It's important to note that this ban is for having an account - it does not ban people under 16 from watching youtube videos.
general1726 · 4h ago
So you can just log off to bypass it? That seems short sighted.
azemetre · 10m 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.
simpaticoder · 2h 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.
guywithahat · 11m 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
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h 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 · 9m ago
5. No "Shorts"
ncruces · 2h 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.
JKCalhoun · 5m 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.
RankingMember · 2h 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
crtasm · 2h 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?
kelseyfrog · 2h ago
They can already access 3blue1brown[1] content without youtube. They just have to visit the site with the same name.
Which aren't videos. The entire draw is the video format.
kelseyfrog · 1h ago
That seems awfully particular.
schoen · 6m ago
Grant Sanderson's mathematical animations and visualizations are famously excellent, though. He developed his own mathematics animation software just for his channel. I wouldn't think of video as preferable to textbooks for math education in general, but for his sort of videos, I might!
qualeed · 2h ago
That is not the only channel of value on YouTube. Not all of them have a website with their content available.
kelseyfrog · 2h ago
Can you spell out the standard plainly?
armchairhacker · 2h ago
https://nebula.tv seems like it's basically that, just curated podcasts. Although 3blue1brown isn't on there.
AlexandrB · 2h ago
Nebula is nice, but has a very specific ideological leaning. It's basically paid "breadtube".
OJFord · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
JJMcJ · 2h ago
Do you want mere children exposed to David Attenborough and Mister Rogers?
Arubis · 2h ago
Can’t speak for the Aussies, but if you’re a US-inflected conservative today, probably not!
CoastalCoder · 10m ago
I wish people wouldn't conflate conservatives per se with the Republican/MAGA definition of that term.
I consider myself somewhat conservative in the traditional sense, and yet the Republican platform is almost diametrically opposed to my values.
mc32 · 2h 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…
AlexandrB · 2h 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.
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.
dumama · 2h 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.
EA-3167 · 2h 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.
m101 · 2h ago
Perhaps this will mean a version of YouTube comes out without YouTube shorts integration. YouTube shorts, imo, legitimises the govts complaint.
ivanmontillam · 2h 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 haven't merged that one hither because it's quite a bit more generic than this one.)
spicyusername · 2h 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.
non- · 2h 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.
JKCalhoun · 55s ago
> "best of the worst"
Such a low bar.
28304283409234 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
ncruces · 1h 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.
forgotoldacc · 2h 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.
RankingMember · 1h 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.
seydor · 2h ago
This is raising a generation of radicalized teens with institutionalized hatred against the older generation. Will end well
simmerup · 3m 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
lanfeust6 · 2h ago
That was already the case.
9rx · 2h 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 · 2h ago
>Aren't "sharing platforms" and "social media" the same thing?
Meta claimed in FTC v. Meta that they are indeed the same.
SilverElfin · 1h 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?
asyx · 9h 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.
· 19m ago
blahlabs · 8h ago
They are not being banned from watching YouTube.
404mm · 6h ago
Asyx, you have an opinion on the ban before reaching the 3rd paragraph of the article. I recommend reading it first.
Jalad · 2h 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
ccppurcell · 2h 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.
sirwhinesalot · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
Sadly I disagree. Those resources are great but they don't come close to the visualization work 3Blue1Brown makes. Many subjects only clicked for me after watching his videos.
RankingMember · 2h 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 · 2h ago
+100 here. I think everyone should try this exercise– browse outside your algorithm. It's a sea of garbage to sort through.
nottorp · 2h ago
It bans accounts on youtube not watching, I think?
bananapub · 2h 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
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 · 2h 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.
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.
trallnag · 2h 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.
incone123 · 2h 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.
viktorcode · 2h ago
I think that was a buyout. Government offered money for the guns.
psunavy03 · 2h ago
That's irrelevant to the argument that was being made. Confiscation for payment is still confiscation; see also "eminent domain."
Anything that moves the needle toward dismantling the advertising and marketing industries will always be a worthwhile endeavor.
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
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.
This is entirely Google's issue to fix. Yes, YouTube has amazing educational content. I'd really like to make it available for my kids to see.
YouTube, however, makes it completely impossible to permanently filter/hide/disable the bane that is YouTube Shorts. I don't let my kids on TikTok not because it's Chinese, but because it's trash. I don't allow them near Instagram either.
The chances of kids growing an attention span by seeing interesting stuff in installments of 30 seconds approaches zero really, really fast. Yes there's the possibility telling a fun joke, demonstrating an optical illusion, or some interesting curiosity in under a minute. But it's far more likely that it's trash, and teaching kids (and adults) that if they don't get a kick of something within the first 10 seconds, it should be skipped.
And it's not necessarily age/quality rating of content; UX matters. It's totally different to find that your kid wasted an hour of their life doom scrolling over 150 videos of which they didn't even complete half, or that they spent it seeing half a dozen things videos of dubious quality: if it's half a dozen it's at least feasible to discuss with them why some are better than others.
So, I'm very close to just banning YouTube (at the DNS level if required). Which is a shame, because I then can't share the interesting stuff with them, and neither can their teachers.
Imagine you're the one running a business where you keep repeatedly trying to shove some feature down your user's throat.
What's that called in business school? I don't know, I never took any Business courses.
That I have no where else to go to see the content I want to see smells like a de-facto monopoly.
See also: Facebook "efforts" to stop scam advertisements and Marketplace fuckery
But you don't need an account to watch most videos on youtube, so this isn't banning all of youtube.. right?
1. https://www.3blue1brown.com/#lessons
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.
I consider myself somewhat conservative in the traditional sense, and yet the Republican platform is almost diametrically opposed to my values.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
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.
I mean, a legit app, not a 3rd party one that'll get my Google account banned eventually.
I had to delete it, using:
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.
Ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, a significant portion of them seem to be AI generated
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.)
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.
Such a low bar.
Unlike what happens if they open the app and are pushed to doom scroll through dozens of videos on every 10 min school break.
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.
If so, you can expand it to hating those younger than themselves, hating the opposite gender, and hating each other
Aren't "sharing platforms" and "social media" the same thing? I understand a long time ago there was a dream that people would produce and share as much content as they consume, and that is what social media was supposed to be in reference to, but that imagined world never happened. Social media, as used to refer to any practical service in the real world, has always been about one-sided content being shared to a mostly consumer-only audience.
> increasingly viewed on TV screens
Are people digging old Trinitrons out of the trash, or what? If you try to buy a new "TV", you are going to get a computer with a large monitor instead.
Meta claimed in FTC v. Meta that they are indeed the same.
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
Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.
Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video.
[1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/
> weird how a foundational myth of australia is that we’re a nation of subversive larrikins, when in actuality everyone here is an ultracop
0: https://nitter.net/tfswebb/status/976299234491121665?lang=en
We’re seeing the same thing in the UK currently with fuzzy definitions of what does and doesn’t need age verification, and even what verification means, and that’s leading to completely harmless communities shutting down to avoid having to risk being in the wrong while the megacorps just hoover up some more metadata about users.