but conveniently excludes sites they do like (YouTube, Discord, Hacker News). This makes them think extreme regulation and government intervention is a good thing because it will only impact the bad social media sites that they don’t want other people accessing. Then when the laws come out and they realize it impacts social media regardless of whether you like it or use it, they suddenly realize how bad of an idea it was to call for that regulation.

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

#303

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…

Until about the age of 12 banning inappropriate media and people that carry such is the sole responsibility of the parents. Between 12 and 16 there is an interraction with the child and afterwards the teen goes by theirself. The same goes for social relations, education, every life choice.

No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version. Who's in charge here, you or your kids? Sure, maybe you could imagine a teen YouTube product you might like more, but you can't say the whitelist feature doesn't exist. It's there and it works.

> 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 someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's disgusting that is willing to support the consumption of .

> It's disgusting that is willing to support the consumption of .

>

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

#306

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…

Of course they are angry. People only love govt intervention when they think it won't affect them. Us vs them mentality is everywhere these days. Even when them is our own children.

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

#307

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…

Interesting, i have 2 questions:

- Can it limit the time range of video to download? Some channels may have ten thousand of video.

- Can it auto include the CC to video, that's one of main selling points of youtube to me.

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

#308

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 prioritize that kind of content. In fact, as far as I can tell it's harder

Post reply on HN