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.
> 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.
> 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.
Also Google raked in about 100 bil based on a quick search last year.
Surely some of that could be redirected to an engineering team to do what's listed here, and while they're at it, maybe make the Apple TV YouTube app not suck industrial quantities of ass.
I think the only one I've used that's worse than YouTube's is Nebula but it's not a direct comparison, Nebula just lags quite a bit, it does function. The YouTube app in comparison frequently just... breaks in incredibly bizarre ways.
Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience.
> Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.
Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?
> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
It's what happens, it's almost by definition not subjective. The world is full of people geeky enough to use third party clients but not geeky enough to understand the nuances of service evolution. Their reasoning goes like this: yesterday it worked, today it doesn't. I didn't change my client, so it must have been the service that changed. Therefore, it's the service's fault.
This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service.
Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.
Something being hard shouldn't be a reason to not do it. Put the features in and punish those who abuse the system. That's what regulation should be for. I think in general we need a wider solution to rampant botting as AI makes it even easier to bot.
If you want to operate at "dominant player in the industry" there's a lot of reasons you have to do stuff that has reasons not to be done, saying "its hard" isn't a good enough excuse if you want to get the lions share of the market.
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.
Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist.
It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
Another approach... Is to mark their kids account as a kids account or something, and have that just be on the regular YouTube website and app.
Or what every parent really wants.
To whitelist content your kid can watch like in YT Kids. But also include blacklisting shorts.
The more this looks like regular YouTube. The better your chances of your kid not just signing out of the app. Or using a web browser with a logged out account to circumvent it.
You have to give some illusion in order to maintain the control.
> And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
Who's in charge here, you or your kids? Sure, maybe you could imagine a teen YouTube product you might like more, but you can't say the whitelist feature doesn't exist. It's there and it works.
As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.
If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.
You are, in fact, in charge of your teenager as a parent. They are, in fact, still a kid. Controlling your kid’s access to things which you deem harmful is, in fact, not abusive. Setting appropriate boundaries does not, in fact, mean you are not treating your kid as a person who has their own sense of self. Most kids will not, in fact, hate you for setting boundaries and being their parent.
It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.
My parents did this to me, and while I loved them, I left home as quickly as I could at age 17 despite them more or less begging me to stay.
We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.
This is a terrible argument. You just repeated the claims and said that they're false, giving no reason to believe this over the claims that you're disagreeing with. If you want to convince anyone, you should explain how you came to the conclusion that these things are false.
They're no longer a child. That is why they have a different nomenclature - teenager. They are not "a kid".
Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].
I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.
To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.
This is an argument for not applying parental controls to YouTube for teenagers, while the guy I was replying to is explicitly asking for parental controls for YouTube for teenagers. I think "teenager" is too broad to have a productive discussion here. Maybe we can agree that sometime between 13 and 19 you should definitely stop trying to impose parental controls on your kids.
If you're lucky. That means they have a good moral compass and figured out that you were the anchor on their lives.
I'm especially worried about the point where parents are accompanying college students into their inerviews. Which is an slowly, but alarmingly rising phenomenon.
Yes, people exaggerate, but I have not gone to see mine in person since 2009 and I have not talked to them since 2016. In fact at uni, I initially didn't understand why anybody would want to go home for Christmas - it was many years later that I realised that my childhood wasn't normal.
Ok, once kids hit certain age, YouTube kids is mostly useless to them. As the most perfectly ok and even educational channels are just not there. Includes channels parent wants to give to the kid.
Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.
> YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
>Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page!
Because you're whitelisting on videos that Youtube already filtered on. If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.
>why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids
Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here.
Now back to the comment I’d written at first:
It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...
That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.
I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.
And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.
As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)
Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.
Not only that, but YouTube kids whitelists a ton of content I never want my kids watching, while exempting a decent chunk of things I'd be tickled pink if my kids watched.
I don't want em watching cocomelon, I want them watching Steve Mould
I want the Netflix version of this. An account that is completely empty except for shows that I add. And not for kids, I just want an empty library that I can fill myself.
I was going to say - Netflix has functionality to do exactly this but only for kids accounts. You can hand pick which shows appear on each child account.
I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.
The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I've just started setting this up for my own family with plex instead of jellyfin, so I don't have a LOT of answers, but...
- yes pinchflat allows you to define the date at which it starts downloading. For a couple channels, I set it to only download the past year's worth of videos and it seems to have respected that properly. It also allows you to set a retention period
- it allows you to download, embed, and use autogenerated subtitles (three separate options)
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.
If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)
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)
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sure, a whitelist makes YouTube less useful to a teenager, but it's hardly "pointless". Even a few whitelisted educational videos and channels could have huge value. You can send videos and channels to your kids' whitelists straight from your phone as you come across them and build up a huge library over time. My kids have dozens of channels and thousands of videos to choose from now, and I add more frequently as I naturally come across them in my own causal browsing.
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
Yeah the interface in the Kids app sucks. The way to do it is from your own phone. Use the "share" feature and choose "with kids". It takes a lot of taps to share a channel, that could be improved for sure. But if you share good channels as you come across them then over time you'll build up a great library of content for your kids.
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.
If it's not found by people who tried the app and explicitly looked for it, maybe the problem is on the app side? (Or maybe it's not available to everyone?)
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.
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).
> The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024.
The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.
> 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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
And it is completely unnecessary in many cases. There are many cases where a third party cannot give access to something to a minor, but the parent is able to give consent anyway. So give parents the tools they need to tell online services, "hey, this is a child so act accordingly" rather than having the government enter the loop. For example: a web browser can ask the operating system for an age verification token, then relay that token to the website. Given that most operating systems these days have the notion of privilege and most operating systems make it difficult for unauthorized users to gain administrative privileges, it should be reasonably secure.
Of course, there are going to be weaknesses in such a system. On the other hand, there are going to be weaknesses to any system. There are also going to be situations where that level of protection is inadequate, but we're talking about access to controlled substances levels of concern here rather than kids getting access to age inappropriate videos. And chances are it doesn't have to be 100% effective anyhow. It just has to be effective enough to discourage people from targeting minors with age inappropriate content.
It's only unnecessary if you assume the goal is actually protecting children, as opposed to entrenching even more data collection and identity tracking.
There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.
> There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.
If you truly believed that this was going to be the solution that governments were going to use, yes you’re still an idiot. Ok, maybe incredibly naive to be charitable. But still have you paid even the slightest bit of attention to pretty much anything a governmental institution has done in the last 15 years?
There's always smart ways to do things. The government will choose the cheapest and hire the most generic IT consulting firm to do it which won't get close. Or if they don't do it themselves, they'll just fine big companies unless they follow an overbearing and forever expanding checklist of requirements where the companies lawyers will be forced to choose the most extreme options or risk exposure.
Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.
Zero knowledge proofs don't matter, these verification systems already exist and they require you to show live video of your face to confirm you're the actual living person that matches your credentials.
You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.
Zero knowledge proofs won't be zero knowledge in practice when organizations the size of governments are involved. They want a backdoor on your devices too (or already have one).
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.
> 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
They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign...
Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.
The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
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.
Definitely. I remember the era of the living room desktop PC, and that was a pretty easy and effective solution. But the primary benefit of parents giving smartphones to their kids these days is the ability to stay in contact while away from each other.
For teenagers, yeah I agree that message content and such should not be shared with the parent. The level of detail in the timeline should be configurable at the discretion of the parent. At the same time, it's also probably the most important period to shield them from harmful online content.
Kids don't really need a personal smartphone until they reach at least secondary school which put them quickly unto the early teens years.
During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.
My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.
Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.
> 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
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.
> but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally
What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate.
Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
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.
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?"
yep. the whole purpose of this is to stop people from communicating with each other, and only consume approved vetted sources. they'd probably prefer to keep tech out of people's hands entirely (why would serfs need that?!?), but it is too useful for the purposes of surveillance and control.
> 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.
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.
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.
No, not every interaction. Given a token without user id, companies can check it's valid without contacting any government service and without knowing your identity.
And then the government sees where those tokens are used and they can easily monitor your every action, and revoke your ability to use certain sites if they don't like what you're saying.
North Korea wishes they came up with an idea this good.
This scenario doesn't make sense. Either govs can spy on your traffic and see everything (and don't need tokens for spying), or they can't and wouldn't be able to see the token. There's no scenario for: they can only spy on their tokens in your traffic.
> 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.
My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens.
And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
It was almost exactly half last year. The number will only go up.
I'm not sure what you mean by the logging part. Yes they can either log or not log it. The system can be designed for either. If your default position is "government will always lie given the chance" that's fine I guess. But then you need to assume they're monitoring your ISP anyway.
There needs to be some terms clarified. mygov vs mygovid vs myid.
Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".
But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.
mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.
Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.
Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.
I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.
There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?
Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).
Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app
> 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.
> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication
They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.
> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part
That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.
> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.
What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.
> An even better idea is to not do any of this
Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.
> 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.
The proposal is for SIGNED tokens i.e. only the govt can issue them, and you need a govt issued ID to generate them. The latter mechanism allows rate limiting. This fixes the problem you outline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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]
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.
Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.
Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.
From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.
So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.
The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.
"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."
Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after
But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.
Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
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.
> 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'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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
> This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services.
The law, as written:
> There are age restrictions for certain social media platforms. A provider of such a platform must take reasonable steps to prevent children who have not reached a minimum age from having accounts.
No commentary I have seen supports your interpretation.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
This is a pure fantasy that you seem to recognise on some level.
You know all of the government apps are "top tier shit". You experience this, yourself, first hand. It's not some statistic, or report.
This, this is what any form of mandatory ID verification will be: shit. Top tier shit made by the most expensive consultancies using the cheapest possible outsourced Indian labour.
Source: First-hand experience working in the IT departments of the very same people that made MyGov ID.
Which the government doesn't care about. This may have something to do that people don't criticise the government when they are just losing their life's savings.
It's worth scrutinizing the philosophical mental model implicit in your opinion.
Do you wait for conclusive empirical evidence before doing anything? Or do you run an experiment in one country based on an informed opinion and see what happens?
I am more inclined to pursue the latter model for this question.
The case against youth social media makes logical sense, there is circumstantial evidence that it's having a negative impact, and I have enough experience with data to know how difficult it is to demonstrate that it's true empirically without a large-scale natural experiment like the one that's about to happen when this law passes.
A lack of evidence should not paralyze you on questions where conclusive evidence is very hard to assemble. Especially when action will create evidence.
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.
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.
" 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?
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Pretty sure it's called inflating metrics. Things that get pushed on you (see many AI features, my pet peeve, especially at google) are not wanted (or they wouldn't need to be pushed) but someone has a big stake in showing uptake, e.g. promises made to investors that this would drive revenue.
> But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
They bought DoubleClick, which Microsoft and others felt strongly enough about to warn the FTC that might give Google too much control over online advertising. Seems like Meta is their only real competition on that front these days.
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.
OK, I didn't know that, though it's not very intuitive. Thanks!
Now, as a parent, I face a tough choice: I have history on the kids accounts precisely because I want to check on it and discuss with them what's good, or less so, to watch.
unfortunately turning off history kills all forms of suggestions, including ones like "you're subscribed to these things, so perhaps you might also be interested in...", which is the form of recommendation I want the most since it's driven by what I chose to be watching rather than what I've previously watched.
I had assumed the behavior was malicious compliance on Google's part against California law that said no history had to actually mean no history.
I have had history turned off for years. It won't recommend anything on the main feed, but when I watch a video, it recommends more as usual. There's plausible deniability that the recommendations are based on just what I'm watching but in practice that's obviously not true, many recommendations are based on either my subscriptions or my watch history, as they are not related to the video I am watching but are related to my interests.
Since there's not supposed to be any history, I have to trust it's just based on subscriptions. It seems like that could be the case, I guess? But I do have doubts that they do in fact have my history somewhere that's accessible to this recommendation engine.
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.
A functional adult doesn't need to ever go to a strip club.
A functional adult in the 2020s needs to learn how to use Google and YouTube. It's actually part of the curriculum at school.
The school also uses Gmail, and Classroom, and teaches kids to use Docs, Slides and Sheets (rather than Office 365). I dunno how much money changes hands, but this benefits Google in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't offer the service.
The problem here is Google feeling the need to compete with TikTok, and then mixing it with their educational offerings.
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.
Let's watch together starts to fall flat when the primary use they have for a device is to chat with family and friends, where it's natural to want a modicum of privacy. I wanna know who they're talking to, not everything they say.
Then, they start watching what their friends share in group chats. I can mostly avoid social media doom scrolling by preventing them having accounts, but not so YouTube.
And it's a tough decision to blanket ban YouTube, since it is used for educational purposes, including by teachers (a teacher wouldn't point a 13 yo pupil to TikTok).
YouTube didn't need to compete with TikTok or Reels; they chose to.
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.
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.
Yeah, but there is a gaping difference between content for kids (i.e. 12 and under) and content for teenagers.
Most teenage-appropriate content would be enjoyed by adults too (e.g. lots of how-tos, educational content, music, entertainment, etc.) Most adults are not going to be into watching Blues Clues or whatever, which is why YouTube doesn't have to worry about cannibalizing more profitable content/algorithms for adults due to the existence of YouTube Kids.
It doesn't meet requirement #4 (Filter out age inappropriate content). You can find many articles and videos, over the years, about all the inappropriate stuff making it into YouTube Kids.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
No, the bill says they must take reasonable steps to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. Arguably, this means embedded videos will need to be restricted just as the regular site will be.
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!
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…
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.
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.
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
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?
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
The decision Australia is making is not an individual one. It’s a societal one. It’s “do we want our kids to grow up in a society free of social media”.
Australia tends to be more willing to make collectivist decisions like this, unlike America which places immense value on individual choice.
We're talking about social media here. There's nothing throwing the whole society under the bus.
I don't agree with the approach from the Australian government and I don't see that at being effective but regulating shady companies using deceptive techniques to maximise their profit is a necessary thing.
Personally I think differentiating impact on kids/teens and adult is a mistake and the approach should be around really strict control on data collection as well as strict control on the use/abuse of manipulative techniques to create addictions.
Australia 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.
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.
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
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.
Careful I think you might be choking on all that strawman.
Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I would describe it as government overreach, to me it looks more like the government doesn't understand the tech and what these new rules mean.
I would have more respect if they just came out and said you can't be anonymous on social media any more. When you post, somebody needs to know who you are, how old you are, and where you live.
I think the world would be a better place if everybody would just pull their head in and get off social media.
With respect to Donald Horne, its not the 60's any more, and there are plenty of great Australian ideas and culture. The hottest 100 last weekend is a great reminder of how much great Australian music there is.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Putting YouTube in the social media ban also removes personalized ads for teenagers. Personalized ad buys are very profitable for companies like Google and Meta. Hurting their ability to make money would only be a net positive for humanity.
I had no issue with using the noncorpotized social media as a teen (livejournal, myspace before the buyout, forums, etc). Anything that ruins the might of Meta, Google would be a net positive for society.
Let's not act like the only way to communicate with each other or use the internet is through corporate controlled software.
It would do teenagers good to be forced to use other forms of social media that aren't controlled by companies that don't care about their mental health.
You put these laws in place, and they will be used indiscriminately as needed. Anything can become "social media", and if not, it's easy to add a new category to the list since the Overton window has already been allowed to shift.
We the people are vanguards of our own freedom. Always assume a government organization is lying to you about their intentions. We're taught about slippery slopes in civics and history class for a reason.
The true intent here is to control the ability for teens to freely congregate online and contribute to discussion around unsanctioned topics. To prevent teenagers from being exposed to or distributing material that challenges the incumbent authorities.
> Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?
How can you do that on the internet?
What Australia did may be a bit shortsighted but it's a step in the right direction together. Other countries did all sorts of measures such banning smartphone use in classrooms and such. We will figure out what works and what does not, but at least something is being done.
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.
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.
I'm not asyx, but I was about to say that I got into programming from playing video games but it appears authoritarian nutjobs like you have beat me to it.
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.
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?
When I was 8, I was already hacking around net nanny software and involved in several online communities operated by other children, I was learning how to program and hack and generally use the internet as a gateway into culture that I otherwise never would have experienced.
I tried involving myself in a lot of communities related to my interests, but some sites were just for entertainment and not active participation, or I simply didn't participate in the community. That doesn't change anything.
Now a software engineer and artist, my entire life was shaped by that time, and as I said, I likely would have committed suicide due to my abusive situation if it wasn't for these communities.
I will always fight to provide that kind of environment for others and not pull up the ladder now that I've climbed up.
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.
It’s like every generation gets fixated on something new which can be perceived as moral decay and societal harm, and then rails against it. Making it even more popular with the younger generation, of course.
I’ve seen the same thing play out with rock music, television, computer games, and now social media. There’s likely examples back throughout history.
I think you can mount an argument against all of these things. In retrospect though, it doesn’t hold up. I wonder if social media is the same?
For every big tech dystopic platform going all wack there is some "the old greeks complained about kids these days" going my way.
Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> The ISP doesn't need to know what the content is or be pro-actively looking for content.
Sure, be it a torrent or pornography, the ISP doesn't have to care in Australia.
> The rightsholder would look at the connecting IP and then contact the owner of that IP for if that IP was allowed to view age-restricted content.
eg: Hollywood Inc. would contact the ISP to ask for details about the customer using that IP address at a particular time.
The existing court ruling establishes that the ISP has no obligation to provide customer details to Hollywood Inc. or to any third party provider of (say) pornography.
Also, typically an ISP customer is a household that contains adults, children, relatives, boarders, passerby's that use the router Guest account, etc.
So, not only is the ISP not obligated to provide customer details, those details are most likely those of an adult over the age of 18 as 12 year olds rarely have an account with an Australian ISP provider.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
"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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.
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.
> "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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Very recently actually yes. Not that it mattered if I wasn't, because I was a kid and I know how important freedom was to my development, as does everyone who had it, that's sufficient to be inoculated against this safetyism.
And yes most people now have abandoned it, that's exactly what I'm complaining about. Not just with their kids mind you but even with themselves, that's why we have people in their late 20s and 30s who talk about how they're learning "adulting". Like, we have an entire generation now of people well into adult live who act like angsty teenagers because what they should have learned at 14 they learned ten years later
Have a look at Jon Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. He makes the case rather well that we need to cut out the safetyism in the physical world while getting serious about it in the online world. It's not some abstract matter of the morality of kids' digital freedom, it's the tanking of mental health and increase in self-harm and attempted suicide since smartphones came along.
You're trying to treat the symptom of the symptom of the symptom.
There are extremely popular movements that claim to stand for their members, but in reality just induce massive paranoia and fear.
It is extremely popular to accuse people of being the worst possible based on little to zero information or to actively twist the values and principles of the "opponent" into their opposites.
I can find the same mental health degrading content you claim is widespread on social media in the form of books, except the difference is someone spent months of their life writing hundreds of pages about it, which personally scares me more than someone dumping their 10 minute hot takes behind a pseudonym.
In this brief choice of words you've revealed that you're just guessing at what the actual problem is. There's a good book about it mentioned upthread; I recommend it.
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.
> 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&...
> 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.
You've described the problems.
But this is where all the value of the future is locked up.
We can't do better at serving people's individual needs until we give up on "one size MUST FIT ALL"
Also Google raked in about 100 bil based on a quick search last year.
Surely some of that could be redirected to an engineering team to do what's listed here, and while they're at it, maybe make the Apple TV YouTube app not suck industrial quantities of ass.
I think the only one I've used that's worse than YouTube's is Nebula but it's not a direct comparison, Nebula just lags quite a bit, it does function. The YouTube app in comparison frequently just... breaks in incredibly bizarre ways.
Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience.
> Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.
Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?
> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
It's what happens, it's almost by definition not subjective. The world is full of people geeky enough to use third party clients but not geeky enough to understand the nuances of service evolution. Their reasoning goes like this: yesterday it worked, today it doesn't. I didn't change my client, so it must have been the service that changed. Therefore, it's the service's fault.
This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service.
Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.
There is no limit that avoid both false nevative and false postives
Something being hard shouldn't be a reason to not do it. Put the features in and punish those who abuse the system. That's what regulation should be for. I think in general we need a wider solution to rampant botting as AI makes it even easier to bot.
If the cost exceeds the benefit, that's a reason to not do something.
But no one is forcing you to myopically express that benefit as solely "increase shareholder value", that's a choice.
If you want to operate at "dominant player in the industry" there's a lot of reasons you have to do stuff that has reasons not to be done, saying "its hard" isn't a good enough excuse if you want to get the lions share of the market.
Dominant players can also afford to do a lot of things without immediate payoff, e.g. Google, Bell Labs.
> The volume of support requests due to third party clients
It's not like Google provides any support to their consumers though. They barely provide any to their customers.
But it would mean they'd have to scale up from one, to two support staff.
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.
Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist.
It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.
Because it's YouTube kids. Not YouTube
YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
Another approach... Is to mark their kids account as a kids account or something, and have that just be on the regular YouTube website and app.
Or what every parent really wants.
To whitelist content your kid can watch like in YT Kids. But also include blacklisting shorts.
The more this looks like regular YouTube. The better your chances of your kid not just signing out of the app. Or using a web browser with a logged out account to circumvent it.
You have to give some illusion in order to maintain the control.
> And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
Who's in charge here, you or your kids? Sure, maybe you could imagine a teen YouTube product you might like more, but you can't say the whitelist feature doesn't exist. It's there and it works.
> Who's in charge here, you or your kids?
As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.
If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.
You are, in fact, in charge of your teenager as a parent. They are, in fact, still a kid. Controlling your kid’s access to things which you deem harmful is, in fact, not abusive. Setting appropriate boundaries does not, in fact, mean you are not treating your kid as a person who has their own sense of self. Most kids will not, in fact, hate you for setting boundaries and being their parent.
It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.
My parents did this to me, and while I loved them, I left home as quickly as I could at age 17 despite them more or less begging me to stay.
We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.
This is a terrible argument. You just repeated the claims and said that they're false, giving no reason to believe this over the claims that you're disagreeing with. If you want to convince anyone, you should explain how you came to the conclusion that these things are false.
> It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.
Parenting is pretty subjective, and everybody has their own way of doing it. You may disagree with something, but that doesnt make it incorrect here.
They're no longer a child. That is why they have a different nomenclature - teenager. They are not "a kid".
Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].
I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.
To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.
[0] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002003.htm
This is an argument for not applying parental controls to YouTube for teenagers, while the guy I was replying to is explicitly asking for parental controls for YouTube for teenagers. I think "teenager" is too broad to have a productive discussion here. Maybe we can agree that sometime between 13 and 19 you should definitely stop trying to impose parental controls on your kids.
You when your kids reach 18: "why do my kids not talk to me anymore? oh woe is me, what have I ever done wrong!"
If you're lucky. That means they have a good moral compass and figured out that you were the anchor on their lives.
I'm especially worried about the point where parents are accompanying college students into their inerviews. Which is an slowly, but alarmingly rising phenomenon.
This is like the swansong of every parent ever lol.
Yes, people exaggerate, but I have not gone to see mine in person since 2009 and I have not talked to them since 2016. In fact at uni, I initially didn't understand why anybody would want to go home for Christmas - it was many years later that I realised that my childhood wasn't normal.
Ok, once kids hit certain age, YouTube kids is mostly useless to them. As the most perfectly ok and even educational channels are just not there. Includes channels parent wants to give to the kid.
Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.
> Because it's YouTube kids. Not YouTube
> YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
This doesn’t sound like a YouTube problem.
>Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page!
Because you're whitelisting on videos that Youtube already filtered on. If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.
>why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids
COPPA, probably.
YouTube Documentation on this feature - https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...
The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.
Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here.
Now back to the comment I’d written at first:
It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...
That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.
I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.
And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.
As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)
An unfiltered web browser has stuff a lot worse than YouTube. That's on you if you give your kids access to that.
Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.
Not only that, but YouTube kids whitelists a ton of content I never want my kids watching, while exempting a decent chunk of things I'd be tickled pink if my kids watched.
I don't want em watching cocomelon, I want them watching Steve Mould
I want the Netflix version of this. An account that is completely empty except for shows that I add. And not for kids, I just want an empty library that I can fill myself.
Arrr, there's a way to do that, just not a way to pay for it.
Gabe’s law: piracy is an UX issue.
Quite the seaworthy approach if you ask me.
I was going to say - Netflix has functionality to do exactly this but only for kids accounts. You can hand pick which shows appear on each child account.
> I agree, it's too niche a product
I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.
The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)
basically just a profile that can only access a single playlist or feed, with which content is added to by another account.
"parent your kids" doesn't mean "ask youtube to be better", it means "teach your kids to choose better"
depends on the age range.
and that's the problem. I don't want Youtube's input aside from being a dumb pipe. I want them to hand me the remote so I can manage my feed.
It also means “trust, but verify“.
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?
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.
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.
It's parenting that is niche. It's outsourced to Google.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
How can it be niche if it would be front and center for every responsible parent?
>responsible parent
>responsible
Yeah, that's niche.
Fuck.
The PS kind of undermines the rest of your point.
Of course if it made a bunch of money it would be a top priority though.
Yeah its a weird one, the lack of this feature is whats making me stop giving them money and I wonder how many other families are in the same boat.
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
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
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.
I've just started setting this up for my own family with plex instead of jellyfin, so I don't have a LOT of answers, but...
- yes pinchflat allows you to define the date at which it starts downloading. For a couple channels, I set it to only download the past year's worth of videos and it seems to have respected that properly. It also allows you to set a retention period
- it allows you to download, embed, and use autogenerated subtitles (three separate options)
Can you link it up with ffmpeg and SponsorBlock to remove ads?
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.
If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)
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)
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.
Ads as effective parental controls is wild, hilarious, and somewhat dystopian to me.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try Kagi. You can filter out the shit sites. It's great!
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
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.
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.
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.
Sure, a whitelist makes YouTube less useful to a teenager, but it's hardly "pointless". Even a few whitelisted educational videos and channels could have huge value. You can send videos and channels to your kids' whitelists straight from your phone as you come across them and build up a huge library over time. My kids have dozens of channels and thousands of videos to choose from now, and I add more frequently as I naturally come across them in my own causal browsing.
Give parents the ability to turn off shorts and watch most of the AI slop they watch go away.
[dead]
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
Yeah the interface in the Kids app sucks. The way to do it is from your own phone. Use the "share" feature and choose "with kids". It takes a lot of taps to share a channel, that could be improved for sure. But if you share good channels as you come across them then over time you'll build up a great library of content for your kids.
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.
No. There is a true whitelist mode that only shows content you choose.
Kind of weird that there are so many comments here lamenting the lack of this feature when it actually exists just as requested.
If it's not found by people who tried the app and explicitly looked for it, maybe the problem is on the app side? (Or maybe it's not available to everyone?)
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.
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).
>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
> The term references an Internet meme depicting the fallacy using Goombas, which was first posted to Twitter by @supersylvie_ on January 29, 2024.
The history of this term goes back… one year? (from a rather unpopular meme) I’m all for introducing new vocab in english but it feels like there should already be a term for this.
Maybe “population fallacy”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy ?
The renaming tactic used is much more interesting and useful than the fallacy
That's brilliant. I suppose the same issue exists in polling and politics in general. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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"
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
And it is completely unnecessary in many cases. There are many cases where a third party cannot give access to something to a minor, but the parent is able to give consent anyway. So give parents the tools they need to tell online services, "hey, this is a child so act accordingly" rather than having the government enter the loop. For example: a web browser can ask the operating system for an age verification token, then relay that token to the website. Given that most operating systems these days have the notion of privilege and most operating systems make it difficult for unauthorized users to gain administrative privileges, it should be reasonably secure.
Of course, there are going to be weaknesses in such a system. On the other hand, there are going to be weaknesses to any system. There are also going to be situations where that level of protection is inadequate, but we're talking about access to controlled substances levels of concern here rather than kids getting access to age inappropriate videos. And chances are it doesn't have to be 100% effective anyhow. It just has to be effective enough to discourage people from targeting minors with age inappropriate content.
It's only unnecessary if you assume the goal is actually protecting children, as opposed to entrenching even more data collection and identity tracking.
There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.
Ironic to call people aware of this stupid.
> There are zero knowledge proof systems that nobody would have a problem with because nobody ever knows who is accessing the content, only that they are allowed or not.
If you truly believed that this was going to be the solution that governments were going to use, yes you’re still an idiot. Ok, maybe incredibly naive to be charitable. But still have you paid even the slightest bit of attention to pretty much anything a governmental institution has done in the last 15 years?
There's always smart ways to do things. The government will choose the cheapest and hire the most generic IT consulting firm to do it which won't get close. Or if they don't do it themselves, they'll just fine big companies unless they follow an overbearing and forever expanding checklist of requirements where the companies lawyers will be forced to choose the most extreme options or risk exposure.
Meanwhile kids will use VPNs, browser extensions, ID spoofing, piracy, etc will become the norm to bypass it and law abiding adults (including good parents and people without kids) will be burdened with the results.
The parent called people stupid. That was uncalled for and I'm educating them.
I don't support these policies myself.
Zero knowledge proofs don't matter, these verification systems already exist and they require you to show live video of your face to confirm you're the actual living person that matches your credentials.
You could have a completely anonymous tech solution to this, but it doesn't matter, because platforms and governments want video proof of life and identity, and they want to keep the data.
Don't ignore the context of this discussion.
Someone just said anyone who believes in privacy and content restrictions is stupid. Except those two concepts are compatible.
The context of this discussion is political realities of censorship, an area where your theoretical proof of compatibility means nothing.
Zero knowledge proofs won't be zero knowledge in practice when organizations the size of governments are involved. They want a backdoor on your devices too (or already have one).
> 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.
But they do have genuine discovery utility, the issue is more of having them tuned for engagement above all else.
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.
> 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!!!
They weren't asking for it - the small sample of parents (not a random sample of voters) agreed in principle with the impossible-in-real-life blocking with no age verification for adults system, but nobody actually really cared enough to push for it except one newspaper pressure campaign...
Yet, as I said the Government was making out like that this gamed survey meant it was basically unanimous support for a system that will require full identity/age verification for everybody (yet they’re still really trying hard to keep the ‘everybody’ bit quiet)
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.
The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
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.
Definitely. I remember the era of the living room desktop PC, and that was a pretty easy and effective solution. But the primary benefit of parents giving smartphones to their kids these days is the ability to stay in contact while away from each other.
For teenagers, yeah I agree that message content and such should not be shared with the parent. The level of detail in the timeline should be configurable at the discretion of the parent. At the same time, it's also probably the most important period to shield them from harmful online content.
Kids don't really need a personal smartphone until they reach at least secondary school which put them quickly unto the early teens years.
During a transition period between 11 and 13 I applied a simple solution: smartphone stay in a drawer at home unless some communication with people is important for school work, parental control disallowed install of apps, data plan was limited to the bare minimum.
My eldest daughter is nearing 15 and now parental control has been off for a year. I can see she is not installing every dumb app possible she has a bit more liberty but screen hours is still caped and the smartphone stays out of the bedroom during the night. This is probably a rule that will sty for a while as she is sharing her bedroom with her smaller sister.
Again, rules will gradually relax with time. Key is to allows them to reach autonomy. Being divorced with the shared custody, with different rules in each household made it a bit more complicated, for example my EX didn't wanted to follow my rule of no screen time during at least a 2h time window every day where all devices are off or in a drawer, including for adults living in the household. So far I think she and her sister understand that it is OK feeling frustrated/limited and not being considered cool at school. Also that being cool at their age only gets you so far and most popular kids in my teenage years where those that ended up the worse at adulthood: early pregnancy, early addiction issues, most didn't get so far into studies and didn't have the luxury to be in a situation where they can steer their own path professionally, at least not at the extent I could. Having the example of 2 different houses, with their own mother having her own struggles help as well as sad as it can be.
> 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
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.
> but not actually write it down or link the two identities digitally
What is to stop you just selling the ID card with zero consequences? Unless it has a photo on it of course, in which case that itself is an identifier you can't easily rotate.
Better is to use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that you have a real ID's private key in your possession. Leaking the private key would be the same as giving away your real identity. Now you could make a proxy service that generates the proofs for money without it being traced back to you - but maybe a countermeasure to limit but not eradicate abuse would be for the protocol to include a proof you haven't used the same real identity to prove your age on that service in at least x days (that does mean you could be tracked for x days until you prove your age under another pseudonym).
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.
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.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sounds like you just want to censor political views and only be seen content that your government wants you to see.
I agree. To the downvoters: do you mind elaborating?
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.
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.
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.
> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <lewd-video-game>.
<<id-verify-service threatens to pull service from store, lewd-game is removed>
> It's disgusting that <id-verify-service> is willing to support the consumption of <trans-dating-sim-video-game>.
<<...>>
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.
Please use paragraphs.
Implementing a feature and doing it in the worst and dumbest possible way are not the same thing.
Why would you assume these 2 groups of people are the same...?
> 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?)
He said, on an online forum.
Sure, ha ha. But I was talking about things I would miss.
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.
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?"
yep. the whole purpose of this is to stop people from communicating with each other, and only consume approved vetted sources. they'd probably prefer to keep tech out of people's hands entirely (why would serfs need that?!?), but it is too useful for the purposes of surveillance and control.
You might be exaggerating the dangers a bit I think, but I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable.
To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.
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.
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.
> So instead of using a photo ID so that everything is logged, register your every interaction online with the government directly.
Not just register, but ask permission for and give the government a veto on.
No, not every interaction. Given a token without user id, companies can check it's valid without contacting any government service and without knowing your identity.
And then the government sees where those tokens are used and they can easily monitor your every action, and revoke your ability to use certain sites if they don't like what you're saying.
North Korea wishes they came up with an idea this good.
Signature schemes can be validated without the signers involvement. No tokens need to go back to the government
And they do this over a network we know governments are constantly spying on?
This scenario doesn't make sense. Either govs can spy on your traffic and see everything (and don't need tokens for spying), or they can't and wouldn't be able to see the token. There's no scenario for: they can only spy on their tokens in your traffic.
> 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.
My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens.
And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
> most people do have mygov id
It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it.
> no logging
If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.
It was almost exactly half last year. The number will only go up.
I'm not sure what you mean by the logging part. Yes they can either log or not log it. The system can be designed for either. If your default position is "government will always lie given the chance" that's fine I guess. But then you need to assume they're monitoring your ISP anyway.
There needs to be some terms clarified. mygov vs mygovid vs myid.
Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".
But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.
mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.
Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.
Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.
I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.
There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?
[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id
[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...
[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...
I agree the naming is a mess. There is the Australian Digital ID system (https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/how-the-system-works) which allows third party providers.
Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).
Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app
> 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.
> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication
They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.
> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part
That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.
> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.
What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.
> An even better idea is to not do any of this
Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.
> 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.
The proposal is for SIGNED tokens i.e. only the govt can issue them, and you need a govt issued ID to generate them. The latter mechanism allows rate limiting. This fixes the problem you outline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
> 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?
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.
> 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...
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.
> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.
Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.
Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.
From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.
So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.
The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.
"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."
Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after
But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.
Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
"but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation."
Maybe if starting from zero, but not with the established culture.
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.
> 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.
I would love to see more scrutiny of short content because it is without doubt the most manipulative.
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.
Right but the point is to be able to block the shorts on my teens phone while still allowing him to benefit from all the useful stuff on YT
I learnt drums for a song I like from shorts. Blanket bans are not a solution
Why do I get down voted for this?
> 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.
Amazing! Do you have some spare time? Can you quickly mint me a BTC token please. kthxbai ;)
> 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
> This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services.
The law, as written:
> There are age restrictions for certain social media platforms. A provider of such a platform must take reasonable steps to prevent children who have not reached a minimum age from having accounts.
No commentary I have seen supports your interpretation.
> 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?
No you're right, thinking about laws & second order effects isn't a government thing
Um... its a law. And yes, law enforcement is widely considered a government thing. See also: police.
Good thing the internet police will be there to ensure those laws are enforced. Great job, Australia!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
This is a pure fantasy that you seem to recognise on some level.
You know all of the government apps are "top tier shit". You experience this, yourself, first hand. It's not some statistic, or report.
This, this is what any form of mandatory ID verification will be: shit. Top tier shit made by the most expensive consultancies using the cheapest possible outsourced Indian labour.
Source: First-hand experience working in the IT departments of the very same people that made MyGov ID.
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.
> 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.
The substack you linked is about political polarisation and doesn't mention children once.
> 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
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.
>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.
" 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?
I agree.
This idea that parents should have to be the gatekeepers for everything doesn’t work.
We work better as a community, and we have democracy so we can elect people to take care of things that are good for all of us.
Broadly, as a society we have taken to blaming individuals for not being perfect at everything.
Parenting is traditionally a group activity. The individual consumer capitalist parent is a recent, mid 20th century onwards, construct.
"It takes a village to raise a child".
This is basically the village stepping up albeit in the dumbest way imaginable.
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.
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.
Your admiration for the nanny state is actually revolting.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Pretty sure it's called inflating metrics. Things that get pushed on you (see many AI features, my pet peeve, especially at google) are not wanted (or they wouldn't need to be pushed) but someone has a big stake in showing uptake, e.g. promises made to investors that this would drive revenue.
It's a form of bundling.
> That I have no where else to go to see the content I want to see smells like a de-facto monopoly.
Not in this case, since the content makers can choose to host the digital files on a computer not owner by Alphabet.
Your situation is simply the content maker betting that it is not worth their time to try to earn a return by hosting on a non Alphabet computer.
But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
> But Alphabet is doing nothing to stop the content maker and you from reaching a deal.
They bought DoubleClick, which Microsoft and others felt strongly enough about to warn the FTC that might give Google too much control over online advertising. Seems like Meta is their only real competition on that front these days.
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.
OK, I didn't know that, though it's not very intuitive. Thanks!
Now, as a parent, I face a tough choice: I have history on the kids accounts precisely because I want to check on it and discuss with them what's good, or less so, to watch.
I've had my history turned off for years, and still get Shorts.
unfortunately turning off history kills all forms of suggestions, including ones like "you're subscribed to these things, so perhaps you might also be interested in...", which is the form of recommendation I want the most since it's driven by what I chose to be watching rather than what I've previously watched.
I had assumed the behavior was malicious compliance on Google's part against California law that said no history had to actually mean no history.
I have had history turned off for years. It won't recommend anything on the main feed, but when I watch a video, it recommends more as usual. There's plausible deniability that the recommendations are based on just what I'm watching but in practice that's obviously not true, many recommendations are based on either my subscriptions or my watch history, as they are not related to the video I am watching but are related to my interests.
Since there's not supposed to be any history, I have to trust it's just based on subscriptions. It seems like that could be the case, I guess? But I do have doubts that they do in fact have my history somewhere that's accessible to this recommendation engine.
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.
A functional adult doesn't need to ever go to a strip club.
A functional adult in the 2020s needs to learn how to use Google and YouTube. It's actually part of the curriculum at school.
The school also uses Gmail, and Classroom, and teaches kids to use Docs, Slides and Sheets (rather than Office 365). I dunno how much money changes hands, but this benefits Google in the long run, otherwise they wouldn't offer the service.
The problem here is Google feeling the need to compete with TikTok, and then mixing it with their educational offerings.
No, but the strip club is next to everybody else's house as well as schools.
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.
Let's watch together starts to fall flat when the primary use they have for a device is to chat with family and friends, where it's natural to want a modicum of privacy. I wanna know who they're talking to, not everything they say.
Then, they start watching what their friends share in group chats. I can mostly avoid social media doom scrolling by preventing them having accounts, but not so YouTube.
And it's a tough decision to blanket ban YouTube, since it is used for educational purposes, including by teachers (a teacher wouldn't point a 13 yo pupil to TikTok).
YouTube didn't need to compete with TikTok or Reels; they chose to.
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)
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.
I don't disagree.
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.
chrome extension that gets you most of the way: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
This exists. It's called YouTube Kids
Yeah, but there is a gaping difference between content for kids (i.e. 12 and under) and content for teenagers.
Most teenage-appropriate content would be enjoyed by adults too (e.g. lots of how-tos, educational content, music, entertainment, etc.) Most adults are not going to be into watching Blues Clues or whatever, which is why YouTube doesn't have to worry about cannibalizing more profitable content/algorithms for adults due to the existence of YouTube Kids.
It doesn't meet requirement #4 (Filter out age inappropriate content). You can find many articles and videos, over the years, about all the inappropriate stuff making it into YouTube Kids.
5. No "Shorts"
> 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
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
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.
https://nebula.tv seems like it's basically that, just curated podcasts. Although 3blue1brown isn't on there.
Nebula is nice, but has a very specific ideological leaning. It's basically paid "breadtube".
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.
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.
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?
The law says providers need to prevent minors from accessing their services. This likely means that YouTube will require an age verified login.
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
Those are just page after page of embedded YouTube videos. It's doubtful that's a meaningful difference under this bill.
The bill only bans them from having accounts.
It does not ban them from streaming embedded YouTube videos or even browsing YouTube.com
"The bill only bans them from having accounts."
No, the bill says they must take reasonable steps to prevent underage persons from accessing their services. Arguably, this means embedded videos will need to be restricted just as the regular site will be.
What are you talking about? You can click on any of the lessons and get text and images. https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/essence-of-calculus
Which aren't videos. The entire draw is the video format.
That seems awfully particular.
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!
That is not the only channel of value on YouTube. Not all of them have a website with their content available.
Can you spell out the standard plainly?
The standard of what?
The channels besides 3blue1brown that would reach parity.
Do you want mere children exposed to David Attenborough and Mister Rogers?
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…
Can’t speak for the Aussies, but if you’re a US-inflected conservative today, probably not!
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.
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
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.
To state it plainly:
We humans, when given enticing bad choices, will often give in to the enticement.
That universal tendency can be overcome by strict application of willpower, which can have long-term benefits.
It is possible to exploit this tendency to make money. And so, by recursive application of this principle, we arrive at 2025.
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
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?
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/
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.
The decision Australia is making is not an individual one. It’s a societal one. It’s “do we want our kids to grow up in a society free of social media”.
Australia tends to be more willing to make collectivist decisions like this, unlike America which places immense value on individual choice.
We're talking about social media here. There's nothing throwing the whole society under the bus.
I don't agree with the approach from the Australian government and I don't see that at being effective but regulating shady companies using deceptive techniques to maximise their profit is a necessary thing.
Personally I think differentiating impact on kids/teens and adult is a mistake and the approach should be around really strict control on data collection as well as strict control on the use/abuse of manipulative techniques to create addictions.
Maybe manageable till they're 11 or 12, but after that there are just too many internet-enabled devices out there in the world for a parent to police.
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.
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.
> 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
I think most parents are really uncomfortable with adolescents accesing smartphone porn, and also sexting.
Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.
Because the kids are imploding.
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
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.
Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies. So are authoritarian governments, perhaps even more so.
I see, props for admitting you are part of the problem.
Next time dont do that.
I just want to share the other side for once.
As usual 'the other side' is exactly what we all knew it was.
It is people who dont understand technology getting frothed up by media scares into believing government promises about censorship.
> They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured
And you believed them?
Careful I think you might be choking on all that strawman.
Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I would describe it as government overreach, to me it looks more like the government doesn't understand the tech and what these new rules mean.
I would have more respect if they just came out and said you can't be anonymous on social media any more. When you post, somebody needs to know who you are, how old you are, and where you live.
I think the world would be a better place if everybody would just pull their head in and get off social media.
With respect to Donald Horne, its not the 60's any more, and there are plenty of great Australian ideas and culture. The hottest 100 last weekend is a great reminder of how much great Australian music there is.
> 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.
>we don't have as an antagonistic relationship with our government
They have one with us.
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
This is basically it. They are gathering the list now so they know who to round up later.
Mass Internet censorship in the Western world started in 2020 with restrictions on Covid information and discussion. This is just the logical conclusion.
Perhaps this will mean a version of YouTube comes out without YouTube shorts integration. YouTube shorts, imo, legitimises the govts complaint.
I would love to block the shorts at home router level. I hesitate to just block the site altogether
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.
Don't their shorts go under https://www.youtube.com/shorts/
Maybe you can just block all URLs that falls under /shorts/
Not router level, but "Enhancer for YouTube" has "Hide shorts" in its appearance preferences. Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
If I was a concerned parent, I'd just install and hide the extension from the bookmarks bar.
The downside being that it doesn't affect native YouTube apps for mobile devices...
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:
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.
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
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!
+1 for ReVanced.
It feels like how YouTube felt before the enshittification.
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.
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.
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.
People would go to TikTok if shorts were removed.
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.
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.
This is raising a generation of radicalized teens with institutionalized hatred against the older generation. Will end well
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.
That’s not universally true.
In Australia, young people skew significantly progressive, and young woman even more so.
It think you are right but also trying to shove an entire generation into a single box isnt the smartest idea we have. Yes, Nuance is needed.
it is is the dominating trend globally in OECD countries
I am in the 'post older generation'. It's the brainless commies in the middle that we all hate.
It's important to note that this ban is for having an account - it does not ban people under 16 from watching youtube videos.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Why would it no longer be profitable to advertise to teens on YouTube just because they can’t have accounts?
Right they'll still have a persistent session that accumulates data for them. Just without the ability to persistent settings, subscriptions etc.
Putting YouTube in the social media ban also removes personalized ads for teenagers. Personalized ad buys are very profitable for companies like Google and Meta. Hurting their ability to make money would only be a net positive for humanity.
> It means it's no longer profitable to advertise to teens on most corporate social media.
Advertisements are targeted on a number of factors. It’s not a simple checkbox that says “market this to teens”
It is when they're personalized ads, which is what gets banned under Australia's social media ban for teens.
Anything? Including preventing teens from having an online life?
I had no issue with using the noncorpotized social media as a teen (livejournal, myspace before the buyout, forums, etc). Anything that ruins the might of Meta, Google would be a net positive for society.
Let's not act like the only way to communicate with each other or use the internet is through corporate controlled software.
It would do teenagers good to be forced to use other forms of social media that aren't controlled by companies that don't care about their mental health.
You put these laws in place, and they will be used indiscriminately as needed. Anything can become "social media", and if not, it's easy to add a new category to the list since the Overton window has already been allowed to shift.
We the people are vanguards of our own freedom. Always assume a government organization is lying to you about their intentions. We're taught about slippery slopes in civics and history class for a reason.
The true intent here is to control the ability for teens to freely congregate online and contribute to discussion around unsanctioned topics. To prevent teenagers from being exposed to or distributing material that challenges the incumbent authorities.
Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?
> Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?
How can you do that on the internet?
What Australia did may be a bit shortsighted but it's a step in the right direction together. Other countries did all sorts of measures such banning smartphone use in classrooms and such. We will figure out what works and what does not, but at least something is being done.
>How can you do that on the internet?
Well to upload YouTube videos you obviously need to log in.
Also note: just being logged out won't stop the algo choosing content based on past watches.
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.
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.
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?
I have an n8n work flow that pumps out AI slop to the very demographic being targetted by this bill!!!!!!!!! HOW DARE THEY
I'm not asyx, but I was about to say that I got into programming from playing video games but it appears authoritarian nutjobs like you have beat me to it.
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.
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?
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.
When I was 8, I was already hacking around net nanny software and involved in several online communities operated by other children, I was learning how to program and hack and generally use the internet as a gateway into culture that I otherwise never would have experienced.
I tried involving myself in a lot of communities related to my interests, but some sites were just for entertainment and not active participation, or I simply didn't participate in the community. That doesn't change anything.
Now a software engineer and artist, my entire life was shaped by that time, and as I said, I likely would have committed suicide due to my abusive situation if it wasn't for these communities.
I will always fight to provide that kind of environment for others and not pull up the ladder now that I've climbed up.
8 year olds having unmonitored access to the Internet doesn't seem to me to be the fault of the platforms, the government, or me.
If you substitute the word “television” for “YouTube” or “social media”, you can almost exactly replay the arguments of the 1970s.
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.
Yes. And yet.
It’s like every generation gets fixated on something new which can be perceived as moral decay and societal harm, and then rails against it. Making it even more popular with the younger generation, of course.
I’ve seen the same thing play out with rock music, television, computer games, and now social media. There’s likely examples back throughout history.
I think you can mount an argument against all of these things. In retrospect though, it doesn’t hold up. I wonder if social media is the same?
YouTube isn't social media, though... It's basically just television with a massive amount of really really bad channels.
For every big tech dystopic platform going all wack there is some "the old greeks complained about kids these days" going my way.
Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please.... They do not care enough about YouTube. Touch their snap and you may have a point. But I doubt it.
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.
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.
For now. Maybe this will be the incentive to get them to dig into how these things work.
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.
If this were my kid I would rejoice and thank my lucky stars
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.
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.)
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.
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...
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
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.
> The ISP doesn't need to know what the content is or be pro-actively looking for content.
Sure, be it a torrent or pornography, the ISP doesn't have to care in Australia.
> The rightsholder would look at the connecting IP and then contact the owner of that IP for if that IP was allowed to view age-restricted content.
eg: Hollywood Inc. would contact the ISP to ask for details about the customer using that IP address at a particular time.
The existing court ruling establishes that the ISP has no obligation to provide customer details to Hollywood Inc. or to any third party provider of (say) pornography.
Also, typically an ISP customer is a household that contains adults, children, relatives, boarders, passerby's that use the router Guest account, etc.
So, not only is the ISP not obligated to provide customer details, those details are most likely those of an adult over the age of 18 as 12 year olds rarely have an account with an Australian ISP provider.
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”
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ah yes, because it's the teenage vote and social media voice they're very very worried about...
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.
At what point do we consider the internet too dangerous to exist?
> "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.
>Aren't "sharing platforms" and "social media" the same thing?
Meta claimed in FTC v. Meta that they are indeed the same.
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
parents worrying about cocomelon is modern day hysteria. parents worried because its new and their brains have past a critical point of plasticity
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
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.
"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
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.
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...
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.
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.
This law was popular with the Liberal & Greens parties sadly - was likely regardless of who won the election.
It is absolutely not supported by the Greens [1].
"The Greens have also called for:
" [2][1] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/greens-condemn-pass...
[2] https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/blunt-social-media-...
It bans accounts on youtube not watching, I think?
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?
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
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.
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.
Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.
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.
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.
I think that was a buyout. Government offered money for the guns.
That's irrelevant to the argument that was being made. Confiscation for payment is still confiscation; see also "eminent domain."
> "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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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).
+100 here. I think everyone should try this exercise– browse outside your algorithm. It's a sea of garbage to sort through.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44732683
> 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
So they will start using YouTube Revanced. What now?
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.
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.
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.
Please ban comments. Please...
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Almost a good comment, just get rid of the unnecessary violence at the end to make your point without being flagged.
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.
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
I think most people abandon views like yours when they become a parent. Are you a parent?
Very recently actually yes. Not that it mattered if I wasn't, because I was a kid and I know how important freedom was to my development, as does everyone who had it, that's sufficient to be inoculated against this safetyism.
And yes most people now have abandoned it, that's exactly what I'm complaining about. Not just with their kids mind you but even with themselves, that's why we have people in their late 20s and 30s who talk about how they're learning "adulting". Like, we have an entire generation now of people well into adult live who act like angsty teenagers because what they should have learned at 14 they learned ten years later
Have a look at Jon Haidt's book The Anxious Generation. He makes the case rather well that we need to cut out the safetyism in the physical world while getting serious about it in the online world. It's not some abstract matter of the morality of kids' digital freedom, it's the tanking of mental health and increase in self-harm and attempted suicide since smartphones came along.
You're trying to treat the symptom of the symptom of the symptom.
There are extremely popular movements that claim to stand for their members, but in reality just induce massive paranoia and fear.
It is extremely popular to accuse people of being the worst possible based on little to zero information or to actively twist the values and principles of the "opponent" into their opposites.
I can find the same mental health degrading content you claim is widespread on social media in the form of books, except the difference is someone spent months of their life writing hundreds of pages about it, which personally scares me more than someone dumping their 10 minute hot takes behind a pseudonym.
> the same mental health degrading content
In this brief choice of words you've revealed that you're just guessing at what the actual problem is. There's a good book about it mentioned upthread; I recommend it.