Sydney (AFP) – Australia will use landmark social media laws to ban children under 16 from video-streaming site YouTube, a top minister said Wednesday stressing the need to shield them from “predatory algorithms”.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said four-in-ten Australian children had reported viewing harmful content on YouTube, one of the most visited websites in the world.
“We want kids to know who they are before platforms assume who they are,” Wells said in a statement.
“There’s a place for social media, but there’s not a place for predatory algorithms targeting children.”
Australia announced last year it was drafting laws that will ban children from social media sites such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram until they turn 16.
The government had previously indicated YouTube would be exempt, given its widespread use in classrooms.
“Young people under the age of 16 will not be able to have accounts on YouTube,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on Wednesday.
"They will also not be able to have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X among other platforms.
“We want Australian parents and families to know that we have got their back.”
Albanese said the age limit may not be implemented perfectly – much like existing restrictions on alcohol – but it was still the right thing to do.
A spokesman for YouTube said Wednesday’s announcement was a jarring U-turn from the government.
“Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens,” the company said in a statement.
“It’s not social media.”
On paper, the ban is one of the strictest in the world.
But the current legislation offers almost no details on how the rules will be enforced – prompting concern among experts that it will simply be a symbolic piece of unenforceable legislation.
It is due to come into effect on December 10.
Social media giants – which face fines of up to Aus$49.5 million (US$32 million) for failing to comply – have described the laws as “vague”, “problematic” and “rushed”.
TikTok has accused the government of ignoring mental health, online safety and youth experts who had opposed the ban.
Meta – owner of Facebook and Instagram – has warned that the ban could place “an onerous burden on parents and teens”.
The legislation has been closely monitored by other countries, with many weighing whether to implement similar bans.
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“There’s a place for social media, but there’s not a place for predatory algorithms targeting children.”
So instead of adressing the algorithms we will collect information about everyone (including children) and violate their privacy instead. Makes perfect sense…
It’s all a ploy to monitor adults under the guise of “save the children”
The only way to prove you’re not under 16 is to provide valid id and I’m not doing that to use anything
As a parent of young kids…youtube is a complicated mess.
It is full of really great content; but YT kids sucks…so if you want access to the good stuff it is standard YT.
But the utter shit that shows up in the side bar and suggested videos is insane.
For older teens/adults; you don’t have to worry about the shit tier garbage that is suggested.
I block the ads, but that is a whole other level of cringe/inappropriate content that just gets shoved into videos; completely unrelated to what is on.
You do know your kids don’t actually have to use youtube at all, right?
Well, obviously.
Completely restricting, potentially the biggest and most accessible corpus of knowledge ever created, is not my goal.
I’m trying to balance the good with the bad here.
Example:
Lichess training embedded videos are hosted on youtube; but can just be watched on youtube directly.
As a not parent: it’s actually very simple, just parent your kids (not you specifically, unless it applies idk you).
You can use uBlock Origin to block the recommended section or another player like FreeTube which allows you to disable that section entirely.
FreeTube also offers Hide Videos and Playlists Containing Text feature in addition to general channel blocking. That should help tailoring content to kids where YouTube fails.
uBlock is my go to for killing the ads.
I’ll look into freetube, my 9yo has some cool interests but YT wants to drive engagement through whatever means necessary.
to shield them from “predatory algorithms”
Fair point, but not the way to go about it :/
How about just get rid of those so called predatory algorithms for everyone. Oh wait it was never about children nor teens but control.
This law will just make the problem worse. It says that <16 won’t be able to have accounts. Not being logged into YouTube means you get the worst algorithm imaginable.
Nah Google will just do what they did to me and force you to login before you can watch anything.
Which fucking sucks because I used to watch YT logged out all the time so that I could see something new outside of my bubble.
My bubble is the only thing that makes YouTube watchable.
The few times I’ve opened it without signing in presented me with a shitshow of “viral” insane garbage of the lowest order. Usually a weird mix of right wing gun shit, influencer bullshit (women explaining shit while sitting in stupid poses to show off various body parts) and scam cures. The ads are even worse.
My bubble doesn’t have all the trash people bitch about yt for so I’m never leaving it.
The UK: We just age gated all content that we decide could be harmful to children, resulting in mass surveillance, scams, and dodgy VPNs.
Australia: Hold my Beer, mate.
The UK: We just age gated all content that we decide could be harmful to children,
I didn’t realise they’d banned religion in the UK, well done /s
You joke, but the “could” there is loadbaring, because it could mean literally anything. The people who decide this are the website or the government, and the government isn’t telling us what “could” means.
In short, anything the government wants age gated can the age gated and websites are over-age gating to cover their arses just in case.
I’m way too lazy to sort out a VPN and start doing piracy, but this will motivate me.
You should be using a VPN for your privacy in general. It’s not really a piracy tool.
VPNs are not doing a lot for privacy. Depending on how you use it, quite the opposite
100%, but it’s definitely better than nothing, it makes it much more expensive for the government to surveil. Some VPNs have no logs but most have real time monitoring for compliance reasons, to catch very bad people. It’s more useful for “I have private journals” than “I’m a criminal target”.
VPN privacy is way overblown by the companies. Only thing it does is obscure your IP but there are so many other ways companies are tracking you.
Alphabet pulling this “we’re not social media” nonsense for YouTube is asinine. They could argue they’re not a social network but they’ve always been social media. Just like slashdot or Reddit. For Christ sakes, YTMND was social media to the non social media hamster dance. YouTube is out of it’s mind thinking it’s somehow making a distinction here.
None of those are social media. God I fucking hate how we’ve somehow gotten to the place where anywhere with people on the internet talking to each other are always defined as “social media”. A comment section or a forum aren’t fucking social media. They’re comment sections, or forums. Reddit is a forum. Lemmy is a forum. Slashdot is a forum.
Calling all those things social media just makes the term completely meaningless.
So let me get this straight, you’re also stating that Twitter wasn’t social media then? Blogs like WordPress and livejournal aren’t social media compared to the old static pages with guestbooks? That social media isn’t media being social? What the fuck is it exactly? Is tiktok social media with its little social interaction while YouTube isn’t? It’s mind boggling to me to attempt to create social media as some narrow term when it always was a broad Web 2.0 term about creating, sharing, and commenting on media.
Social media is a subset of social networking. Twitter -> social networking. It’s not social media. Anyone claiming that fucking Wordpress or LiveJournal is social media is out of their goddamn mind. Just because you’re talking to someone in a comment section doesn’t mean it’s a social networking site and it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s social media.
Social media -> a social networking site where the majority of users are sharing media. Example: Flickr. A literal social networking site built around all users sharing their photos. YouTube -> not social media, barely a percentage point of users are commenting much less making their own videos. It’s more akin to a TV station than any sort of social site, and this is readily apparent when you actually compare it to TV show websites!
Social media was never a broad Web 2.0 term, how old are you!? It literally referred to sites like MySpace where you friended others and put fucking MEDIA on your goddamn profile page! It has never once included anything like LJ or WP and that’s such a backwards rewriting of history it’s pretty apparent you’re just saying shit to make it match up with the definition you have in your mind.
Anyone claiming that fucking Wordpress or LiveJournal is social media is out of their goddamn mind.
Somewhere in your life, you have gathered a misunderstanding to the definition and categorization of social media. You are absolutely incorrect based on the understanding of others and every single dictionary I have at my disposal. (we’re up to 7) Honestly, I can’t even make up a solution to answer where you learned that they weren’t social media. The term is used so often and is so clear about the sites being social media. I can only guess that you’ve been going off for a decade now every time someone says social media because you heard It wrong once, or someone you respect ultimately told you that’s not what they were.
Social networking platforms are a subset of social media, not the other way around. You have that backward.
The insanity of it is you saying that it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks or what the 7 dictionaries I’ve reviewed now say.
From your post history, you’re not generally this obtuse, dying on this hill is frankly silly with the mountain of evidence against you.
I think the words were used not just by different generations, but also different level of users.
As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.
The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.
However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.
The majority of humans weren’t on the internet before social media. So that’s all they know.
Exactly. The only thing that I really have to add is that I personally draw the line between social media and other types of websites or internet services is whether the service is intended to be used anonymously or connected to a real identity. I’d further divide the anonymous stuff between whether they are intended to be used with handles or without an account at all.
Under that personal definition, I would not consider stuff like BBS, Usenet, forums, AIM, etc., to be social media.
I also wouldn’t consider Discord to be social media tbh, it’s a messaging application. If Discord is social media why isn’t iMessage?
Something like Twitter, BlueSky, or Mastadon could be social media depending on how you use them, but since many people do utilize them with accounts linked to their real identity I would consider them social media.
Then you have the obvious social media stuff like FaceBook, and LinkedIn.
Now that I’m typing this out, stuff like Insta, TikTok, Snap, etc., get weird. I would personally consider them social media, but tons of people use those apps with handles. Maybe in addition to the anonymous or real identity thing there’s also the consideration of whether the site or app is intended to connect you with people you know in meatspace or online.
Yeah, I guess the distinctions I personally use are becoming a bit meaningless now.
I also used to make a distinction for apps where the majority of content was rando internet user created. But all the apps are now just fulltime creators and very rarely does a true rando go viral.
The “going viral” technique got ruined similarly to how seo ruined search. Completely ruined to the point that the little guy never appears.
Yeah when musically/tiktok came along, twitter, insta, snap, and YouTube all copied the model so you’ve got this dual use thing going on there where you can scroll short videos, but you don’t have to
The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.
Exactly. The ‘academic’ source that roguetrick (not who you replied to) supplied that apparently ‘37 thousand citations’ are using, was written in 2009 and states that Usenet was a social networking site. Just a complete rewrite of history. Notably that ‘academic’ source was from a business school.
As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.
Thank you for understanding my point of view. This is complete rewriting of history by (mostly) news corporations that serve only to make people mad. And ‘social media’ became an easy buzzword to refer to anything that had something wrong with it. This got very bad in the past 5-10 years (time passes weird now).
However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.
you can argue with the dictionary, that’s what I’m doing here. A term that refers to everything under the sun is a meaningless word, especially when it’s weaponized against its citizens, exactly like the UK is doing with ‘social media’ currently, by having it literally encapsulate every website out there, but making citizens think that it doesn’t. The only way you convince the dictionary to change is by telling people that social media doesn’t mean forums. That social media doesn’t mean YouTube. That social media doesn’t mean Wikipedia. (I have some other words I’d like to argue as well, but they’re completely unrelated to this thread).
So that’s what I’m doing here. Telling people that including these things in this all encompassing meaningless word not only devalues the word, but makes it so that politicians can fuck us over anytime they want by using the ‘social media’ boogeyman, and then firewalling Wikipedia, or anandtech.com, or fordf150ownersforum.com, etc.etc.etc.
What you’re hinting at is a little broader. It’s not so much language redefining things as much as users rejecting labels doesn’t matter. For a functional definition like social media, people do and did reject being defined as that to preserve some sense of community distinctiveness. But just like punk artists rejecting that they’re in the genre or even musicians, the small groups view on the subject isn’t as important as the functional reality and the greater social utility of the term. Instead of functioning as a descriptive definition, such things are actually acting as shibboleths.
In regards to rewriting history, it’d be like rejecting calling da vinchi’s helical air screw a proto helicopter. Just because the term was coined later doesn’t mean that it’s rewriting history to apply the concept. It’s not unhelpful to define a concept and review it’s impacts. I honestly think it’s very helpful in examining eternal September myself, for example, and seeing it’s parallels in the walled gardens and subsequent social networks and how they all approached the same challenges and implemented some of the same tools.
In essence, the broad term exists precisely because it defines something that is useful in ways “the Internet” is not.
nah I’ve never ‘gathered a misunderstanding’ of it. Somewhere in the past 5 years, everyone and their mom has started referring to idiotic things as being social media, like roguetrick claiming that Wikipedia is social media (they even provided an ‘academic’ source (from a school of business mind you)).
Social media must be a subset of social networking because the literally concept of a ‘social’ website implies networking. So if all you’re adding to the social element is ‘media’ (rather than just text, like Twitter), then it is by definition a subset. If you see ‘adding’ media as expanding the category, rather than restricting the set of social networking sites to only those with sharing of media, then sure I could see how you think that social networking sites must be a subset of the media sites, since they don’t have media. But I see it as a subset of sites that allow for connections and follows of other users, which would make it a subset in the direction I stated.
From your post history, you’re not generally this obtuse, dying on this hill is frankly silly with the mountain of evidence against you.
I honestly do not care what ‘mountain of evidence’ there is. Some things people are just frankly idiots about and it doesn’t matter what the actual justification for it is, in the current world it’s dumb to continue calling it that. I can give two other examples if you would like, where the majority of people in any given region might refer to something as but it makes no sense from any logical, political, social, ethical, moral, legal, etc. standpoint. The only reason being historical (or etymological), which frankly is a dumb reason, especially in this day and age. We should use words so that they communicate something.
If ‘social media’ refers to anything that exists on the internet (which by the arguments I’ve seen so far, it would literally include 99.99% of websites out there) then it’s a pointless, meaningless word that serves only for politicians to use as a battering ram to remove civil liberties and personal freedoms from citizens. Instead of a law stating “You are now required to verify your ID on every website on the internet” they instead can state “You are now required to verify your ID on social media sites” and then that suddenly includes Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, a website bookmarking service called Delicious, and the General Motors blog site (all of these according to roguetrick’s ‘academic’ source of what social media is)! What is the point of the word if it refers to anything and everything under the sun…
You ignore everything presented to you as stupid, and demand the world is defined by whatever vibes you’ve developed. It doesn’t work that way. Language doesn’t work that way and you defining history in ways that are wildly against reality doesn’t work that way. You’re not making a historical argument and you’re not making a usage argument. You’re making an argument that the world should align with Tyler’s vibes. In this often repeated phrase: “I don’t care” about that.
You’re the one redefining history dude. Even another person in this comment section is telling you how it never meant that to start with. You linked an article from a business school that literally makes up history. Your “source” calls the General Motors blog “social media”.
You’re defining Twitter and Tiktok as not social media and calling everyone else out of their mind. You have lost the plot entirely. You’re far from the academic and long accepted meaning of social media and are confusing social networks as an integral part of social media. That has never been the case.
It has always been the case. Please provide a few sources for your claim of “academic and long accepted meaning of social media” because as far as I’ve seen the only places calling these things social media are you and news sites. And I’ve literally never even heard a news corp call fucking Wordpress “social media” because that’s so meaningless even they aren’t dumb enough to do that.
How about this top result on Google scholar from 2010 with 37 thousand citations reflecting on the historical meaning of social media: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andreas-Kaplan/publication/222403703_Users_of_the_World_Unite_The_Challenges_and_Opportunities_of_Social_Media/links/5a2cd570aca2728e05e0a561/Users-of-the-World-Unite-The-Challenges-and-Opportunities-of-Social-Media.pdf
Jesus Christ, since you’ve never heard it obviously it must not exist.
I’m just gonna rewrite this comment in a nicer tone. Your ‘source’ is from a business school, it states that Usenet is a social network, it claims that the General Motors blog is social media, and it claims that World of Warcraft is the highest level of social media. I really think that is all I need to respond with.
Good luck, I really don’t want to talk to you anymore.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social media
Those are all by definition social media.
I honestly do not give one shit what merriam Webster says, nor any dictionary. It’s an idiotic way to describe what amounts to almost every website on the Internet. That definition includes personal blogs and news websites for fucks sake. You might as well just say “website” because that’s just as descriptive.
Merriam-Webster added that as a definition because that’s how people started referring to everything they did or didn’t like. It’s not because it’s the actual definition or even a good definition.
Ahh, yes, the old I don’t care what the actual definitions are or what people in this community are telling me it means, I have my own definitions and you all are wrong defense, smart man.
Perhaps you should realize that social media features predominate in the modern web and have similar complex problems due to that. It’s a sea change but that doesn’t make it useless. Example: some news orgs did shift heavily into social media citizen journalist models to enable retention but realized that they were not making money from it and the content moderation came at a cost that was onerous. That’s why it’s a useful term. It’s not some categorizing specific websites term. It’s a functional term about how a website operates. And it hasn’t changed despite your belief that it once was very narrow. If anything your narrow usage of the term is what makes it entirely useless because you’re tossing out a descriptor for functionality and it’s associated problems because it doesn’t match whatever imaginary categories you’ve developed.
god i love governments
No single limit to freedoms is the end goal
These fucking morons.
No kids under 16 can have an account… So my teens that have accounts under my family account, that is paid, gets no ads and is parental settings managed… Switch to using it logged out. Ads. Unmanaged. False accounts created.
What about YouTube music?
I mean, good, but also, how?
By taking just a little bit of privacy from everyone.
Even if we all were willing to make that trade, how?
MyGovID/DigitalID (maybe as SSO) is my bet; a Google account linked to one of these two government services.
https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/mygov-website/sign-in-to-mygov
How’s that going to stop someone with a VPN?
It won’t.
This is how I see ‘giving up a little privacy’ looking. Legitimate/compliant users will link their accounts, the government & Google both enhance their tracking, and the rest of us will abandon our existing accounts (if we have one) and skip out via VPN to a region without this requirement.
One of those quotes heavily implies they want private corporations to massively step up surveillance and individualize it so they can pick you out if a crowd. It’s genuinely insane.
I think they should also limit accounts for anyone over 61 too.
“We want kids to know who they are before platforms assume who they are,” Wells said in a statement.
Ngl, that sounds TERFy as fuck
It also swings the other way. Young boys are getting red pilled by YouTubers and influencers like Andrew Tate and his ilk, and I would prefer those kids to learn who they are and how they relate to and fit into their community before being exposed to that sort of toxic content.
As others have said here though, the right tact here would have probably been to legislate away the algorithmic content feeds themselves instead of regulating kids having accounts. YouTube will still push related videos without an account, so I don’t see how this particular route helps at all.
No it doesn’t, all redpillers do is posture. TERFs are actually out to get you
