YouTube to be included in Australia’s social media ban for children under 16
YouTube to be included in Australia’s social media ban for children under 16
www.pm.gov.au
Albanese Government protecting kids from social media harms
43 comments
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The trend of using child abuse as argument to implement media control mechanisms, is dangerous for society. There, i said it.
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I was thinking about this being wrong. But then I realized that parents can still grant access to YT for their children. However the unattended restriction age should be lower imo.
The problem is too many parents not supervising their children at all, and letting the algo make them go down in a truly despicable pile of shit of auto-play queues. My oldest one is six, and if I leave her alone on her tablet or the family room TV with YT, setting her on a path of kpop dance practice videos or some popular non-english kids show, if I check back half an hour later, sure enough the thematic changes from (likely with the help of recommended videos as well) to mindless marble/magnet builder videos, some yanky animated minecraft story or even worse.
So now imagine a kid that gets no supervision at all, and an impressionable youth without critical thinking is seeking answers and then believes whatever they are told by a late millennial just saying bogus shit for the views.
I am not sure what the right solution is, and this may not be it, but at least Australia is trying something. Let's see how it works out.
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IMHO the best parental control is to disable the recommended videos sidebar on platforms like YT, be it via uBlock element hiding picker or via usercss.
And more geneeally, the browser setting a JS signal as well a CSS media query.
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All this child safety is just because they don't want to do proper moderation. What about user safety? Scams and hate speech don't belong for adults either
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Sure, but adults should make their own decisions. I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a nanny state.
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I would usually say this is bad, but with the ungodly amount of AI generated slop flooding YT this is good actually
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I wager it isn't the 16 year olds making this.
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Oh boy, it's Online Safety Act 2: Electic Boogaloo! Get ready for:
- Teens downloading Dodgy VPNS.
- YOTI and other ID apps taking out personal info and eventually getting fuckin' hacked.
- Fake ID Apps appearing and just skipping the "Hack YOTI" Stage.
- VPN subs and Tor use to skyrocket.
- The monopolisation of out internet lives into the hands of a few social media companies.
...and much more!
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Can someone explain what "Albanese" means, please? Obviously not Albanian, but I'm still confused.
edit: got it, his name is "Albanese"
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Good. YouTube is a contributor to increasing massive societal polarisation. We don't want kids these days turning to Nazis. Some of the kids and people I grew up with became extremist.
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Lol
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Good, social media is a bane on growth
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43 comments
youtube? the place with free quality documentaries, free knowledge in the easiest to digest video form about a huge variety of topics? the spot where you can learn life skills, cooking, hobbies, maths, physics, programming, among many others, with visualised tutorials showing every part of every step with explenations?
what on earth is happening to the internet these days? absolute insanity
social media is shit and i get restricting twitter or tiktok, but youtube? it seems so bizarre to me
While all of that might be true, YouTube is also a for-profit cesspool of trash content, hate speech, and misinformation. An entire generation of gen z manosphere Nazi bootlickers got where they are watching "gaming videos" on YouTube.
It auto plays by default and their algorithms are dogshit, so you might start watching an educational video with your kid, but end up on a flat earth video fifteen minutes later, or much much worse.
When my son was younger, we severely limited his YouTube time and closely monitored what he was watching on it. Most parents don't do that.
I dislike legislation like this too, but we're not talking about PBS or a library here. Kids truly shouldn't be on YouTube unattended.
Parenting should stay with parents. The more power the government gets, the more they will abuse it. When companies are restricted, they will see this as an opportunity to better identify adults better.
What's the deal with gaming videos? Do game streamers tend to be Nazis? Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.
I have struggled to filter with YouTube Kids what is allowed. The setup is default allow with channel denies (opposite of a good firewall), so I have taken to yt-dlp and Jellyfin to get around it. I don't agree with the law as written, but I get the intent. Parents should be more active in their kids's lives versus the state.
The degree to which some of you stick your heads in the sand is stunning. How do you even reply to this in good faith? Between the algorithms, mis/disinformation, propaganda, hate speech, bullying, and general bullshit, I don’t understand how someone can either be this naive or this fucking dishonest.
I get what you are saying and there is some great stuff on YouTube, but they do not do enough to moderate content or comments.
If they can't guarantee or even take reasonable steps to ensure content is safe then it gets treated the same as other social media.
I would put the blame with Alphabet not anyone else.
YT well known for radicalizing users. It as bad as ticktock or Instagram. there's a lot of quality educational content on public TV.
YouTube is totally blocked for my son at home and on his phone and I myself avoid it as the plague as well. If he wants to learn stuff, I'm eager to buy him all the books he wants. The moderate amount of useful resources on YT is 100% available elsewhere, on less addictive platforms or media.
Youtube very consistently ranks lowest in terms of reacting to reports of hate speech and is a massive vector for it worldwide.
I mean, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measure, but Youtube is a massive contributor to the decline of democracy around the world.
Tiktok, incidentally, has way better stats on addressing hate speech complaints than Youtube. As in, by far. As in, industry leading, so in the exact opposite end of Youtube's.
Youtube is the second largest Social Network
I never saw it that way I till I saw a report on what the preferred social media platforms for teens… and it was the number one slot at that time. Apparently teens (and others) have entire conversations in the comments, share videos with friends, and doom scroll YouTube.
And I don’t know if you’ve read YouTube comment threads (I don’t usually) but they can get pretty toxic, even on tame content. Not to mention all the FUD and propaganda being distributed there.
You can say all those same things about Xitter and TikTok.
Elsagate