YouTube to be included in Australia's social media ban for children under 16

So it's time something is done about it.

I will try not to recommend any games to any child moving forward, and instead direct them to other hobbies. Because not only are games mostly a waste of time anyway, but they're also turning into an entrypoint to pornography.

Itch removed all NSFW games because they themselves admitted they could not police their store front and had no idea how many games would be problematic for the payment processors. They did police it for "hate" games though, just not games the encouraged violence for sexual gratification.

Three ways to not get games banned from online stores:

A) Online stores add 'pro rape/incest/forced sexual violence' to the list of things that they will not host, they already ban "hate" games after all.

B) The government requires all online games that are sold or offered from store fronts to be classified, just like games were when they were sold in normal retail stores - that way it is guaranteed all the games are legal and the payment processors have reduced risk and thus no reason to ask for store fronts to make changes. You wouldn't be able to buy all the games that were targeted though as I am sure a few of them would likely be banned.

C) The law is changed so payment processors are no longer liable for any of the transactions they process, thus removing all risk for them allowing them to provide services for both legal and legal content/entities.

It IS a matter of national security if your nations children grow up and witness all the horrors it's government does abroad and heavens forbid grow anti government sentiment or opinions.

The "they" you're all mentioning simply doesn't exist. Who are they ? All the governments of the west somehow working together ? They can't even cooperate more than 6 months on internal matters but they globally agreed on some world wide evil plan ? And the plan is to ban kids from youtube ? Because reasons ?

Who is going to collect more data if there are less websites/users ? Who's selling "the" data ? Who's buying "the" data ? What data ? How are governments benefiting from censoring brain rot in a way that doesn't also benefit me exactly ?

All the data is already collected by US megacorps and stored on US servers the US gov can already fully access, it doesn't get any worse than that

When I open yt I get an empty page with a search box, even clicking on the Shorts page it just says "Recommendations are off Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your Shorts feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for Shorts instead. Learn more."

Every time I hear some AI video my kids watching, it's a short.

But ultimately I can't see how a blanket law banning kids makes sense instead of a law banning the platform from targeting kids.

But then again it seems like a lot of people on HN have a very limited scope of what freedom is and to them it basically amounts to "I want to do whatever I want whenever I want"

Yes there is a lot of crap because it's both easier to produce than quality content, and has higher incentives to keep making more of it.

But that's the same with eg. books. Aside from small curated book stores, pick up a random book. Most likely it's not worth to cut down the tree it was printed on.

It's very easy to watch only quality content and there is an incredible amount of it on youtube. I've learned lots of electronics, CAD work, mechanical engineering, watched tons of lectures from amazing professors...

I'm not willing to give up the latter to save the masses from the former.

That advice is for adults BTW. Kids don't have the requisite developed tastes and self control, so YouTube's algorithm will almost always send them into a death spiral of brain rot. Kids shouldn't have unsupervised access to this kind of system.

I agree that we're wildly inconsistent about when children are treated as children, when they're treated as adults and when they become adults (16? 18? 21? when their brain development actually finishes somewhere between 20 and 30?). And not only do we end up with garbage laws but we also end up w garbage exceptions like in juvenile criminal law. We acknowledge that young offenders can't be treated the same as adult offenders because our legal system takes into account intent and the offender's ability to reason and know right from wrong, but then we charge children as adults when we're particularly grossed out by the crime or the prosecutor wants to appear tough.

The online safety act is much more than a porn ID law. Look at this stuff about controlling public discourse. Even if you trust a Labour government with this power you might not trust a future Reform one.

"This clause enables the Secretary of State to give OFCOM directions in circumstances where they consider there is a threat to the health or safety of the public, or to national security.

This includes directing OFCOM to prioritise action to respond to a specific threat when exercising its media literacy functions and to require specified service providers, or providers of regulated services generally, to publicly report on what steps it is taking to respond to that threat.

For example, the Secretary of State could issue a direction during a pandemic to require OFCOM to: give priority to ensuring that health misinformation and disinformation is effectively tackled when exercising its media literacy function; and to require service providers to report on the action they are taking to address this issue." - Explanatory Notes relate to the Online Safety Bill as brought from the House of Commons on 18 January 2023; Clause 156 - Section (8), available https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49377/documents/273...

This manifested in the final bill as section 44 - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/44

Children are being groomed by high-profile paedophiles and trafficked to powerful people with no consequence, and you want to give those people more control over the internet?

> But what are we supposed to do instead when everything has been shot down previously?

What would "being responsible" have looked like, prior to these pushes?

> If we see a child bullied in school, we don't say the parents of the victim are not doing enough parenting. If an adult flashes or cat calls a child in the street, we don't blame the child's parents for not doing enough parenting.

Perhaps not, but we also don't abolish schools or ban kids from going outside, do we?

> The amount of children being groomed is probably the highest it has ever been, but because it's done in their own bedrooms over the internet everyone ignores it.

What does this mean, exactly? And what sort of source do you have?

> I'm surprised at the lack of care for children in commentary around social media bans

I think you're misunderstanding the pushback. I think most people are perfectly agreed that yeah, children shouldn't be exposed to some things until a certain age. The problem is the question of how we do that without utterly destroying privacy for everyone else too? If the answer is "we can't", then it might be we have to look at ways to deal with our children being exposed to those things - either, you know, don't let your kids on the parts of the Internet you don't agree with, or teach them the right morals and ethics so they learn to recognize and avoid those areas themselves.

If YouTube really did want to stop yt-dlp, they'd encrypt all the videos with Widevine.

When was this? Before or after child labor laws? Before or after we started making it illegal to beat children? Before or after child marriage laws? Age of consent laws? Standards around education, health, abuse and neglect?

Whether or not this is a step too far, it's hard to say that society and or governments stepping into protect children is a recent thing.

We gave the keys to our leaders, now they get to choose what content may be accessed or not.

Conversations with highly educated Chinese nationals I've had on this topic at elite universities will often conspicuously include whataboutery on e.g. the number of security cameras in London using statistics from about 2005. Presumably they learn this in school.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that it's pretty common already.

Parents have been blaming books, music and video games for decades.

Raising children with reading comprehension and critical thinking skills is hard.

Equally, from a governments point of view, creating citizens with critical thinking skills is hard. There is probably more chance they will frustrate the regime if they're capable of understanding its corruption.

Giving into desires and having children is the easy part. The bodies do all the work for you but after that the 2 decades of work really starts.

I'd say it's just an example of "never waste a good crisis". Parents want to complain at someone that essentially the society is too free and their children made mistakes they didn't prepare them for. The government feels pressured and uses the opportunity available to increase control.

This is completely on-brand for Australia. I'm not the slightest bit surprised. To be honest, I don't disagree with the premise: Keep social media away from kids. YouTube is brain rot patient zero. I just don't think it's the governments job.

And why specifically mention Western? What Eastern or other non-Western countries do you feel are above such scrutiny?

The question is how do you implement “Chinese style censorship and social credit score” without overtly doing it, you do it the same way that all infringements on freedoms and rights have always been implemented all across the West for 100+ years, you invert, reframe it, and implement amidst cheers, and jeers towards anyone who is not also being virtuous through conformance.

Some believe the COVID prison-term lockdowns were a test to gauge the reaction and conformity of the actions taken. Maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t, but it may as well have been, because the warriors apparatchiks and wardens of conformity operated nicely to deprive their own human rights as well as those of others.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” It may as well end with “…tolerate atrocities.”

“Curated list of educational channels”:

PBS App Maybe Disney+ with a profile