That's interesting. How so?
I consider myself somewhat conservative in the traditional sense, and yet the Republican platform is almost diametrically opposed to my values.
There are people at YouTube/Google/Alphabet who care but at the end of the day we get what the invisible hand gives us. Market forces have not yielded a well-curated educational video experience on YouTube.
It does not ban them from streaming embedded YouTube videos or even browsing YouTube.com
No, the bill says they must take reasonable steps to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. Arguably, this means embedded videos will need to be restricted just as the regular site will be.
See also: Facebook "efforts" to stop scam advertisements and Marketplace fuckery
The major outcome of this legislation should be nothing more than Australian kids being the most familiar with VPN's and very little else, along with other tricks to bypass this.
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 it's trash. I don't allow them near Instagram either.
The chances of kids growing an attention span by seeing interesting stuff in installments of 30 seconds approaches zero really, really fast. Yes there's the possibility telling a fun joke, demonstrating an optical illusion, or some interesting curiosity in under a minute. But it's far more likely that it's trash, and teaching kids (and adults) that if they don't get a kick of something within the first 10 seconds, it should be skipped.
And it's not necessarily age/quality rating of content; UX matters. It's totally different to find that your kid wasted an hour of their life doom scrolling over 150 videos of which they didn't even complete half, or that they spent it seeing half a dozen things videos of dubious quality: if it's half a dozen it's at least feasible to discuss with them why some are better than others.
So, I'm very close to just banning YouTube (at the DNS level if required). Which is a shame, because I then can't share the interesting stuff with them, and neither can their teachers.
Imagine you're the one running a business where you keep repeatedly trying to shove some feature down your user's throat.
What's that called in business school? I don't know, I never took any Business courses.
That I have no where else to go to see the content I want to see smells like a de-facto monopoly.
Not in this case, since the content makers can choose to host the digital files on a computer not owner by Alphabet.
Your situation is simply the content maker betting that it is not worth their time to try to earn a return by hosting on a non Alphabet computer.
But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
They bought DoubleClick, which Microsoft and others felt strongly enough about to warn the FTC that might give Google too much control over online advertising. Seems like Meta is their only real competition on that front these days.
> What's that called in business school?
Pretty sure it's called inflating metrics. Things that get pushed on you (see many AI features, my pet peeve, especially at google) are not wanted (or they wouldn't need to be pushed) but someone has a big stake in showing uptake, e.g. promises made to investors that this would drive revenue.
No idea why, but it works and it's blissful. Plus you can still like videos, subscribe to channels and curate your own lists if you want to bookmark stuff to come back to.
I had assumed the behavior was malicious compliance on Google's part against California law that said no history had to actually mean no history.
Since there's not supposed to be any history, I have to trust it's just based on subscriptions. It seems like that could be the case, I guess? But I do have doubts that they do in fact have my history somewhere that's accessible to this recommendation engine.
Now, as a parent, I face a tough choice: I have history on the kids accounts precisely because I want to check on it and discuss with them what's good, or less so, to watch.
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(4) www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-entry-renderer.ytd-guide-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)
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.
We could actually mandate that certain types of filtering features be implemented and available to users.
You can absolutely write laws which are aimed at ensuring user choice and agency are preserved.
This legislation and the broader idea of bans are none of that.
This isn't a "real life" thing - it's not like there's a strip club with open windows next door to your house for your children to look into. We're talking about a computer/iPad/mobile phone - block YT at the DNS level or better yet, don't even give one to your kids. Problem solved.
Other people shouldn't have to be punished with breaches to their privacy because people can't manage their childs online time.
A functional adult in the 2020s needs to learn how to use Google and YouTube. It's actually part of the curriculum at school.
The school also uses Gmail, and Classroom, and teaches kids to use Docs, Slides and Sheets (rather than Office 365). I dunno how much money changes hands, but this benefits Google in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't offer the service.
The problem here is Google feeling the need to compete with TikTok, and then mixing it with their educational offerings.
We humans, when given enticing bad choices, will often give in to the enticement.
That universal tendency can be overcome by strict application of willpower, which can have long-term benefits.
It is possible to exploit this tendency to make money. And so, by recursive application of this principle, we arrive at 2025.
But you don't need an account to watch most videos on youtube, so this isn't banning all of youtube.. right?
1. Had no opaque algorithmic feeds
2. No comment sections
3. Have a "show me more content like this" button, but again, no auto algorithmic feeds
4. Filter out age inappropriate content.
would be great for teenagers. I think the problem for YouTube is that it would be great for everyone else, too, so they'd get bombarded by "Hey, I want that version" requests, which would clearly make them less money.
There is no moral high ground with basically any online platforms, it's all solely based on financials, and people should realize this.
Most teenage-appropriate content would be enjoyed by adults too (e.g. lots of how-tos, educational content, music, entertainment, etc.) Most adults are not going to be into watching Blues Clues or whatever, which is why YouTube doesn't have to worry about cannibalizing more profitable content/algorithms for adults due to the existence of YouTube Kids.
What kind of content would you envision to be shown? Says if I want to watch more car review videos
The real big-brain move is understanding this isn't about protecting kids, and there isn't really anything YouTube can do long-term. Australia has been going after US big tech for a long time
And it's almost purely bathwater that gets put in my face on the YT front page. The occasional baby pops up.
(as someone who rarely logs in, and only with a couple of throw away-ish accounts because I don't like being tracked and don't like YT/Google - so this will affect my perception of the baby:bathwater ratio)
This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but to be fair AI and really toxic context wasn't as big of a thing when I was in highschool
> weird how a foundational myth of australia is that we’re a nation of subversive larrikins, when in actuality everyone here is an ultracop
0: https://nitter.net/tfswebb/status/976299234491121665?lang=en
We’re seeing the same thing in the UK currently with fuzzy definitions of what does and doesn’t need age verification, and even what verification means, and that’s leading to completely harmless communities shutting down to avoid having to risk being in the wrong while the megacorps just hoover up some more metadata about users.
But so much YouTube content is educational or otherwise has significant utility for older children or adults. Seems like a pretty big misstep to outright ban it.
And that doesn't even get to the thorny question of how this is supposed to even be enforced...
Then again, it may be better to do SOMETHING to start making these tech companies take solving these problems themselves seriously. Hard problem to solve, for sure.
I already had a local net nanny software to contend with, if the government had also tried preventing me from participating in online culture, assuming I didn't kill myself because of a lack of escape from my abusive situation, I would 100% have ended up being an absolute menace to the government in defiance and retaliation.
I would have opened myself up to fraud charges creating accounts with private information from adults. And once I was over the wall of censorship, I'd only find adults and other criminally-minded children. I'd be on a conveyor belt to more serious crimes. Is that what we want the next generation of computer enthusiasts to grow up with?
I would say the circumstances are pretty different.
I tried involving myself in a lot of communities related to my interests, but some sites were just for entertainment and not active participation, or I simply didn't participate in the community. That doesn't change anything.
Now a software engineer and artist, my entire life was shaped by that time, and as I said, I likely would have committed suicide due to my abusive situation if it wasn't for these communities.
I will always fight to provide that kind of environment for others and not pull up the ladder now that I've climbed up.
It’s like every generation gets fixated on something new which can be perceived as moral decay and societal harm, and then rails against it. Making it even more popular with the younger generation, of course.
I’ve seen the same thing play out with rock music, television, computer games, and now social media. There’s likely examples back throughout history.
I think you can mount an argument against all of these things. In retrospect though, it doesn’t hold up. I wonder if social media is the same?
Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.
Conceptually, a digital means of communicating life’s events between friends needn’t be terrible, but … the impulse to self-promote is human, and ultimately destructive.
Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.
Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video.
[1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/
2. Mathologer (Various maths-related theorems and properties)
3. Simon Roper, Colin Gorrie (Old English)
4. Jackson Crawford (Norse)
5. Doctor Mix (Synthesizers; Recreating classic songs)
6. Numberphile / Computerphile / Sixty Symbols / etc.
7. NativLang
8. Artifexian, Biblaridion, etc. -- ConLang and Speculative Biology, but also cover linguistic, geographical, and biological topics where relevant
I do get the very occastionally glimpse when I have to log in fresh and the recommendations on the front page are not great.
This whole situation leaves me very torn. Great arguments on both sides. I just hope it isnt a trogan horse to online digital IDs being linked to all content access.
I mean, a legit app, not a 3rd party one that'll get my Google account banned eventually.
I had to delete it, using:
$ adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.google.android.youtube
TikTok/Reels/Shorts format is really, really exploitative on the mind.
Ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, a significant portion of them seem to be AI generated
The feeling of a cleaned-up front page without addictive shorts or clickbait thumbnails is refreshing... and, ironically (as it usually happens), a much better experience, not to speak mentally healthier for anyone, especially a kid.
In the options, there's a Shorts section, a couple example options: "Hide Shorts in home feed", "Hide Shorts in search results", "Hide Shorts in subscription feed". I do not see any Shorts, ever.
Not only that, apart from not having ads, Revanced YT also has customizable SponsorBlock integration, which skips ads/sponsors in the actual video (community-based feedback).
Instructions on how to install it (no root required) can be found on the revanced subreddit, beware fake sites in the search results, go straight to Reddit or Discord. Highly recommend!
It feels like how YouTube felt before the enshittification.
Maybe you can just block all URLs that falls under /shorts/
If I was a concerned parent, I'd just install and hide the extension from the bookmarks bar.
The downside being that it doesn't affect native YouTube apps for mobile devices...
Throw this into some LLM on research mode and I'm sure you could get some step-by-step instructions for setting it up.
I suppose it's not much different to a PiHole but instead of filtering out ads you're filtering out shorts.
I mean, for one, it's false advertising, but mainly it's pushing this exploitative (in multiple ways, all disgusting) behaviour.
I use ReVanced because there's no other way to get shorts out of my face. It's just great.
Aren't "sharing platforms" and "social media" the same thing? I understand a long time ago there was a dream that people would produce and share as much content as they consume, and that is what social media was supposed to be in reference to, but that imagined world never happened. Social media, as used to refer to any practical service in the real world, has always been about one-sided content being shared to a mostly consumer-only audience.
> increasingly viewed on TV screens
Are people digging old Trinitrons out of the trash, or what? If you try to buy a new "TV", you are going to get a computer with a large monitor instead.
Meta claimed in FTC v. Meta that they are indeed the same.
They don't know what they are doing, but they know how to follow instructions on github.
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.
And speaking more broadly, teenagers are in the process of growing into adults. With that comes the forging of their own identity, and part of that journey is trying things and discovering who they are - in no small part outside of your watchful gaze.
Unlike what happens if they open the app and are pushed to doom scroll through dozens of videos on every 10 min school break.
Such a low bar.
Speeding isn't made impossible by speeding fines. It sets a civil penalty, non-compliance with the penalty in turn sets a criminal penalty, which in turn can lead to significant consequence.
If so, you can expand it to hating those younger than themselves, hating the opposite gender, and hating each other
In Australia, young people skew significantly progressive, and young woman even more so.
What could be great is a revolutionary generation. But I don't see that happening. We've already been dumbed-down, and indoctrinated into a selfish and therefore neutered culture.
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 need to submit proof that you're over 18. And instead of being an annoying checkbox that says "I'm 18. Leave me alone", it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online.
People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will.
The issue is everyone wants some quick and easy solution when the truth is we’re going to need to get much more intentional as a society about this. Take phone bans. Everyone wants to ban phones from schools/classrooms, but the truth is in a lot of places phones are already banned from school. But we’ve spent the last 3 decades taking away any power from teachers to enforce their rules so kids just do it anyway.
Ironic to call people aware of this stupid.
Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.
I don't support these policies myself.
You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.
Someone just said anyone who believes in privacy and content restrictions is stupid. Except those two concepts are compatible.
You can't hope or advocate for a better future? That's silly.
If you truly believed that this was going to be the solution that governments were going to use, yes you’re still an idiot. Ok, maybe incredibly naive to be charitable. But still have you paid even the slightest bit of attention to pretty much anything a governmental institution has done in the last 15 years?
Wow, so intellectual you are to say nobody can hold ideals.
And instead of owning up to that fact, saying “oh no, but that’s not what I expected, I expected these laws to affect someone else, not me”.
If it allows regular checking (and they all basically have to), I can determine someone's exact birth date when they become an adult. If a system allows me specifying an age to check (as many do), then I can determine anyone's birth date.
Further the vast majority of people do not understand ZKPs. If some random website asks them to go verify their age by installing software or going to a website that requires them to upload an ID, a good percentage will simply balk. The fear of lack of privacy, regardless of actual privacy, creates a major chilling effect on speech.
The truly galling part is that all of this nonsense only exists because parents won't spend a couple minutes setting up parental control software. For goodness sake, it takes 30 seconds to turn on a filter that blocks all porn on the screen on an iPhone. I have little doubt that if governments required it - or simply paid for it, they could get apple/microsoft/google/etc to modify their parental control software to detect social media as well.
And it is completely unnecessary in many cases. There are many cases where a third party cannot give access to something to a minor, but the parent is able to give consent anyway. So give parents the tools they need to tell online services, "hey, this is a child so act accordingly" rather than having the government enter the loop. For example: a web browser can ask the operating system for an age verification token, then relay that token to the website. Given that most operating systems these days have the notion of privilege and most operating systems make it difficult for unauthorized users to gain administrative privileges, it should be reasonably secure.
Of course, there are going to be weaknesses in such a system. On the other hand, there are going to be weaknesses to any system. There are also going to be situations where that level of protection is inadequate, but we're talking about access to controlled substances levels of concern here rather than kids getting access to age inappropriate videos. And chances are it doesn't have to be 100% effective anyhow. It just has to be effective enough to discourage people from targeting minors with age inappropriate content.
Bans on recommendation systems. Doesn't need much thought to figure out. Instant 90% harm reduction.
I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)
"But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protect the children or stop anti-Semitism or something?"
I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable.
To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.
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.
Much of the panic on social media amplified by protestants and religious ppl are greatly exaggerated. Porn isnt the danger its the addictive tendencies of the individual that must be educated upon.
We beat the moral panic last time and kept our freedoms. This time I'm not so certain that we will prevail, there seems to be a coordinated/unified effort on this wide spread surveillance and my hunch tells me the rise of authoritarianism around the world is the drive - much easier to oppress a population in a surveillance state. The "for the children" argument is as old as time.
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.
The internet was somewhat social in the 90's and early 2000's.
The institutions largely being affected here did not exist then.
And leaked every 6 months, now including your ID photos and real name instead of an internet pseudonym, and lots of other sweet details that make extortion schemes a child's play
Even cooler would be if you create a different identity for each service so when they do leak, you know who leaked it. My first id would be for John Facebook Doe.
What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate.
Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
<<id-verify-service threatens to pull service from store, lewd-game is removed>
> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <trans-dating-sim-video-game>.
<<...>>
People want these laws simply because its hard to say no to your kids, and it's a lot easier to tell your kids its the governments fault they can't use social media any more.
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.
This is BS and not productive. We can do better.
Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.
And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
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.
I'm not sure what you mean by the logging part. Yes they can either log or not log it. The system can be designed for either. If your default position is "government will always lie given the chance" that's fine I guess. But then you need to assume they're monitoring your ISP anyway.
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 don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.
There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?
[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id
[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...
[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...
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).
"I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability"
I mean, technically they could do it and provide at least a modicum of privacy protection. But I will bet they won't because whoever is implementing it will want to be able to point to specifics - specific people, specific times, specific places - so they can cover their arse come the next moral panic moment.
There's zero difference. Either way, the government will have you monitoring your every single little comment online and having it forever tied to your person. And that'll have a chilling effect on individual liberties.
Not just register, but ask permission for and give the government a veto on.
North Korea wishes they came up with an idea this good.
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 you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."
That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.
You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.
A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.
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.
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.
Delivering safety is a necessary condition for preserving liberty. It is not a nuisance or a side quest.
To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother posting about how they're glad minors can use social media freely, but once restrictions are in place they will quickly complain (because they prefer the old way).
I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1]
The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.
Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?
The population fallacy is when one infers information about an individual from the group, which wasn't done here as there is no specific individual in question. The population fallacy is seeing that some demographic likes to do a thing more than other demographics and thinking therefore any given subject in that demographic likes to do that thing.
It is something worth pointing out.
Some with kids will praise and use it as intended. Many with kids won't. Those without kids won't. All in return for the ultimate in monitoring.
And then people will work around it in various ways. Use forums or chat-group apps that don't comply with the law as intended. Share videos in other ways.
This whole shebang is pointless for enforcement and scary for authoritarianism - worst of both worlds.
The common theme in these statements is that people see “social media” as something that other people consume.
All of these calls for extreme regulations share the same theme: The people calling for them assume they won’t be impacted. They think only other people consuming other content on other sites will be restricted or inconvenienced, so they don’t care about the details.
Consider how often people on Hacker News object when you explain that Hacker News is a social media site. Many people come up with their own definition of social media that excludes their preferred social sites and only includes sites they don’t use.
No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.
Best I can tell it came from a single but sustained pressure campaign by one of the Murdoch newspapers.
Then the Government gamed some survey polling to make it look like there was support for it (asking questions that assumed an impossible perfect system that could magically block under-16s with no age verification for adults). Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram, and over 75% of parents said they should be able to access YouTube, but the Government was acting like 95% of people were for blocking them, when it was closer to 50% of parents.
Government in australia is about being seen to be busy. Give them an idea that cant be morally contested, that the media wont contest, and they go about it.
Much like how we got our eSafety commissioner and internet bans. We protested them for years, but then sneaky scomo used Christchurch as wedge and got it through without protest.
And as ever, our minor parties, especially liberty minded ones are more concerned with whats in kids pants than actual liberty.
So a whopping 60% were asking for it!!!
Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)
FWIW I'm personally happy it's becoming a law
Are you going to be impacted by it?
> According to the YouGov poll, seen by the dpa news agency, some 77% of respondents said they would either "fully" or "somewhat" support similar legislation in Germany.
This isn't the right way to characterise what happened. Governments are going this is unison, it is a coordinated campaign that has been obviously coming for a couple of years. Remember that governments wanted to act against misinformation? Well, this is it. Deanonymised internet. Aus, UK, US, etc - its on the way.
What you are seeing with certain comments etc is probably a lot of genuine comments primed by stories of cases where id would have apparently prevented something-or-other, along with comments from agents and bots. This is how modern governance actually works.
There is a goal (here, its deanonymised internet) then the excuse (children, porn, terrorists), then the apparent groundswell of support (supportive comments on hn, etc) then actual comments that validly complain this is dystopian but go nowhere (auto-downvoted or memory-holed by mods) which gives the appearance to most that no one really cares and this should be simply accepted. So, a difficult idea managed correctly can get past everyone with the minimum of fuss.
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 every new action (any new content or contact within any app). The regulation should be that children are only allowed to use such devices. Social media would then be limited to the parent-approved circles only. A minor's TikTok homepage would likely be limited to IRL friends plus some parent-approved creators, and that's exactly how it should be.
There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a power grab by governments and now the people who trusted the state are making surprised pikachu faces. "We didn't mean like this", they cry, whilst studiously ignoring all the people who predicted exactly this outcome.
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.
When I was a kid I was logging in every night, talking to random strangers online, I even met up with a few as the years passed. Everything was fine. If you were right that it's as bad for a child's development as drink and drugs I should have ended up a burned out husk. Not only did I not, none of my friends did either and they all also had unrestricted access to the internet.
Regulations aren't the answer. They hardly ever are. Half of HN's content these days is just people being faced with the negative consequences of regulations they themselves supported and then doing a No True Socialistman meme: "good regulations haven't been tried yet!"
For example: Teenagers playing Counter Strike is most often fine. Teenagers accessing Counter Strike skin gambling websites is not. I'd say that almost all parents would agree with that, yet it still constantly happens because parents have no visibility, no way of preventing it, and most likely do not even know that their son or daughter may be lured into gambling by playing the game.
Admitedly at some point they are reaching teenage years and they should have a right to privacy so even having access to a timeline of actions seems like a no go to me. The same way they can wander off in the street on their own, write private letters to people or have private calls with friends.
For teenagers, yeah I agree that message content and such should not be shared with the parent. The level of detail in the timeline should be configurable at the discretion of the parent. At the same time, it's also probably the most important period to shield them from harmful online content.
During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.
My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.
Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.
I just wish that this was the standard for every child. So many of them are handed completely unrestricted tablets and smartphones from a very young age these days.
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.
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"
Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)
These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.
1. we don't have as an antagonistic relationship with our government and we trust that most of what will be banned will be gross stuff we don't want weirdos watching.
2. I think most people feel social media really is breaking young people, and its easier if all kids are banned than just trying to ban your own kids. It's really hard to explain to a kid why they are not allowed to watch you tube when every other kid is.
Update: Also, the only thing this law is going to do is to force every parent in Australia to create accounts for their kids.
They have one with us.
Laws created based on parent's inability to explain something to their kids are invariably shit.
Unfortunately, this has propagated down to a lot of the people. They want the government to be the parent instead.
As Jordan Shanks once said - "I have 6 investment properties" is the entire personality of a lot of Aussies. Many others are the same they just don't have the opportunity.
This whole situation appears to be a failing on all angles. From government over reach, corporate greed by forgoing morals to the people who are so worn down they just don't have anything left to give.
I would have more respect if they just came out and said you can't be anonymous on social media any more. When you post, somebody needs to know who you are, how old you are, and where you live.
I think the world would be a better place if everybody would just pull their head in and get off social media.
With respect to Donald Horne, its not the 60's any more, and there are plenty of great Australian ideas and culture. The hottest 100 last weekend is a great reminder of how much great Australian music there is.
Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development. I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.
Watch the press conference from our PM and comms minister from yesterday to understand that this is coming from a place of compassion or control. They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured. I know there are flaws in that though. https://youtu.be/SCSMQUmrh38?feature=shared
Maybe this is what you meant? it's what the CSIRO and the Privacy Commissioner said was their recommended method to do proofs of age/identity through government issued documents, without revealing what the URL was being accessed.
Next time dont do that.
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?
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.
> 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.
'Terminally online types?', 'complain all day?'
You have broad assumptions, exaggerations, and stereotypes in that one sentence. It could be the dictionary definition of strawman.
Even if that were the case, demanding a solution doesn't mean accepting a bad solution.
"My dog is hungry" "Well I killed your dog and it no longer experiences hunger, please clap"
I need you to understand that you have put at severe risk a lot of good honest people for a false sense of security that is more likely to push kids into worse places than actually prevent harm. With the inclusion of Youtube, its likely the government is going to ramp this up to apply to any website with a comment section. Civil Liberties are easy to destroy in this manner, but oh so difficult to restore. We fought, hard, against internet filtering in this country. We shouldn't have to re-litigate it every 5 years or so while getting white anted by our own.
If there's something worse than ashamed, its where you should be right now.
Australia used to have energy for protesting this sort of shit, but its all spent.
We used to have a pretty decently funded anti internet censorship lobby. It died in the 2010s.
Since then its just been hit after hit after hit. Any minute justification is seized upon to wind up internet freedoms.
Former PM Turncoat said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” That was 2017. And so far its been a bipartisan position.
The truth is that industry used to also oppose censorship. But its been completely captured. Every time one of these censorship proposals come through, Ausnog gets the usual "Should we act this time?" emails, and nothing comes of it.
Its over. Freedom of Communication is dead in this country, instead of our politicians.
All the campaigns I was involved in for well over a decade achieved absolutely nothing because of this. It is worse than that now, seeing the screws slowly get tightened on peaceful protests makes this even worse. They cant just ignore it but actively suppress it and get away with it.
A few years back I wrote an essay about the passing of Ted Kaczynski, it was never published as they said to be a topic you do not touch. However my conclusion was that I fear the "children of Ted", those that end up being so silenced, end up radicalized by their own oppression that violence becomes their only answer. I suspect we are only a decade or two away from this on a lot of issues.
I'm happy to be proven wrong about any of that though. It's been quite a few years since I read it.
I completely agree with your "Children of Ted" hypothesis, for that matter. Historically, oppression births revolutionaries, for better or worse.
Charles Stross calls it the Beige Dictatorship. As long as they agree on 99% they can do whatever they want without public support. And you bring this up with low information voters and they just say "But Blorbus will decrease health spending by 3% thats a huge difference!!!" meanwhile all our civil liberties are eroded.
Not in the idealistic sense that you imply, so this has always been normalized, and variations of such policies have always been implemented
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 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476631/
I don't agree with the approach from the Australian government and I don't see that at being effective but regulating shady companies using deceptive techniques to maximise their profit is a necessary thing.
Personally I think differentiating impact on kids/teens and adult is a mistake and the approach should be around really strict control on data collection as well as strict control on the use/abuse of manipulative techniques to create addictions.
Australia tends to be more willing to make collectivist decisions like this, unlike America which places immense value on individual choice.
Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.
YouTube to be included in Australia's social media ban for children under 16 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44732683 - July 2025 (117 comments)
(I haven't merged that one hither because it's quite a bit more generic than this one.)
And lets note that the ALP government is very fast and snappy to ban social media, very slow to do important things like:
- ban money laundering in real estate
- ban gambling advertising
And very quick to:
- approve massive new coal mines
- approve massive new natural gas projects
The Australian government hates social media because that's where the people get to say what they think of the governmnent - in real time.
The social media companies have missed a crucial point about doing business in Australia - you must be paying your dues to the political parties and you must be paying big taxes. This is what the mining and gambling and fosil fuel companies do, and the Australian government does backflips to give them what they want.
Teens also have more time to connect with others and develop unsanctioned philosophies than adults who work and take care of the household full-time.
The fact that social media makes a stack of money in Australia but manages to pay almost no tax absolutely impacts their fate: both with the government and the voters.
Some of the popularity of this legislation might even come from it being seen as sticking it to “techbros”.
Banning eg coal mining, online gambling, etc, is vastly less popular. And they contribute to employment, revenue (via taxes), and they lobby/donate effectively.
Social media could easily have avoided this, as other industries have, but they decided not to. They might yet be able to leverage US tariffs though?
But, and that's a very important but, this was based on questions that assume that adults would not have to do any kind of age or identity verification.
I expect the Government will be very surprised with the response when this is actually implemented.
Hyper optimization of attention to drive up profits for the sake of share holders while ignoring the externalities was a terrible idea but in a capitalist system, they are the winners.
Large corporations' eagerness to implement this legislation should be a MASSIVE red flag alone. How do they benefit from this? I can think of a few ways.
Track record also shows that we can't properly do biometric data collection like this. This will end up in massive data leaks, if not people's IDs then at least faces. Congrats, you've given some scammers a full dataset for impersonating people.
Not only that, most noninvasive methods for age verification are dumb and ineffective with the AI options available today. Not to mention five or ten years.
So now you've got a vague unspecified and relatively nanny-state goal combined with ineffective and invasive methods and malicious compliance with immensely negative side effects. It is not worth it.
It's akin to wanting every restaurant that sells beer to card everyone at the entrance and store it in a database. Do we perhaps also want lists of minorities to better "protect" them?
"Oh, you bought lava cake? That's children's favourite, please show us your ID to see that you're not a child or we'll take the cake away."
what fascinates me most, is when people dont realise this.
there isn't unless you're a neurotic helicopter parent who wants to infantilize people up until they're adults.
I'm only in my early thirties but I thank god that I have a dad who bought me Doom when the store owner didn't want to sell it to me, we shocked the crap out of each other with gore sites in school and when our parents caught us looking at boobs they didn't have a moral panic because unlike now teenagers being hormonal was still considered normal
I literally pity the kids who are raised by people who give Victorian Englanders a run for their money. Forget this argument that the adults are the ones suffering under "legitimate concerns for kids", the kids are the actual losers here
And yes most people now have abandoned it, that's exactly what I'm complaining about. Not just with their kids mind you but even with themselves, that's why we have people in their late 20s and 30s who talk about how they're learning "adulting". Like, we have an entire generation now of people well into adult live who act like angsty teenagers because what they should have learned at 14 they learned ten years later
There are extremely popular movements that claim to stand for their members, but in reality just induce massive paranoia and fear.
It is extremely popular to accuse people of being the worst possible based on little to zero information or to actively twist the values and principles of the "opponent" into their opposites.
I can find the same mental health degrading content you claim is widespread on social media in the form of books, except the difference is someone spent months of their life writing hundreds of pages about it, which personally scares me more than someone dumping their 10 minute hot takes behind a pseudonym.
In this brief choice of words you've revealed that you're just guessing at what the actual problem is. There's a good book about it mentioned upthread; I recommend it.
Haidt argues that social media platforms are designed to be addictive, leveraging variable reward schedules and constant novel stimuli (likes, notifications, new content) to continually trigger dopamine release. This overstimulation of the brain's reward system, which is heavily mediated by dopamine, can lead to several negative consequences.
This constant seeking of instant, shallow rewards trains the brain to crave immediate gratification, making it more difficult for young people to engage with activities that require sustained attention, effort, and delayed gratification, such as reading a book, focusing in school, or building deep real-world relationships. The constant overstimulation can lead to a dysregulation of these pathways, making it harder for individuals to feel motivated by or find pleasure in less stimulating, everyday activities, thus contributing to feelings of boredom, apathy, and a diminished capacity for sustained attention and effort.
If the same exact content were revealed to the user in response to the user's making an effort, undergoing some danger or exercising patience or forbearance, the adverse effect described above would not occur: what causes the adverse effect is stimulation and gratification that requires almost no effort, no risk, no waiting and that is constantly available (even for example when the user is standing in line or riding on a crowded train).
The same thing is true BTW of the effect of porn on the young mind: if a boy can persuade a girl to show him her body, that experience will not tend to damage the boy even if he sees exactly the same thing he would see if he watched a porn video because it almost always requires significant effort to persuade a teenage girl to take off her clothes: among other things, the boy would need exhibit some degree of consistency and predictability in his behavior (exercising his frontal lobes) and to show that he cares about her at least to some minimum standard, which will probably entail learning and remembering many things about her and her recent experiences.
Almost everything in life that is pleasurable or exciting requires significant effort, danger or waiting, not just persuading a teenage girl -- or at least that was the case before the widespread availability of paperback novels, newspapers, comic strips, easily affordable distilled alcohol and drugs, radio, movies, pornography, television, the internet, social media and smartphones.
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.
I remember I read a lot of these methods before here on HN. Some were pretty cool, and somewhat old-school yet effective.
It's not. Much of the world's governments (particularly those that follow the UK system) implement smaller laws and then delegate the implementation to statutory instruments/secondary legislation, written by experts and then adopted by ministers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_legislat...
(Australia included)
It seems suboptimal, but then so does the alternative of a "big beautiful bill" full of absurd detail where you have people voting it into law who not only haven't fucking read it but are now not ashamed that not only have they not fucking read it, nobody on their staff was tasked with fucking reading it and fucking telling them what the fuck is in it.
Lighter weight laws that establish intent and then legally require the creation of statutory instruments tend to make things easier, particularly when parliament can scrutinise the statutory instruments and get them modified to better fit the intent of the law.
It also means if no satisfactory statutory instrument/secondary legislation can be created, the law exists on the books unimplemented, of course, but it allows one parliament to set the direction of travel and leave the implementation to subsequent parliaments, which tends to stop the kind of whiplash we see in US politics.
ETA: for example, the secondary legislation committee in the UK, which is cross-party, is currently scrutinising these:
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/255/secondary-leg...
Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.
Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.
From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.
So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.
The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.
Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.
Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
Maybe if starting from zero, but not with the established culture.
In this case, basically all the tech experts and child safety experts were saying that a blanket ban is not a workable policy, and could create harms in certain marginalised demographics where teens may rely on social media for support, yet the Government ignored them all and ploughed ahead.
The only changes to the legislation came from some political horse trading with the Opposition to get it through the Senate.
Well that is the normal process of things, surely? I mean, (politics is the art of the possible) * (nobody really likes seeing how the sausage is made).
Yes, but its also unregulated and full of shit, Moreover its designed to feed you more stuff that you like, regardless of the consequences.
For adults, thats probably fine (I mean its not, but thats out of scope) for kids, it'll fuck you up. Especially as there isnt anything else to counteract it. (think back to when you had that one mate who was into conspiracy theories. They'd get book from the library, or some dark part of the web. But there was always the rest of society to re-enforce how much its all bollocks. That coesn't exist now, as there isn't a canonical source, its all advertising clicks)
I'm sure their approach to enforcement will be something along the lines of relying on the websites to sort it out and fining them if they don't. The govt doesn't need to enforce the age check themselves or even provide or suggest a mechanism.
I imagine any smaller players in this market will just stay away from having an official presence in Australia.
"The govt doesn't need to enforce the age check themselves or even provide or suggest a mechanism."
I suppose it will be up to the courts to decide what is reasonable as an age check. However, the government has said that they don't want to include full ID checks, which is why one would assume they would provide guidance on how to comply.
The law, as written:
> There are age restrictions for certain social media platforms. A provider of such a platform must take reasonable steps to prevent children who have not reached a minimum age from having accounts.
No commentary I have seen supports your interpretation.
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't be able to circumvent. I think back to my teenage years: None of the half-assed attempts made to keep teenagers away from booze, cigarettes, drugs, or porn even remotely worked. These things were readily available to anyone who wanted them. If there is an "I am an adult" digital token, teenagers will easily figure out how to mint them. If the restrictions can be bypassed with VPNs, that's what they will do.
There's no guarantee that the government will pick the best standard, but one can hold out hope (e.g. when the US govt adopted Rijndael as the AES encryption standard).
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.
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
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 to search for more content or if the content is just getting worse, maybe both, but I'm probably just going to cancel the sub so they at least have to put up with terrible ads if they try to access it.
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 partially implement user preferences. White listing is a step too far against the purpose of YouTube.
Thus Google will always be biased to not letting you implement full customisability and user control.
Once they started masquerading ads as results, yeah any ability for user down or upranking became unworkable.
Whether this is viable or not, I don't know. I'm not sure what the average take per person is from the current model.
- 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.
- yes pinchflat allows you to define the date at which it starts downloading. For a couple channels, I set it to only download the past year's worth of videos and it seems to have respected that properly. It also allows you to set a retention period
- it allows you to download, embed, and use autogenerated subtitles (three separate options)
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
Kind of weird that there are so many comments here lamenting the lack of this feature when it actually exists just as requested.
edit: Oh neat they do have a parental approval mode in there now. Last time I was in here they only let you set an age range for the content that you wanted. It still seems a bit weird though, I can select a channel from the list they are presenting me but I can't search for some arbitrary channel to unlock. I'll have another look tonight though
The UX is a complete fail, my comment having a moan about it all has over 90 upvotes now, yet I'm wrong. But the reason I'm wrong is because they've made it painfully hard to manage.
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 YouTube Kids to watch Baby Shark and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or whatever other kiddie stuff they have there.
Something else entirely is needed here.
The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. It would be one more feature to regression test against an ever growing list changes, and an ever growing list of client apps that need to work across an endless list of phones, computers, tvs, etc.
This is why it is important that society normalize third party clients to public web services. We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed.
PS: this particular feature exists though.
https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...
The option (or at least documentation) does not seem to be there for computers. Is it only on mobile devices?
I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.
The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.
Now back to the comment I’d written at first:
It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...
That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.
I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.
And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.
As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)
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.
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.
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.
It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.
Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].
I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.
To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.
I'm especially worried about the point where parents are accompanying college students into their inerviews. Which is an slowly, but alarmingly rising phenomenon.
Parenting is pretty subjective, and everybody has their own way of doing it. You may disagree with something, but that doesnt make it incorrect here.
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.
Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.
> 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.
This doesn’t sound like a YouTube problem.
Because you're whitelisting on videos that Youtube already filtered on. If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.
>why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids
COPPA, probably.
This is false too. You can add almost any channel or any video on YouTube by using the YouTube app on your phone to "share" it to your kids.
As I said, it will refuse on some videos that contain product placement, and there are probably a few other restricted categories, but otherwise you are not restricted to sharing pre-filtered "kid" videos.
I don't want em watching cocomelon, I want them watching Steve Mould
Every restriction is a demonstration of a lack of trust.
Your first sentence is plain wrong and your second only begs the question. It's as if you're just trying to distract from the content of my comment with sheer semantic disingenuity. But maybe you missed my point so:
every check shows distrust
and that's the problem. I don't want Youtube's input aside from being a dumb pipe. I want them to hand me the remote so I can manage my feed.
How's that?
2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.
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 was a frequent occurrence.
The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up.
I doubt this will be a popular anecdote on HN, but after walking the walk I understand why this idealistic concept is much harder in reality.
> 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 was a frequent occurrence.
Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?
> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service.
Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.
Today I'd say the chances of it being a hostile move are more like 75/25.
It's not like Google provides any support to their consumers though. They barely provide any to their customers.
But this is where all the value of the future is locked up.
We can't do better at serving people's individual needs until we give up on "one size MUST FIT ALL"
Surely some of that could be redirected to an engineering team to do what's listed here, and while they're at it, maybe make the Apple TV YouTube app not suck industrial quantities of ass.
I think the only one I've used that's worse than YouTube's is Nebula but it's not a direct comparison, Nebula just lags quite a bit, it does function. The YouTube app in comparison frequently just... breaks in incredibly bizarre ways.
The answer is even shorter: money. Our society prioritizes "giant corporation makes money" over good things happening.
>responsible
Yeah, that's niche.
But why does the UI need to change? Nobody would miss having to relearn it every couple of months.
There's some truly great content on the platform, some of it even for kids. But it gets drowned out by mountains of algorithmic slop.
I have stopped giving my kid access to Youtube. instead I set up my own media server, filled it with pirated TV shows and Movies I can curate, and give them access to that on the TV and iPad in their allowed screen times.
My opinion is that YouTube should be forced to permit third party clients (interoperate). NewPipe and the various other clients are proof that there is a desire for alternative experiences and more toggles and options. Forcing users to identity themselves online to watch videos (or certain classes of videos) is a privacy nightmare, dystopic even.
Ublock origin and Sponserblock on Firefox. I also have an extension (forget the name) that blocks recommendations after a video. Disable autoplay.
There are also extensions that replace the home page with the subscriptions page.
But really, if BS exists on the internet, either your kids will find it or it will be shown to them. There's nothing you can do.
While also containing huge amount of unboxing toys crap I would not give to my kids in my own watchiles.
the most annoying part of all of this is that the people voted for it by voting Labor again. we are fkd.
"The Greens have also called for:
A ban on the targeting, harvesting and selling of young people's data
A Digital Duty of Care on tech platforms
EU-style guardrails to limit the toxicity of algorithms and extreme content
The ability for users to turn down and opt-out of unwanted content
The full release of the Online Safety Act review.
Investment in education for young people and their families to help develop digital literacy and online safety skills, and equip them with the tools and resources they need for positive and responsible online use.[1] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-condemn-pass...
[2] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/blunt-social-media-...
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 anonymous temporary age verification tokens generated through a government app.
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- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.
Watch the press conference from our PM and comms minister from yesterday to make up your mind on if this is coming from a place of compassion or control. They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured. I know there are flaws in that though. https://youtu.be/SCSMQUmrh38?feature=shared
It's interesting to see that the press conference felt so uniquely grounded in reality and authentically emotional- maybe that's because they are directly challenging the delegitimising impermanent reality of social media-
Yes they did bring families with children who had passed from social media abuse on stage but it felt genuine. Doesn't mean your privacy concerns aren't real but they don't always trump protecting a childs emotional development.
I don't understand this argument I keep hearing. What is your understanding of parenting that doesn't involve controlling what they are exposed to? It sounds like you want to say, parents should parent in any way that doesn't burden non-parents. Why would that be in a democracy?
This idea that parents should have to be the gatekeepers for everything doesn’t work.
We work better as a community, and we have democracy so we can elect people to take care of things that are good for all of us.
Broadly, as a society we have taken to blaming individuals for not being perfect at everything.
Parenting is traditionally a group activity. The individual consumer capitalist parent is a recent, mid 20th century onwards, construct.
Also, relatedly, it is uniquely modern western idea that parent has to control everything alone by himself and have the kid under perfect control every moment.
This is basically the village stepping up albeit in the dumbest way imaginable.
Cute. Let's see the reviews for an existing Australian government auth app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.gov.mygov.m...
And the kicker is that the above app doesn't even need to exist since myGov could just use industry standard TOTP two-factor auth like the dozens of other services I use.
Aussie politicians once again conforming to their lucky country stereotype:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
The alternative is an acceleration of the negative cultural trends and atomisation we have now.
You don't get to cry about the negative effects of social media but also cry about censoring it/protecting an impressionable population from it at the same time.
This is a pure fantasy that you seem to recognise on some level.
You know all of the government apps are "top tier shit". You experience this, yourself, first hand. It's not some statistic, or report.
This, this is what any form of mandatory ID verification will be: shit. Top tier shit made by the most expensive consultancies using the cheapest possible outsourced Indian labour.
Source: First-hand experience working in the IT departments of the very same people that made MyGov ID.
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/the-case-against-soci...
Meanwhile Australia has the largest per capita losses on gambling in the world.
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/gambling
Which the government doesn't care about. This may have something to do that people don't criticise the government when they are just losing their life's savings.
It's worth scrutinizing the philosophical mental model implicit in your opinion.
Do you wait for conclusive empirical evidence before doing anything? Or do you run an experiment in one country based on an informed opinion and see what happens?
I am more inclined to pursue the latter model for this question.
The case against youth social media makes logical sense, there is circumstantial evidence that it's having a negative impact, and I have enough experience with data to know how difficult it is to demonstrate that it's true empirically without a large-scale natural experiment like the one that's about to happen when this law passes.
A lack of evidence should not paralyze you on questions where conclusive evidence is very hard to assemble. Especially when action will create evidence.
Ghoulish
There is a name for this tactic - emotional blackmail
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 you did supporting covid policies.
You don't help children isolating them and censoring them and their parents.
Disgusting Propaganda of the lowest form. War on terror. War on drugs. War on disinformation.
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.
You're an authoritarian throughout and through and want to impose your tyranny through "keep you safe" like every tyrant.
You're the useful supporter and as much to blame as the corrupt politicians who enact these things.
Who on earth are you that you want to tell everyone else how to live. So conceited that you think you should rule over other people's kids.
Peoples lives aren't just hypothetical moral scenarios to point score on. Inaction has had and will continue to have real world consequences that you refuse to address. Don't complain about how bad the world is if you wont give up a single inch of your life to accomodate others and made their childhood in this sociopathic modern hellscape any easier. Have you even seen how much more stunted this generation is in ideology, emotion and idealism. If a non regulated internet worked for children we wouldn't be here.
Techno libertarian fantasy? Dude. You don't know anything about history. Get some life experience. Fight real injustice some day and come back to me. Have you ever engaged in politics or been at a protest?
> Inaction has had and will continue to have real world consequences that you refuse to address.
Inaction is better than action when the action is harmful theater.
> Don't complain about how bad the world is if you wont give up a single inch of your life to accomodate others and made their childhood in this sociopathic modern hellscape any easier
You're a predator. See how easy it is to paint scary pictures? Modern hellscape? Lol
> Have you even seen how much more stunted this generation is in ideology, emotion and idealism. If a non regulated internet worked for children we wouldn't be here.
You're a zealot. Really. You've made no arguments but appeals to emotions and attacks. We're done. We're not scared of you, your accusations or your fake morals. You're exactly like a religious zealot coming to oppress us for our greater good. No one asked you. Our speech, bodies and mind, our choice. Over my fucking dead body, authoritarian parasite.
Then what difference will it make in practice? Do the legislators really think that kids being able to comment on videos was the most harmful thing about the platform? YouTube will still be able to give you suggestions and send you down a rabbit hole of smoothbrain content even if you use it without an account.
> I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.
It sounds like you admit that this has mostly signal value.
I really don't understand how you can support this.
I do believe in this so ask whatever tricky questions you want.
I think age restrictions are a misguided attempt at fixing the root issue. I am not against draconian legislation against social media giants, but age restrictions on the internet will negatively affect everyone other than the social media giants the most. I think the main problem with social media right now is the incentives that the tech companies have to optimize for engagement above anything else, and the reason they have that incentive is simple: targeted ads are an insanely lucrative business model. The fix is pretty simple, but draconian: ban any form of targeted advertising on any digital platform.
Age restrictions will just cause a loss of privacy, increase the risk of government censorship, increase the risk of government misusing this for imposing morals and risk causing smaller independent sites to become inaccessible to the young even if they don't actively promote inappropriate content (I will also claim that defining what is child-appropriate content on the internet is impossible). Last but not least, the proposed technical solutions for this, at least in the EU, rely heavily on technologies such as Google Play Integrity and Apple App Attest, which means that they basically require EU citizens to accept Google's or Apple's TOS if they want to participate on the internet, and further preclude them from using an alternative open source operating system such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS. This alone is enough of a reason that I am fiercely against this, but it is by far not the only reason.
Keep the internet free and open for the users, but regulate the hell out of predatory business models.
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.
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 childhood has a very strong impact on environmental awareness and vocabulary of the children.
That said, I don't see any bans changing this, parents will just give young children access to their own "adult" YouTube account.
...Would it? I'm not advocating for this by any means, but at least they'd then be sat in one spot and not, say, roaming around the house, getting into things that might hurt them even more than the screen.
I just managed to navigate the entire preschool age range without my children seeing a single cocomelon video on youtube. Its surprisingly easy, and makes me really wonder why people are complaining. Its as if they feel like they have to show these videos to their kids or something.
Dont people have a slop filter? Or are they just opening the youtube kids app and blindly handing their phone to a preschool child to watch whatever they want?
Yet their kid demands attention. So they put the phone in front of them to be able to do whatever they needed to do.
I don’t really blame them, in today’s economic climate there are a lot of people who have to struggle every waking second to get by.
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...
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.
Kids will flock to darker places like 4chan.
For one thing, among all its garbage content, like the rest of the internet, YouTube is also full of absolutely excellent videos for children of all ages, which can range from outright entertaining to deeply educative to a standard that you'll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.
That any rational, mentally functional human being believes the state should have a hand in controlling all of this because of some nebulous bullshit about "misinformation" and other moronic scare words is incredible. Controls of this sort are too stupid for rational support even on a practical level, never mind the poisonous philosophy of state control over expression and opinions that underlies them.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
People who complained about political speech being too scary to tolerate (see the typical discourse around Republicans on sites like these) have been pushing for this all along.
How to X, doing x making y learn to play x on the piano/ guitar
Keep knowledge away from the children. For their “safety”
Keep Hancock and Joe Rogan away from kids.
Keep lies and conspiracy theories away from kids.
You seem to think kids are good at risk analysis and critical thinking. There are exceptions, but most people don't develop these things until their late teens when the pre-frontal cortex is developed.
This is politically beneficial because Google and Facebook squandered historically broad and strong goodwill, and they made themselves a target in the culture wars.
Google would have survived just fine with its historically light touch on ads.
Both would have been ok without monetizing data collected from users.
Both would be successful allowing users to pick aspects they wanted (e.g., shorts or not), rather than coercing them.
Unfortunately, there's no market feedback for missed future opportunities, and weak positive benefits from PR that dampens and side-steps negative sentiment, so there's no correction.
Had Google taken the privacy tack that Apple did, we might all be storing our most critical data on their servers (given their high data center standards), and thus inclined to do most business on Google cloud.
Both companies have founders still directing a majority of shares. There's no excuse of corruption by short-sighted shareholders.
So I think you can do more than minimize ("wishful", "negligible"). Also, what you seem to be saying is that being among the biggest makes everything they did right, so one should just accept that.
If I were a Google principal hiring any leader, I'd want to select candidates who had concrete plans for improvement -- opportunities to grow the business or to correct mistakes. Isn't that a better approach?
If instead Google principals and managers were hiring for those who accept their decisions - loyalty -- I'd run in the opposite direction.
There's no bigger purveyor of "misinformation" than the Australian government. An authoritarian disgusting pool of corruption and hypocritical righteousness.
But people get what they deserve, having pushed for authoritarianism all along to combat speech that scared them on covid policies and more
The ISPs are giving the individuals their licence plates (IP Addresses) so are in a good spot to say this IP is allowed to access X content. For devices being a NAT then the local router can provide that information to the ISP to forward to the service.
That was WRT torrenting, but it's a case that'd serve as a foundation for any push back in other related claims.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet...
This case is important in copyright law of Australia because it tests copyright law changes required in the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement, and set a precedent for future law suits about the responsibility of Australian Internet service providers with regards to copyright infringement via their services.
The managing director of iiNet, Michael Malone, claimed that "iiNet cannot disconnect a customer's phone line based on an allegation. The alleged offence needs to be pursued by the police and proven in the courts. iiNet would then be able to disconnect the service as it had been proven that the customer had breached our Customer Relations Agreement,"
ISP's can, of course, choose to do all manner of MiTM behaviour and monitoring but they are not obligated* to do so.
* save via five eyes related unspoken mandatory duties nobody talks about
The rightsholder would look at the connecting IP and then contact the owner of that IP for if that IP was allowed to view age-restricted content.
Sure, be it a torrent or pornography, the ISP doesn't have to care in Australia.
> The rightsholder would look at the connecting IP and then contact the owner of that IP for if that IP was allowed to view age-restricted content.
eg: Hollywood Inc. would contact the ISP to ask for details about the customer using that IP address at a particular time.
The existing court ruling establishes that the ISP has no obligation to provide customer details to Hollywood Inc. or to any third party provider of (say) pornography.
Also, typically an ISP customer is a household that contains adults, children, relatives, boarders, passerby's that use the router Guest account, etc.
So, not only is the ISP not obligated to provide customer details, those details are most likely those of an adult over the age of 18 as 12 year olds rarely have an account with an Australian ISP provider.
The problem is not the free-sharing, there is an enormous potential for social media platforms but, that comes from what it is allowed to develop in the platform, i.e. the predatory design and content.
We should restrict these predatory techniques and type of features to be developed as well as, promote good use among children. I don't mean, kids you should only look at educational content as entertainment is as important to the development as the learning.
With US tariffs being imposed on Australia, the economy will go belly up if it cannot have its own independent media.
I'm starting to think that some of the narratives around censorship are a PsyOp to prevent the government from doing what must be done to protect the economy. Banning specific platforms is not the same as preventing people from posting what they want online. So long as the latter is maintained, it's fine. People can find new platforms. Ideally smaller platforms. The government of any country should be allowed to shut down any large corporation it wants if it does not align with the interests of the people who live there.
The only thing the government cannot do is block people's free speech online. A government can demolish a public square if it wants; sure people won't be able to go there to talk anymore, but people can still go talk elsewhere. We shouldn't conflate banning of platforms with censorship. It's not the same.
It's kind of ridiculous how these things have been bunched up together.
It’s absolutely worthless to whitelist content when the default “age appropriate” filters have thousands of content that need to be blacklisted one by one and then new ones are added all the time.
I even built a chrome extension that loops over them to disable but they just keep coming.
But hey, I guess the elites in developed countries always know what's best for the children. What would we, the stupid unwashed masses do without them!
I would think the Australian government should instead focus on fixing its batshit insane housing policy and leave the Big Brother stuff to each individual family. But I'm weird I guess.
WantonQuantum•2d ago
general1726•2d ago
azemetre•2d ago
Anything that moves the needle toward dismantling the advertising and marketing industries will always be a worthwhile endeavor.
Gud•2d ago
mathiaspoint•2d ago
azemetre•2d ago
soulofmischief•2d ago
azemetre•2d ago
Let's not act like the only way to communicate with each other or use the internet is through corporate controlled software.
It would do teenagers good to be forced to use other forms of social media that aren't controlled by companies that don't care about their mental health.
soulofmischief•2d ago
We the people are vanguards of our own freedom. Always assume a government organization is lying to you about their intentions. We're taught about slippery slopes in civics and history class for a reason.
The true intent here is to control the ability for teens to freely congregate online and contribute to discussion around unsanctioned topics. To prevent teenagers from being exposed to or distributing material that challenges the incumbent authorities.
azemetre•1d ago
No one has twisted Mark Zuckerberg to make something that profits off of misery, he's more than capable in making something less harmful and not getting banned. If you don't like Zuckerberg replace him with who you do like, it's the same story.
I also trust democracy and democratic institutions. The ability to destroy something is completely democratic and should happen by the people with things prove harmful.
What I don't trust are actors who engage in advocacy that is always anti-democratic in nature.
Aurornis•2d ago
Advertisements are targeted on a number of factors. It’s not a simple checkbox that says “market this to teens”
azemetre•2d ago
yreg•2d ago
tartoran•2d ago
How can you do that on the internet?
What Australia did may be a bit shortsighted but it's a step in the right direction together. Other countries did all sorts of measures such banning smartphone use in classrooms and such. We will figure out what works and what does not, but at least something is being done.
yreg•2d ago
Well to upload YouTube videos you obviously need to log in.
giantg2•2d ago
Nobody knows. The government hasn't determined how the age verification will work. A good guess will be that it will require age verified accounts for anyone in that country to access content on those platforms... or a VPN.
hofrogs•1d ago
jay_kyburz•2d ago
giantg2•2d ago