Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-widens-teen-social-media-ban-youtube-scraps-exemption-2025-07-29/

by Brajeshwar • 12 months ago

358 558 12 months ago

It's important to note that this ban is for having an account - it does not ban people under 16 from watching youtube videos.

general17262• 12 months ago

So you can just log off to bypass it? That seems short sighted.

azemetre5• 12 months ago

Not really. It means it's no longer profitable to advertise to teens on most corporate social media.

Anything that moves the needle toward dismantling the advertising and marketing industries will always be a worthwhile endeavor.

yreg2• 12 months ago

Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?

giantg211• 12 months ago

"So you can just log off to bypass it?"

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• 12 months ago

YouTube doesn't let me watch videos without logging in to some account. If I try to watch any video from an incognito tab, I get a "Sign in to protect our community" stop-screen. This doesn't happen to everyone, of course, but for people like me who have a "haunted" IP4 address logging out will not be an option.

jay_kyburz7• 12 months ago

Also note: just being logged out won't stop the algo choosing content based on past watches.

giantg211• 12 months ago

This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. This means they will likely have to require login and age verify any accounts. The carve out in the article is talking about teachers and parents being allowed to show the content to the kids.

asyx• 12 months ago

I think that’s a really bad idea. I owe my career to YouTube and I think especially these days it’s much more useful for learning than it was back then. The whole internet moved to bite sized content but on YouTube you can find hour long videos of people doing really cool and sometimes super niche stuff.

blahlabs• 12 months ago

They are not being banned from watching YouTube.

404mm• 12 months ago

Asyx, you have an opinion on the ban before reaching the 3rd paragraph of the article. I recommend reading it first.

blast• 12 months ago

I owe my career to YouTube

That's interesting. How so?

dankwizard• 12 months ago

I have an n8n work flow that pumps out AI slop to the very demographic being targetted by this bill!!!!!!!!! HOW DARE THEY

worthless-trash• 12 months ago

Please ban comments. Please...

simpaticoder• 12 months ago

Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I might personally prefer to use that version of YT myself.

JJMcJ• 12 months ago

Do you want mere children exposed to David Attenborough and Mister Rogers?

Arubis• 12 months ago

Can’t speak for the Aussies, but if you’re a US-inflected conservative today, probably not!

mc32• 12 months ago

Oh, is that the majority of their content, traditional educational content? I must be mistaken in thinking they were funneling their audience into “shorts” and that kids obviously naturally recoil from “shorts” as much as they do green veggies and chores…

OJFord• 12 months ago

But this is basically the way for Australian government to try to make YouTube do that isn't it? There's already YouTube Kids, so maybe this makes YouTube think ok we need YouTube Teenz, or YouTube Educational or whatever.

arebop• 12 months ago

YouTube Kids is also full of garbage. The bar to get content into YouTube Kids is substantially higher than YouTube but still the average video's educational quality is abysmal.

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.

kelseyfrog5• 12 months ago

They can already access 3blue1brown[1] content without youtube. They just have to visit the site with the same name.

1. https://www.3blue1brown.com/#lessons

qualeed2• 12 months ago

That is not the only channel of value on YouTube. Not all of them have a website with their content available.

angry_moose• 12 months ago

Those are just page after page of embedded YouTube videos. It's doubtful that's a meaningful difference under this bill.

RankingMember3• 12 months ago

I think Google/YouTube would slow-walk the hell out of this only because they are making a ton off of the worst, basest of content and more filters = less eyeballs.

See also: Facebook "efforts" to stop scam advertisements and Marketplace fuckery

EA-3167• 12 months ago

Putting that aside, the reality is that kids are bored, highly motivated, and networked with each other across the planet. Even more than porn, which is only going to appeal to a subset of kids, "all of Youtube" is definitely a bit more universal.

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.

dumama• 12 months ago

Youtube is optimized for engagement and ad revenue. In my experience, there's more click/rage bait and entertainment than educational content (perhaps that reflects my algorithm haha). Unless there's improved content moderation or media training, I can see how this would ultimately benefit teens as they're minds are still developing.

armchairhacker• 12 months ago

https://nebula.tv seems like it's basically that, just curated podcasts. Although 3blue1brown isn't on there.

AlexandrB2• 12 months ago

Nebula is nice, but has a very specific ideological leaning. It's basically paid "breadtube".

ncruces6• 12 months ago

As a parent (who also btw uses Google products every single effin day) I just can't agree.

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.

JKCalhoun5• 12 months ago

Yeah, no amount of effort allows me to shut off YouTube Shorts.

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.

decimalenough• 12 months ago

You can completely disable Shorts by turning off your YouTube history.

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.

upboundspiral3• 12 months ago

I have been able to somewhat reasonably block youtube shorts with the following custom filter ublock origin rules (on firefox at least). Note that it might accidentally hide some legitimate stuff but from my experience it should be pretty minimal if any. I think to hide the shorts from the left sidebar it hides one of your subscribed channels but that's all I've noticed so far.

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)

sellmesoap• 12 months ago

I feel you about short content, I've taken to using uBlock origin with a custom filter to eliminate shorts from the front page. On the other hand when a youtuber makes a video 10-40 minutes long when the brunt of the information could be 1-5 minutes that gets my goat as well. My children do benefit from the amazing assortment of educational and entertaining options, but we watch together and talk about what we see, they're becoming media savvy and complain when sponsor block misses a segment. If we all skipped the ads we would see a new internet emerge.

XorNot3• 12 months ago

Except this is something the government could practically fix.

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.

bfg_9k• 12 months ago

So then block google/YT and call it a day? It's absolutely not Google's problem.

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.

AlexandrB2• 12 months ago

The bathwater is not any specific piece of content but the YouTube discovery and recommendation algorithm. As long as that's in place, there will be incentive to create terrible "slop" content to get into "education.youtube.com" and collect ad revenue. The same thing happened with kids.youtube.com[1] and I don't see a solution other than hand-curating channels for inclusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

anigbrowl• 12 months ago

Well put. I do not agree with the clumsy approach taken by countries like Australia, UK, and Texas, but I absolutely consider youtube and social media problems responsible for the tsunami of lowest-common-denominator slop. Free market/user choice idealists need to face up to the fact that slops is bad and lowers standards rather than elevating them, because the economic incentives tilt in favor of low quality, sensationalism, and so on. To some extent that's a reflection of the viewing/clicking population, but that doesn't mean that you should always just give people more of what they want. We tried that with high fructose corn syrup and the result is whole populations ravaged by obesity and diabetes.

crtasm• 12 months ago

The ban outlaws YouTube accounts for those younger than 16, allowing parents and teachers to show videos on it to minors.

But you don't need an account to watch most videos on youtube, so this isn't banning all of youtube.. right?

giantg211• 12 months ago

The law says providers need to prevent minors from accessing their services. This likely means that YouTube will require an age verified login.

hn_throwaway_992• 12 months ago

My thought was that a version of YouTube that:

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.

glial• 12 months ago

5. No "Shorts"

hasperdi• 12 months ago

This exists. It's called YouTube Kids

signatoremo• 12 months ago

Have a "show me more content like this" button, but again, no auto algorithmic feeds

What kind of content would you envision to be shown? Says if I want to watch more car review videos

oblanvil• 12 months ago

chrome extension that gets you most of the way: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...

guywithahat• 12 months ago

Yeah but how do you decide who's educational content and who isn't? Mr Beast does tons of "educational" videos in the context of "$1 vs $10,000,000 house" or "living in Antarctica for a week". Same with Jubilee.

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

anothereng• 12 months ago

I use invidious to watch YouTube and have no shorts.

jeffybefffy5192• 12 months ago

Youtube has gotten so much worse in the last 6 months tho, introduction of shorts has devalued the platform terribly and it seems like all the good educational creators are moving off it anyway and now its just ripped crap that is often AI produced. Hopefully this move makes some actual competition show up for Youtube, because it sorely needs it.

BLKNSLVR3• 12 months ago

The amount of bathwater is increasing rapidly, whilst the baby is about the same size.

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)

energy1234• 12 months ago

YouTube has so much good content with sub-5000 views. Lectures or interviews with quality thinkers who avoid the podcast bro drama circuit. Hard to discover with Youtube's junk-food recommendation engine.

Jalad• 12 months ago

Interesting, I find that youtube is a great resource for educational content and was very useful in highschool etc.

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

bananapub• 12 months ago

adding more laws that will be universally ignored by anyone with a small amount of thought and effort feels like a stupid way to solve anything, but it is absolutely the Australian Way. to quote[0] a noted philosopher:

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

trallnag• 12 months ago

Where does this myth come from? It's quite the opposite. For example, around 30 years ago hundreds of thousands of Australians willingly handed in their guns. And they accepted new laws that mostly prevented them from owning guns, and by that using them for self-defense.

viktorcode• 12 months ago

I think that was a buyout. Government offered money for the guns.

incone123• 12 months ago

About that time my then boss handed in his guns, 'willingly' only in that he wasn't daft enough to think he could beat the police in a firefight.

SoftTalker2• 12 months ago

The only entities that can possibly control Facebook and Google are nation-states. If there is to be any regulation of them (or the content they push) at all, that's where it has to happen. These giant tech companies have demonstrated that they don't care to do it themselves. Of course individuals can decide to use these platforms or not, but if that was good enough to achieve the society most of us want to live in, we wouldn't need 90% of the laws we currently have.

jon-wood• 12 months ago

Sadly nation states, or at least the ones acting currently, seem to think the only thing available is a banned or not binary. There’s no nuance to laws because nuance is hard to get into a 1 paragraph sound bite for the media.

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.

spicyusername4• 12 months ago

Under, say, 10-12 or so, I can understand a blanket ban. In general, the YouTube content aimed at children is pretty vapid and encourages too many parents to use it as parenting auto-pilot.

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.

soulofmischief5• 12 months ago

Ridiculous. Would we have had a similar ban against flash video and game websites growing up if it were today? Against AOL Instant Messenger?

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?

spicyusername4• 12 months ago

We're talking about 8-year-olds here not 15-year-olds, and a website intended for passive consumption, not active participation.

I would say the circumstances are pretty different.

__d6• 12 months ago

If you substitute the word “television” for “YouTube” or “social media”, you can almost exactly replay the arguments of the 1970s.

spicyusername4• 12 months ago

Except in this case the content is basically totally unmoderated and mediated through an algorithm designed to keep the childrens attention permanently, so I would say the circumstances are at least a little different than back then.

XorNot3• 12 months ago

This is all irrelevant though. You can't enforce this without surveiling everyone, and what you're trying to achieve would fail if the target group have unrestricted access to the Internet otherwise.

ccppurcell• 12 months ago

It's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what the right metaphor is. Throwing the scrap of edible meat out with the ton of rotten flesh? YouTube has got really bad in recent years. There are channels deliberately trying to get through to kids with horrific content. And of course the tobacco, gambling and sugar industries trying to turn our kids into addicts. They are often only one or two clicks away from extremely inappropriate content.

sirwhinesalot2• 12 months ago

That edible meat is close to being the only edible thing around though. Can you really name anything on the level of 3Blue1Brown available for free?

Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.

somenameforme• 12 months ago

Most (all?) top universities have free educational content, often including entire courses, available. For instance here [1] is MIT's open courseware site where you can download all the required media, including lecture video/notes/problem sets/exams/etc, for courses - completely for free.

Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/

rhdunn• 12 months ago

1. Welch Labs (Complex Numbers, AI)

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

RankingMember3• 12 months ago

Besides content harmful to kids, there's a ton that's harmful to just about any human psyche from a social or personal perspective. I wasn't aware of how bad it was until I recently browsed Youtube.com from an incognito window and saw the default experience- it's rage bait, misinformation, and just straight mental junk food. My logged-in experience is nothing like that, thankfully, but I can't imagine throwing a kid into a fresh YouTube account and them needing to pare that down (or even having the critical thinking skills to do so).

showcaseearth• 12 months ago

+100 here. I think everyone should try this exercise– browse outside your algorithm. It's a sea of garbage to sort through.

SlowTao6• 12 months ago

This is probably why I havent seen YouTube as being a big issue. The algorithm on my account is so tightened up that non of that stuff bleeds through. So while I don't see the issues directly it is because they are kept away from me.

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.

nottorp• 12 months ago

It bans accounts on youtube not watching, I think?

m101• 12 months ago

Perhaps this will mean a version of YouTube comes out without YouTube shorts integration. YouTube shorts, imo, legitimises the govts complaint.

ivanmontillam• 12 months ago

I really wish there was a version of YT in Android that did not come with YT Shorts. As a YT Premium user, I should be able to disable it, or at least not make it the first thing it opens when I tap on the app icon.

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

It lasted a month for me that way; then I installed it, and after a week or two I fell into the old habit of Doomscrolling and had to nuke it again.

TikTok/Reels/Shorts format is really, really exploitative on the mind.

simmerup2• 12 months ago

I've recently started watching shorts. I blink and an hour has passed!

Ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, a significant portion of them seem to be AI generated

Avamander3• 12 months ago

As a premium user I should be able to add content "made for kids" to playlists and see comments as well. It's absolutely idiotic how "save the children" is just an excuse to fuck over everyone else.

j1elo2• 12 months ago

You know, the current best option is not exactly a 3rd party app but an original app with some patches applied to it. Of course in the end you're trusting someone out there, but hey the patches are FOSS so they can be downloaded, reviewed, and applied locally.

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.

Kwpolska• 12 months ago

As a free YouTube user, I was able to disable the Shorts stuff by disabling watch history on my YouTube account. I can watch shorts from my subscriptions only, on the subscriptions tab, by explicitly clicking on them.

Tenemo• 12 months ago

There is, I'm a long-time user of ReVanced-patched YouTube. Comes with all sorts of plugins, tweaks and knobs.

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!

tamirzb• 12 months ago

If you are worried about your Google account being banned for using ReVanced (not that I saw any evidence for anything like that so far but I agree that there could be a scenario like this some time in the future), for years now I've been using a separate Google account only for YouTube. This account essentially only contains my YouTube viewing history and nothing more. I have yet to see any disadvantage in this separation

amelius• 12 months ago

People would go to TikTok if shorts were removed.

mitthrowaway2• 12 months ago

People who want shorts would go to TikTok. People who keep clicking the "don't show me Shorts" button are probably not using TikTok in the first place.

foobarian2• 12 months ago

I would love to block the shorts at home router level. I hesitate to just block the site altogether

shortn• 12 months ago

Don't their shorts go under https://www.youtube.com/shorts/

Maybe you can just block all URLs that falls under /shorts/

deviation2• 12 months ago

If you have a raspberry pi or some device laying around that you're happy to act as an always-on-server you could set it up as a Layer 7 firewall using something like Nginx to act as a reverse proxy for SSL/TLS interception.

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.

BLKNSLVR3• 12 months ago

Even on an incognito tab, the first set of shorts always includes at least one semi-soft-porn cover image for a short that doesn't actually contain that image.

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.

ChrisArchitect• 12 months ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44732683

9rx• 12 months ago

"YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content [...] It's not social media."

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.

lvass• 12 months ago

Aren't "sharing platforms" and "social media" the same thing?

Meta claimed in FTC v. Meta that they are indeed the same.

non-• 12 months ago

Teens are old enough to find their way around any content bans. This seems like a good way to introduce teens to VPN's and skirting content regulations early. It's also dumb because YouTube can teach you almost anything, I'd say it's the "best of the worst" when it comes to social media on the internet.

283042834092342• 12 months ago

My teens, and each one I have encountered through them, cannot discern a pixel from a wallsocket. They are tech consumers. Not tech savvy. My dad (82) is more tech savvy.

the_snooze• 12 months ago

Exactly, teens have tons of access to tech. But that tech is just a straw through which to consume an endless stream of content. It's not a tool to master and manipulate.

jay_kyburz7• 12 months ago

My 13yo wanted to install some dotnet disassembly or injection tool so he could download mods and inject new code into existing games on steam. All his friends were doing it and I'm the mean dad because I won't let him download any random code from the internet and run it.

They don't know what they are doing, but they know how to follow instructions on github.

SlowTao6• 12 months ago

For now. Maybe this will be the incentive to get them to dig into how these things work.

standardUser2• 12 months ago

Your kids don't need to be savvy, just a small number of kids will create the culture and technology to circumvent these laws and other kids will consume it. And the sharpest kids will always outflank the adults because their perspectives are fresher and their motivations are far more personal and urgent.

LexiMax2• 12 months ago

They're not tech savvy because they didn't need to be.

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.

ncruces6• 12 months ago

Good, at least they'll learn a useful skill in the process.

Unlike what happens if they open the app and are pushed to doom scroll through dozens of videos on every 10 min school break.

JKCalhoun5• 12 months ago

"best of the worst"

Such a low bar.

ggm3• 12 months ago

A point sometimes missed is that government bans on access to knives and aerosols aren't so much designed to actually make it "impossible" as to impose a social barrier, which demands active bypassing, and so clarifies the responsibility across the boundary.

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.

seydor• 12 months ago

This is raising a generation of radicalized teens with institutionalized hatred against the older generation. Will end well

lanfeust62• 12 months ago

That was already the case.

simmerup2• 12 months ago

You mean YouTube (and social media in general)?

If so, you can expand it to hating those younger than themselves, hating the opposite gender, and hating each other

jjangkke3• 12 months ago

More likely this will force them to be right wing as they get older. Young ppl arent digging left wing stuff as trends show many are shifting to conservatism.

__d6• 12 months ago

That’s not universally true.

In Australia, young people skew significantly progressive, and young woman even more so.

neilv• 12 months ago

Hatred/resentment, maybe.

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.

mianos• 12 months ago

I am in the 'post older generation'. It's the brainless commies in the middle that we all hate.

somedude895• 12 months ago

You think kids will grow up to hate their parents because they weren't able to consume brainrot? They'll turn 18, open Tiktok for the first time and think wow our parents have been keeping this treasure from us all our childhood? Do kids grow up to hate their parents because they aren't allowed to drink before turning 21? If it's a general ban for all kids, not just some that will then feel excluded from the rest of the group, I don't think they'll care the tiniest bit about not being allowed to access this crap before age 18.

forgotoldacc3• 12 months ago

A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well.

Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you 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.

RankingMember3• 12 months ago

I think the concern about how this will be implemented (e.g. selfie and ID submission) is well-founded. I also think that letting tech companies make billions by feeding our youth mental junk food is a problem. I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.

Bukhmanizer3• 12 months ago

If you didn’t realize that making teens verify their age online meant that everyone had to verify their age and identity online, that’s just a dangerous level of stupidity.

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.

jjani2• 12 months ago

I'm not sure where the middle path is, but I think it'll need some real thought to figure out.

Bans on recommendation systems. Doesn't need much thought to figure out. Instant 90% harm reduction.

JKCalhoun5• 12 months ago

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.

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?)

stavros• 12 months ago

He said, on an online forum.

kristopolous• 12 months ago

If "save the children" creates enough friction to bring the demise of social media then I'll go lay a flower on Anita Bryant's grave and tell her I'm sorry.

XorNot3• 12 months ago

It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated?

"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?"

jjangkke3• 12 months ago

When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz"

In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games 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.

thewebguyd• 12 months ago

Yep. This feels a lot like a repeat of the moral panic from the early eras, only this time the policies are unfortunately within the overton window instead of outside, and have shown to be popular outside of tech circles.

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.

mschuster91• 12 months ago

In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games because of violent content and now we have complete censorship and control over what games can sell or not on steam.

I get your point but I don't agree.

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

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

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

_carbyau_4• 12 months ago

I largely agree with you but this bill is touted as a social media bill.

The internet was somewhat social in the 90's and early 2000's.

The institutions largely being affected here did not exist then.

j1elo2• 12 months ago

it's needing to submit a selfie and ID photo to be verified, saved, and permanently bound to your every single action online.

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

jay_kyburz7• 12 months ago

It would be cool if the post office could issue you an ID card, but for a pseudonym of your own choosing, so that when the data leaks, you can just trash it and get a new one. You could just show the dude at the post office your real id and he can check the age, but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally.

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.

squigz5• 12 months ago

Why would you assume these 2 groups of people are the same...?

carabiner• 12 months ago

I love this.

upboundspiral3• 12 months ago

I would like to note that I am probably grossly unqualified to talk about such topics, but one idea that I've had rolling around is that inevitably, if you ask people "should kids be able to watch/read/be exposed to [insert adult thing here]" they will inevitably say no of course not. I feel like this is pretty reasonable. For advocates of privacy to succeed I believe that they will need to not just oppose censorship on a global scale, but provide solutions. One thing that technology has not changed is the unit of human relations. From foster care to single or two parents, the idea of a family is still there in society. In my opinion, this group is greatly underserved, and I do not believe it is enough to say "its the parents responsibility" to curate content. That is a full time job. Now, I will be the first to say that children do not at all need to have a smarphone/ipad/etc until they are in their teens, restricting all technology use can be hard. There needs to be tools that allow parents to choose what their children are allowed to be exposed to. Some parents will choose complete freedom, some will choose some "censorship." But I believe the power should rest in the hands of the parents, and I am strongly opposed to the government dictating this choice. I believe one thing the government can be good at is enforcing standards and providing reference implementations that would allow such curation to be possible. Imagine if you walk into an Apple store and say you are buying a phone for your child, and they tell you: would you like a side of censorship with that? Or if companies like youtube that are a platform with children would need to provide a means for them to be curated, for channels and features to be blocked, etc. I am not sure if what I am proposing is the right way forward but I would love to see governments tackle this problem of giving power back to the parents, instead of seeing governments attempt to enforce their worldviews onto others. I am also interested in how there would a handoff, from a "child-friendly" internet to a fully uncensored one within families. I believe that outright rejecting censorship of what children can access will do nothing to assuage the fears of people that do not want their children accessing random websites, and that a solution that keeps the power in the hands of the people and not the government is needed.

jamiek88• 12 months ago

Please use paragraphs.

mango7283• 12 months ago

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

jay_kyburz7• 12 months ago

Apple already provides heaps of tools to help moderate what children can do on the phones, you can limit apps screen times and disable some apps altogether.

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.

viraptor8• 12 months ago

Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number.

People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

This is BS and not productive. We can do better.

nojs• 12 months ago

Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site

Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.

forgotoldacc3• 12 months ago

So instead of using a photo ID so that everything is logged, register your every interaction online with the government directly. The government which also has your photo ID on record.

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.

RpFLCL• 12 months ago

give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry 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.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number

The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens.

If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the tokens they want.

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

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

paradox4602• 12 months ago

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety

energy1234• 12 months ago

The case study of Bukele in El Salvador shows why this is naive. Low safety directly caused low liberty, because voters care about safety more than liberty, due to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Delivering safety is a necessary condition for preserving liberty. It is not a nuisance or a side quest.

opan• 12 months ago

The simple answer to these situations is usually that it's not the same people complaining in both instances. I see similar things in places with anonymous posting where people assume everyone was in agreement on x, then later they hear something different and try to frame it like a flip-flop or a gotcha. People are never all in agreement.

To add to that, often no news is good news, or rather people won't bother 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).

Dilettante_• 12 months ago

it's not the same people complaining in both instances

I just learned a brand-new term for this: It's called the "Goomba Fallacy"[1]

[1]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

watwut4• 12 months ago

Someone the two groups never meet in one thread. Somehow they are all afraid to voice their points when the other group is speaking.

It is something worth pointing out.

_carbyau_4• 12 months ago

The issue I have is this is all for naught. All it does is make things more complicated.

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.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

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

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.

tsoukase• 12 months ago

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

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

nromiun• 12 months ago

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

stephen_g6• 12 months ago

From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here.

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.

protocolture8• 12 months ago

From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here.

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.

eviks4• 12 months ago

From here in Australia, nobody was really asking for this here. Still, over 40% of parents said that 15s and under should be able to access Facebook and Instagram

So a whopping 60% were asking for it!!!

jezzamon• 12 months ago

As an Australian living overseas, I heard about this on social media from friends / celebrities pushing for this to become a law so I disagree that no-one was asking for it.

FWIW I'm personally happy it's becoming a law

energy1234• 12 months ago

Is it this one? How did the government game this poll?

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.

verisimi• 12 months ago

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.

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.

dyauspitr2• 12 months ago

I still want it.

ygritte3• 12 months ago

Implementing a feature and doing it in the worst and dumbest possible way are not the same thing.

uyzstvqs5• 12 months ago

That opinion still stands. But I believe that we should regulate children's access to the internet, and not the internet's access to children. As the prior does not affect adults and their free, open and private internet, while the latter absolutely does.

I believe that there should be a standard, open framework for parental control at the OS level, where parents can see a timeline of actions, and need to whitelist 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.

qcnguy3• 12 months ago

Why do you need regulation for any of that? Devices with parental controls exist already. Special browsers with parental controls exist, just for kids. Do you think Jane Smith, L3 civil servant, will do a great job of taking over product management for the entire software industry despite having a BA in English Lit and having never heard of JIRA?

There's no need for any regulations here and never was. It was always a 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.

prmoustache3• 12 months ago

An easy solution is to limit their access to the device. If they can only use the devices in your living room when you are sitting next to them you keep full control.

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.

prmoustache3• 12 months ago

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

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

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

williamdclt• 12 months ago

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

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

matty22• 12 months ago

I think you are 100% right. Let's ban social media for all ages and wipe this scourge from the planet.

meindnoch• 12 months ago

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

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

zik• 12 months ago

This has been in process for over a year. It's not a sudden thing. The press you saw was all part of a campaign to push the idea.

dennis_jeeves2• 12 months ago

People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.

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.

SilverElfin• 12 months ago

Why are so many countries like Australia, UK, EU, etc suddenly pro censorship. Aren’t these all liberal democracies? I would think these policies would be very unpopular. Is there some analysis of how this came to be normalized?

aspbee555• 12 months ago

this is why "think of the children" is always used in these instances, it gets right past peoples defenses and if you try to argue against privacy invasive/life invasive/completely useless regulations/regulations ripe for abuse (by design) then you are somehow the "bad guy"

owisd3• 12 months ago

A majority of adult GenZs who've grown up with this stuff agree it was bad for their childhood and most older adults use social media and feel the negative effects too. Using some sophistry to argue it's all made up by the government is like Democrats arguing Biden was fit to run a second term when everyone can see with their own eyes he was not.

jay_kyburz7• 12 months ago

I'm an everyday Australian, I'll take a few guesses. (I don't support these new laws)

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.

protocolture8• 12 months ago

we don't have as an antagonistic relationship with our government

They have one with us.

vasco• 12 months ago

It's really hard to explain to a kid

Laws created based on parent's inability to explain something to their kids are invariably shit.

SlowTao6• 12 months ago

To use the Donald Horne quote "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."

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.

t0lo10• 12 months ago

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. 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

ggm3• 12 months ago

I think homomorphic encryption through a third party would be better. Gov app could be one side of it, blinded evidence provision to the identity, to the intermediary.

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.

protocolture8• 12 months ago

I see, props for admitting you are part of the problem.

Next time dont do that.

sadleqabd• 12 months ago

Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies. So are authoritarian governments, perhaps even more so.

protocolture8• 12 months ago

Suddenly?

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.

SlowTao6• 12 months ago

I think a key point of it is that those in power know that if there is bipartisan support, they can ignore all protests.

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.

eviks4• 12 months ago

Aren’t these all liberal democracies?

Not in the idealistic sense that you imply, so this has always been normalized, and variations of such policies have always been implemented

boudin2• 12 months ago

There are multiple studies showing the negative impact of social media on teen's health. It's not about censorship but about forcing companies that don't care at all to be held accountable.

I'm not sure the approach taken by Australia will be effective (i'm not sure how it can be implemented), but i don't see the problem with doing something against harmful companies like meta, tiktok, x/twitter

One of the study https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10476631/

runsWphotons4• 12 months ago

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

bad_username• 12 months ago

Mass Internet censorship in the Western world started in 2020 with restrictions on Covid information and discussion. This is just the logical conclusion.

derelicta• 12 months ago

Sharpening contradictions of capitalism leading to an impasse, forcing its servile governments to clamp down preventively on workers rebellions around the western world. So yes, there are analysis for this and analytical/scientific tools to understand those phenomenon

imtringued3• 12 months ago

This is basically it. They are gathering the list now so they know who to round up later.

dyauspitr2• 12 months ago

Because the kids are imploding.

blendo• 12 months ago

I think most parents are really uncomfortable with adolescents accesing smartphone porn, and also sexting.

Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.

alt2277• 12 months ago

Think of the children!

general17262• 12 months ago

So they will start using YouTube Revanced. What now?

Avamander3• 12 months ago

Revanced will unfortunately not last long. Ten years maximum. The moment YouTube can, they'll jump on the WideVine ship. They've already tested it. It won't be long until it's all DRM-ed, no mainstream custom client is going to work.

dang• 12 months ago

Related ongoing thread:

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.)

wewewedxfgdf• 12 months ago

The Australian Prime Minister - Anthony Albanese - was once asked by a radio host what he would do if he was dictator - he said he would ban all social media.

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.

netsharc• 12 months ago

Ah yes, because it's the teenage vote and social media voice they're very very worried about...

soulofmischief5• 12 months ago

Uh, yea, it is. Teenagers grow up. In just a few short years. Then they become members of the voting group most vulnerable to propaganda and political manipulation. It's the same reason tobacco and alcohol companies love advertising to teens. You're creating a target that can be identified, manipulated and controlled through social reinforcement.

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.

__d6• 12 months ago

The social media ban is broadly popular. The clear majority of voters support it. It’s a political win for the government to push this through, over the objections from Google, Meta, etc.

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?

stephen_g6• 12 months ago

Hardly. Their survey showed about 55% of parents support for blocking 15s and under from Facebook and a bit less than 60% for Instagram, and less than 25% support for blocking YouTube, yet the Government talks as if support was almost universal.

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.

like_any_other• 12 months ago

If only there was some kind of parental control software available, there would be no need to further expand state surveillance and repression. Unfortunately, this is the only way, that the government only reluctantly resorted to, after much public outcry, and after having tried many other non-invasive, freedom- and privacy-respecting measures, that have all failed...

SlowTao6• 12 months ago

Yep, it seems like a failure on all parties. Government, civil and corporate.

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.

binary132• 12 months ago

I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody has ground to stand on in asserting that minors have a moral right to an “online life”. On the other hand, there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons. I’m not saying I necessarily support it in all cases, but I definitely don’t think it’s necessarily a bad or immoral thing either, and it’s a bit surprising that a bunch of extremely online tech jockeys seem to.

Avamander3• 12 months ago

The deal is that everyone shouldn't be subjected to invasive identity verification just to not be considered children. Not only is this process generally vaguely specified in depth, it's a massive (financial) burden for most online platforms. The effect this kind of legislation has, has not been properly thought out.

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."

jackdawipper2• 12 months ago

yea but that isnt why they are doing it. they dont gaf about kids, they want total control of the populace online behaviour and this is steps in that direction.

what fascinates me most, is when people dont realise this.

Barrin922• 12 months ago

there are tons of good reasons to disallow minors from participating in the free online commons.

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

hollerith2• 12 months ago

I think most people abandon views like yours when they become a parent. Are you a parent?

giantg211• 12 months ago

Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media. There are tons of great instructional videos.

The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.

jeffybefffy5192• 12 months ago

Is mechanics of enforcement really a government thing tho?

coolestguy• 12 months ago

No you're right, thinking about laws & second order effects isn't a government thing

sophacles• 12 months ago

Um... its a law. And yes, law enforcement is widely considered a government thing. See also: police.

y1426i• 12 months ago

It should at least be possible to ban YouTube shorts. I wish those were served from a separate domain to make it easier to block just those.

exasperaited5• 12 months ago

I would love to see more scrutiny of short content because it is without doubt the most manipulative.

andriamanitra• 12 months ago

It's not too much effort to find µBlock Origin filter lists that hide them. The only time I see YouTube shorts is when I deliberately navigate to the shorts tab on a channel page.

quintes3• 12 months ago

I learnt drums for a song I like from shorts. Blanket bans are not a solution

exasperaited5• 12 months ago

It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.

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...

giantg211• 12 months ago

There is a happy medium. The big beautiful bill stuff is not normal. There are some states that have single issue clauses where the bill must be a single issue, resulting in more concise bills. Enforcement and rules can be made by agencies too. I think the whiplash is more of a two party thing since the bipartisan ones rarely flip-flop. The other stuff barely passes. We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.

stephen_g6• 12 months ago

Except in Australia experts don't come into it, except for sham inquirys that are held as a matter of course.

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.

KaiserPro• 12 months ago

There are tons of great instructional videos.

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)

insane_dreamer3• 12 months ago

YT still has the great instructional videos, but teens today (my son included) are mostly just scrolling the shorts just like TikTok. YT is heavily orienting itself as social media.

jemmyw• 12 months ago

They aren't banning viewing videos, they're banning kids having an account I believe.

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.

giantg211• 12 months ago

"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.

_jackdk_• 12 months ago

I was in Melbourne Central the other day and there were big ads up for identity verification platforms, where consumer brands normally put up their ads. That'll prime the brand recognition for everyone so that when the identity checks come in, people will feel more comfortable complying.

ryandrake2• 12 months ago

The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to its mechanics or feasibility.

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

__jochen__4• 12 months ago

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

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media. There are tons of great instructional videos.

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

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

giantg211• 12 months ago

What I like has no bearing on what I consider social media. When I use YouTube, I don't connect or interact with others. I'm just consuming content similar to Netflix. Maybe the comments section could be considered that. However, that means any site with comments is social media - news sites, stores with reviews, etc.

Cytobit• 12 months ago

Redditors will swear up and down that they are not using social media. I don't know what they think social means.

jedimastert• 12 months ago

Its a little bit of a stretch to call YouTube social media.

Is it? As far as I can tell, the definition of social media is a platform where it is trivial to publish to it. That definitely fits YouTube.

The fact that there is great educational content on it (and I 100% agree that there is great educational content) I pretty much solely due to a passionate community, not really anything YouTube itself does to prioritize that kind of content. In fact, as far as I can tell it's harder

oneeyedpigeon2• 12 months ago

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

t-3• 12 months ago

They passed the law without considering the past decades of attempts to prevent minors from accessing all kinds of content on the internet. Anyone who grew up with internet access knows it won't work. Even if you put up a country-level firewall it's basically impossible to stop people from finding what they want on the internet without spending way too much effort to be politically viable.

standardUser2• 12 months ago

Maybe if the age limit was lower, and maybe if the law was less strict. But the delta between this law and the society its being imposed on is way too big to not cause serious unintended consequences. The younger kids will find ways to achieve many of the same interactions, only totally unregulated, and in doing so will be forced to create distance between themselves and 'adult' society.

ElCapitanMarkla5• 12 months ago

I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels.

I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able 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.

Ancalagon• 12 months ago

Ads as effective parental controls is wild, hilarious, and somewhat dystopian to me.

jasonfarnon2• 12 months ago

Why? Back when I was a kid and TV/radio were the only options, it's the ads that often got me to shut it off and do something else as often as not having anything to watch. I would wager advertiser data reflects this. Conversely I noticed a trend sometime in the 2010s my grandkids would watch shows that didnt break to commercial after rolling the end credits but instead segue to a new episode in a mini-view, and they would never leave.

ACow_Adonis• 12 months ago

Presumably for the same reason Google doesn't let you block or filter shit sites.

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.

glaucon• 12 months ago

Agreed but ElCapitanMarkla is paying for an ad free service so at that point (as far as I can see) there shouldn't be any reason they can't have what they suggest.

kingnothing• 12 months ago

Try Kagi. You can filter out the shit sites. It's great!

jorvi• 12 months ago

Well, that didn't or wouldn't have mattered when Google only had a top box and sidebox with sponsored sites.

Once they started masquerading ads as results, yeah any ability for user down or upranking became unworkable.

oneeyedpigeon2• 12 months ago

Whitelisting—and more user control in general—seems like such a valuable feature, that they could probably charge for it. Heck, I'd pay $10 a year if I could just customise certain aspects of YouTube and remove all the ads and suggested content.

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.

sharperguy• 12 months ago

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I self host my own Jellyfin(1) instance, and I've had it recommended to combine it with pinchflat(2), which will auto download and label entire youtube channels, as they publish new videos. So then you could use it to archive and provide access to the channels you want without worrying about the recommendations and other channels.

1. https://jellyfin.org/

2. https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

mrheosuper• 12 months ago

Interesting, i have 2 questions:

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

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

GardenLetter27• 12 months ago

Can you link it up with ffmpeg and SponsorBlock to remove ads?

turkishmonky• 12 months ago

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

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

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

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

modeless11• 12 months ago

YouTube kids has a feature to only show whitelisted channels and videos. It's been there a few years now. You can share videos to your kids directly from the YouTube app.

viraptor8• 12 months ago

But that also opens all the yt kids content, doesn't it? At least I couldn't find any way to whitelist within the kids app too. And there's just WAY too much brainrot crap in it to allow open access for my kid.

ElCapitanMarkla5• 12 months ago

Hmmm I'll check it out, I last looked into this about a year ago. I'm pretty sure it still allowed a bunch of crap through that I didn't want them to have access to.

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

ryandrake2• 12 months ago

Whitelisting and YouTube Kids are not viable solutions for the 12-16 age group, which is the group this legislation is targeting.

Whitelisting: There is way too much appropriate content out there to whitelist it all. It's totally infeasible for a parent, unless you're planning to only approve a handful of channels, which makes YouTube pointless.

YouTube Kids: Teenagers are not "kids" and are not going to go onto YouTube Kids to watch Baby Shark and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or whatever other kiddie stuff they have there.

Something else entirely is needed here.

vineyardmike• 12 months ago

I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels

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&...

ndriscoll• 12 months ago

Your second paragraph is kind of funny as a solution to your first, but was nonetheless what I was going to suggest: since it would require too much work for a multi-trillion dollar company to be cable of building, you can instead rely on hobbyists and use yt-dlp and jellyfin to make your own whitelisted youtube.

The option (or at least documentation) does not seem to be there for computers. Is it only on mobile devices?

PoignardAzur• 12 months ago

The PS kind of undermines the rest of your point.

frereubu• 12 months ago

That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people whose response to complaints about kids' access to inappropriate content is "you need to parent your kids" is fine, but I need the tools to do that! A tool like this would be a godsend.

bamboozled• 12 months ago

Of course if it made a bunch of money it would be a top priority though.

theelous3• 12 months ago

You heard it here first folks - children are too niche now.

2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.

natnatenathan• 12 months ago

I don’t think this is too niche of a feature. Instead, the issue is that this would decrease the engagement (and profitability) for any customer using it, so they have a disincentive to building it. Same reason that Facebook removed features that helped customers narrow their feeds down to just favorite friends and family.

Aurornis7• 12 months ago

We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed

Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error 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.

BrenBarn• 12 months ago

The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize.

The answer is even shorter: money. Our society prioritizes "giant corporation makes money" over good things happening.

GoblinSlayer3• 12 months ago

Electron apps solve the sync problem by redirecting to main site for full UI. Also there's not much need for UI in this case, because the user is not supposed to change or see whitelist, filtering can be implemented on server side.

ygritte3• 12 months ago

How can it be niche if it would be front and center for every responsible parent?

dpassens2• 12 months ago

This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change.

But why does the UI need to change? Nobody would miss having to relearn it every couple of months.

pmarreck• 12 months ago

No, that feature doesn't exist. My son is 4 and I looked. You can approve individual videos, but to my knowledge you can't whitelist channels for your kid. You can subscribe to a bunch of channels, and that will tend to make your kids' feed get steered in that direction, but random outliers are always a possibility.

Which as a parent of a toddler is absolutely mind-numbing.

Which means that every so often he will always end up encountering either some foreign-language content (borderline appropriate if I want him to learn his native tongue first) or something with violence, etc. that is not at all appropriate, or something like some kid playing some dumb but colorful game (non-mind-enriching, pure dopamine garbage) from some rando channel.

PLUS, they seem to be abandoning YouTube Kids in order to merge its functionality into the main YouTube app, and yet...

Like, does ANYONE at Google/Alphabet/whatever actually have fucking kids?!?!?!

I paid for family YouTube just so my kid (and myself) wouldn't be forced to watch ads.

All they'd have to do here is let me ban FUCKING shorts (don't get me started... note that they intentionally made this extremely difficult to impossible, good luck blocking it at the router level), and whitelist some channels, and they'd instantly make every parent 100% happier with YouTube!

And no, I'm sorry but this would NOT be hard to build/maintain. Hell, they can hire me to build it out, I'm LFW!

upboundspiral3• 12 months ago

For windows / linux I've found the freetube app to provide a lot of sane controls. I can block channels as needed, block shorts, hide profile pictures of commenters, and a lot of other quality of life things. You can even set a password for the settings as needed. Otherwise in the browser (firefox) I've been somewhat succesful in blocking youtube shorts with ublock origin filter rules: 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)

sandworm101• 12 months ago

Yup. Id pay money to lock down the 24/7 Bluey youtube channel for the kids... at least until the next trend comes along.

https://www.youtube.com/live/cN4EPsfBnq0?feature=shared

ElCapitanMarkla5• 12 months ago

Another commenter has just pointed out that this is actually possible in the YT Kids app now. You can select approved channels and Bluey Live is one of them. I still need to see if I can approve other channels though.

hapticmonkey• 12 months ago

It's pretty clear to me that Youtube shoving endless low quality content towards kids is their intended business model. It's what drives the most engagement. It's why they don't let you permanently disable YouTube Shorts. It's why they don't let you block channels easily any more. Or dislike videos. They're AB testing themselves into a low quality slop firehose.

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.

0_____0• 12 months ago

If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)

yshvrdhn• 12 months ago

I think its a similar issue with older generation than dont search and just scroll for content.

wileydragonfly• 12 months ago

The ability to filter what your kids can access disappeared with the invention of the transistor radio.

NegativeLatency• 12 months ago

You might be able to rig something up with invidious? https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

deadbabe• 12 months ago

Is there perhaps a way to do some kind of person-in-the-middle attack to intercept youtube packets and drop channels you don't whitelist, so that the UI only ever shows the whitelisted channels?

linuxandrew• 12 months ago

NewPipe blocks ads, and optionally blocks Shorts. NewPipe does also happen to break YouTube's terms of service.

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.

MathMonkeyMan• 12 months ago

I don't have kids, so I really can't comment, but I'll describe my setup.

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.

methuselah_in• 12 months ago

You can force them to use browser like firefox if possible. I had seen some extension that you can block the shorts!

kdamica• 12 months ago

Have you tried creating a YouTube Kids profile? What you’re describing sounds like what they already have. It is not the default but there is a setting that allows you to create a list of allowed channels. The setting is called “Approved Content Only”.

watwut4• 12 months ago

YouTube kids is a wasteland for non English content. And also, there is whole world of content I would be more then happy to encourage my kids to watch that is unavailable there.

While also containing huge amount of unboxing toys crap I would not give to my kids in my own watchiles.

jackdawipper2• 12 months ago

testing ground for whats coming out of Europe.

the most annoying part of all of this is that the people voted for it by voting Labor again. we are fkd.

pfych• 12 months ago

This law was popular with the Liberal & Greens parties sadly - was likely regardless of who won the election.

scubadude• 12 months ago

It is absolutely not supported by the Greens [1].

"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.

" [2]

[1] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-condemn-pass...

[2] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/blunt-social-media-...

t0lo10• 12 months ago

Adding some context which is sorely missing:

Our government intends to spruik this at the UN and get other countries on board.

Our government has said there will always be a non id method

Youtube will still be accessible it is just the account making/usership which will be banned

Posting my threaded comment higher up:

I'm an australian who completed the esafety survey which helped guide this policy. I pushed for 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.

curiousgal• 12 months ago

Last I checked it was the parents' primary job to protect a child's emotional development. And yes some kids might not be fortunate enough to have caring parents but I'm pretty sure that alone would fuck them up more than social media. But hey let us continue to make the world a safe space lest Western parents actually parent their children.

t0lo10• 12 months ago

I wish it wasn't the case but have you seen how emotionally retarded (correct use of the word) this generation of children is? Compare it to even 20 years before. We wouldn't need to do this if more parents actually did their job. By the nature of the social media monoculture it's harder than ever to shield kids from anti intellectualism. Each school basically has the same culture- good and the bad.

jasonfarnon2• 12 months ago

" lest Western parents actually parent their children."

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?

watwut4• 12 months ago

Western parents currently spend way more time and effort directly "parenting" then used to be a historical standard. This jab is completely ridiculous.

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.

_Algernon_• 12 months ago

"It takes a village to raise a child".

This is basically the village stepping up albeit in the dumbest way imaginable.

ThrowawayTestr• 12 months ago

Your admiration for the nanny state is actually revolting.

ggm3• 12 months ago

Don't do ad hom. It isn't helpful. Their views are their views. They are grounded in their life experience. Your revulsion is not informing.

sunaookami2• 12 months ago

So frustrating spending years fighting against censorship, people protested on the streets when SOPA and ACTA were a thing and now they are advocating for even more dangerous censorship. ACTA hasn't become law but internet censorship is on an unprecedented level in Europe (see Spain).

jbarham• 12 months ago

I pushed for anonymous temporary age verification tokens generated through a government app.

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."

t0lo10• 12 months ago

I'm not saying aus government online portals and services aren't top tier dog shit- but doing an age token through mygov is the best approach, hopefully with enough pressure to make it non shit.

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.

sien2• 12 months ago

The case against social media is pretty weak.

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.

owisd3• 12 months ago

The substack you linked is about political polarisation and doesn't mention children once.

energy1234• 12 months ago

The case against social media is pretty weak.

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.

protocolture8• 12 months ago

Yes they did bring families with children who had passed from social media abuse on stage but it felt genuine

Ghoulish

stephen_g6• 12 months ago

Yes they did bring families with children who had passed from social media abuse on stage but it felt genuine.

There is a name for this tactic - emotional blackmail

t0lo10• 12 months ago

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

isaacremuant5• 12 months ago

Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development and institutionalising a culture of infectious insecurity. I support this-

YOU are undermining the fabric of society.

With the excuse of "protecting children" you're trying to destroy the last semblances of privacy and the ability to dissent.

Fuck your using children as a shield. You're hurting them like 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.

t0lo10• 12 months ago

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

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

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

ulrikrasmussen2• 12 months ago

Youtube will still be accessible it is just the account making/usership which will be banned

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.

t0lo10• 12 months ago

It has some signal value, but it's also a part of creating a culture where social media isn't mandatory in the greater society and the workforce- which has a lot of benefits- and not exposing the next generation to the crushing double demoralisation of AI/Machine learning and social media hyperconnectivity which no generation has had before and could ruin them imo.

I do believe in this so ask whatever tricky questions you want.

andsoitis• 12 months ago

"Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

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.

https://about.youtube/

zippo_the_zippo• 12 months ago

YouTube Kids is exempt from the ban, this one should have been banned first because the sheer amount of smoothbrain content.

Channels like cocomelon and AI-generated songs with weird visuals are played on infinite loop with a mobile stand holding the phone in front of the child's pram while the parents pay no attention- and the children are hooked onto it as if they are hypnotized.

These videos in early stage of childhood has a very strong impact on environmental awareness and vocabulary of the children.

squigz5• 12 months ago

Aren't parents like that going to ignore the development of their child anyway?

dvdkon• 12 months ago

Yes, and I agree that bad parenting is the real issue, but I also have to acknowledge that leaving children unsupervised will have better results if they don't have the option of just watching a screen.

That said, I don't see any bans changing this, parents will just give young children access to their own "adult" YouTube account.

alt2277• 12 months ago

These videos in early stage of childhood has a very strong impact on environmental awareness and vocabulary of the children.

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?

squigz5• 12 months ago

The argument is, apparently, that keeping your pre-school children away from these things is just too hard in this day and age. Your wee child will be ostracized if they don't have unfettered access to the Internet...

haizhung• 12 months ago

The parents putting these videos on autoplay are usually the ones who can’t afford to spend quality time with their kid.

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.

skeezyboy4• 12 months ago

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

brushfoot• 12 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

toofy• 12 months ago

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

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

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

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

eviks4• 12 months ago

This is just victim blaming. There is no amount of (self-)regulation that could ever stop extreme ideologues from trying to push further, so you're right on the always coming but, but dead wrong on the cause

jaimex2• 12 months ago

Government over-reach aside. The social media bans are going to make the problem they are aiming to solve sooo much worse.

Kids will flock to darker places like 4chan.

Henchman21• 12 months ago

At what point do we consider the internet too dangerous to exist?

southernplaces7• 12 months ago

Idiocy beyond reason. The Australian population seems to have fallen to the same mental illness of their UK cousins, of letting the nannying state pry into every facet to their lives and treat them like stupid little children, even in very basic elements of giving teenagers and kids some modicum of autonomy (with a nice mass potential surveillance cherry on top).

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.

isaacremuant5• 12 months ago

It's not idiocy. It's malice and it's lobbied hard transnationally. It's coming to the EU as well:

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.

quintes3• 12 months ago

YouTube is actually useful.

How to X, doing x making y learn to play x on the piano/ guitar

Keep knowledge away from the children. For their “safety”

Perenti• 12 months ago

Yep, keep how to make PCP in a bathtub away from kids. Keep holocaust deniers away from kids. Keep race-hate videos away from kids.

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.

sbrkYourMmap• 12 months ago

I don't get, why governments all of the world suddenly decided to protect all the children from horrors of Internet. This should be done by parents. This is just stupid.

Psoodu1313• 12 months ago

"Dystopia by iced earth starts playing" Yep, there seems to be a lot of dissenting thoughts here. Give it about 2 years before ID is required to even view the comments

w10-12• 12 months ago

Leaving aside the merits of the ban for a moment...

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.

7bit• 12 months ago

I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in your post. Alphabet is the 5th biggest and richest company in the world. From a capitalistic perspective, they made everything right and the point you bring are negligible.

w10-12• 12 months ago

Perhaps. A hypothesis that their business would be bigger could be seen as a wish. But Alphabet's stock multiples are below comparable companies. From a capitalist perspective, that means they're being poorly run.

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.

leoc• 12 months ago

Page and Brin have consistently escaped blame for things that Zuckerberg and Musk are excoriated for. It turns out that you just have to lie low, instead of jumping up and down for attention in the press or on social media, and people will obligingly forget that you exist and have effectively full control over your giant, society-dominating company.

the_hoser• 12 months ago

This is it 100%. Zuckerberg and Musk aren't doing anything more awful than Page or Brin, but they're smart enough to understand that it's WAY easier to get away with sketchy stuff when you're not someone that the average person knows about. There's a huge amount of value in keeping your mouth shut.

geoffbp• 12 months ago

My first thought when I saw the age checking in the UK was it’s more of a social monitoring tool than what they say it is

isaacremuant5• 12 months ago

Artificial intelligence has supercharged the spread of misinformation on social media platforms such as YouTube, said Adam Marre, chief information security officer at cyber security firm Arctic Wolf.

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

Ylpertnodi• 12 months ago

The Juice Media on youtube, is always a fun watch.

lesuorac2• 12 months ago

I'm kinda surprised that the rightsholders don't try to push the accountability onto the ISPs.

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.

defrost2• 12 months ago

There's already Australian High Court precedent establishing that Australian ISP's are blind providers of data with no obligation to spy on their users for the benefit of third parties wanting user intel to connect the dots.

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,"

In general it established that Australian ISP's are not obligated to act as a nanny wrt their customers.

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

lesuorac2• 12 months ago

The ISP doesn't need to know what the content is or be pro-actively looking for content.

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.

tamrix• 12 months ago

Which raises the question. If the government really cared about kids why couldn't they fund the ISPs to have an opt in service to ban social media or implement these controls?

skeezyboy4• 12 months ago

parents worrying about cocomelon is modern day hysteria. parents worried because its new and their brains have past a critical point of plasticity

aggamo• 12 months ago

The objective should not be banning. Not even mentioning, needing to input your identity as basis for your personal profile.

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.

jongjong• 12 months ago

I'm starting to think that banning major platforms is fine, necessary even. These platforms have gained enormous power and they need to be reigned in by whatever means necessary or else countries like Australia will forever remain vassal states of whoever controls the platforms.

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.

bodhi_mind• 12 months ago

This reminds me of Amazon fire’s kids program.

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.

pembrook• 12 months ago

Outsourcing more and more of our parenting responsibilities to politicians...what could possibly go wrong?

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.

lofaszvanitt• 12 months ago

The problem is that if you are not logged in, you get the lowliest, bottom-feeding trash from the YouTube shorts.

Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

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