Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Can you link it up with ffmpeg and SponsorBlock to remove ads?

If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)

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.

>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

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.

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.

> 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.

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 you are 100% right. Let's ban social media for all ages and wipe this scourge from the planet.

> 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!!!

>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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The parents putting these videos on autoplay are usually the ones who can’t afford to spend quality time with their kid.

Yet their kid demands attention. So they put the phone in front of them to be able to do whatever they needed to do.

I don’t really blame them, in today’s economic climate there are a lot of people who have to struggle every waking second to get by.

The argument is, apparently, that keeping your pre-school children away from these things is just too hard in this day and age. Your wee child will be ostracized if they don't have unfettered access to the Internet...

> 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...

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.

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.

What I like has no bearing on what I consider social media. When I use YouTube, I don't connect or interact with others. I'm just consuming content similar to Netflix. Maybe the comments section could be considered that. However, that means any site with comments is social media - news sites, stores with reviews, etc.

I would love to see more scrutiny of short content because it is without doubt the most manipulative.

I learnt drums for a song I like from shorts. Blanket bans are not a solution

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.

Amazing! Do you have some spare time? Can you quickly mint me a BTC token please. kthxbai ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This exists. It's called YouTube Kids

chrome extension that gets you most of the way: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...

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

Nebula is nice, but has a very specific ideological leaning. It's basically paid "breadtube".

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.

Those are just page after page of embedded YouTube videos. It's doubtful that's a meaningful difference under this bill.

That is not the only channel of value on YouTube. Not all of them have a website with their content available.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

" 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?

"It takes a village to raise a child".

This is basically the village stepping up albeit in the dumbest way imaginable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>we don't have as an antagonistic relationship with our government

They have one with us.

> 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.

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/

If you are worried about your Google account being banned for using ReVanced (not that I saw any evidence for anything like that so far but I agree that there could be a scenario like this some time in the future), for years now I've been using a separate Google account only for YouTube. This account essentially only contains my YouTube viewing history and nothing more. I have yet to see any disadvantage in this separation

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!

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.

That’s not universally true.

In Australia, young people skew significantly progressive, and young woman even more so.

I have an n8n work flow that pumps out AI slop to the very demographic being targetted by this bill!!!!!!!!! HOW DARE THEY

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.

Maybe they target content production, not content consumption?