Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

> 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&...

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

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”.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?)

I still want it.

> 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.

I love this.

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.

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?

> 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?

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

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.

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.

> 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...

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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)

Is mechanics of enforcement really a government thing tho?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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)

>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?

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

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

I use invidious to watch YouTube and have no shorts.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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."

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.

> 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

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

Ghoulish

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.

> 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.

Your admiration for the nanny state is actually revolting.

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

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/

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

Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.

> 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

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.

Because the kids are imploding.

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"

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.

Think of the children!

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

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

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

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.

People would go to TikTok if shorts were removed.

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.

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.

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.

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

That was already the case.

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.

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

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.

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

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

They are not being banned from watching YouTube.

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

> I owe my career to YouTube

That's interesting. How so?

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "best of the worst"

Such a low bar.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

    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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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."

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.

> 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