HN Explorer

Tell HN: YouTube is asking for age verification to watch Bret Weinstein's video

79 points by whitepaint ↗ HN
I tried to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id6AqKIxd94 (the discussion between Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein about free will) and Youtube is asking for age verification (that can be done by submitting your ID or by using a credit card).

54 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
rvz
And so it begins. Enforcing KYC to watch a video to verify your age.

Won't be long until this become pervasive over all the major services and platforms and privacy will be totally and completely finished.

Thank you YouTube and well done to everyone using it. /s

Mindwipe
Ultimately YouTube are required legally to do this in much of the EU, and Australia.

The privacy community bluntly completely got caught with it's pants down being angry about corporates and ignoring the huge lobbying from "child protection" groups in the last few years which is resulting in some horrendous legislation in much of the western world.

DoingIsLearning
> YouTube are required legally to do this in much of the EU

Citation needed?

What constitutes adult content on youtube?

Other than for actual online gambling I struggle to see age gates are a thing anywhere in the EU.

Mindwipe
Citation -

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/audiovisua...

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10070779?hl=en-GB#...

The Irish communications regulator, Comreg, determines categorisation for what is considered "adult" content on YouTube (well, or at least sets guidance, which YouTube somewhat clumsily implements, but the guidance is vague and crap). The Irish regulator is allowed to do it Europe wide, as under the Single Market YouTube's European operations are based in Ireland for tax reasons.

The AVMS and DSA are going to force age gates in Europe to an unprecedented scale, as will the Online Safety Bill in the UK.

DoingIsLearning
This is insane. The only way to win really is not to play.
rvz
Exactly correct.
thunderbong
From my experience, this was always there for videos which have been considered inappropriate for younger people.

Although, I don't have a clue why a discussion on free will would warrant that!

It even says so at the bottom of the video -

>> Age-restricted video (based on Community Guidelines)

konschubert
I don't know Bret Weinstein, why would this video be inappropriate for younger people?
emerged
Because Google wants to ensure young people are indoctrinated according to the “correct” collection of information.
fuzzfactor
It's for mature audiences only.

You're supposed to be over 41 to understand it.

[dead] dennis_jeeves
I wish they did that with the voting age.
zuminator
Fairly early on in the discussion, Harris is talking about how he supposedly never tells a lie, not even to his 10 year old daughter, although he does conceal facts from her that she doesn't need to know. For example, there exists a certain guerilla organization/theocratic proto-state that was known at the time for systematically carrying out horrific acts against women and children, She doesn't need to be burdened with that knowledge at that age so he withholds it from her.

But see what he just did there? The very thing he said his own kid is too young to hear, he just blurted out. That would mean by his own standards their conversation is inappropriate for children. So perhaps he himself asked Weinstein to age-restrict the video so as not to be a hypocrite.

amadeuspagel
I doubt that explanation. I haven't watched that video, but I doubt it includes a graphic description of the acts of that organization, which I guess is the part that you wouldn't want children to know. And a child that's able to browse the internet freely can learn easily see way more horrible things. Apart from that, it says that the video is restricted "according to community guidelines", which seems to imply that someone enforcing community guidelines and not the creator restricted the video.
dgb23
The simplest explanation is often the best one!
mooxie
Last year(?) YouTube changed TOS to state (IIRC) that if you didn't explicitly mark your own videos as 'not for children' they would be included in search results that included content for young children. Then, if the video was found to violate TOS in the content, it could be removed or demonetized.

Creators like myself who may have cursing or other 'adult themes' would need to check a box saying that the content was not intended for children or risk TOS violation. Ergo many people self-imposed age restriction on their content.

So while people are looking at this in the lens of 'YouTube is censoring free thought!' it is entirely possible (maybe even likely) that the creator of the video chose to exclude children from their audience, and that YouTube's request for age verification is the consequence of that creator's choices.

Obviously there are still troubling implications here, but if a creator chooses to age-restrict their own content that's not really YouTube's fault (though their poor review policies combined with a 'shoot first' approach to takedowns could definitely be seen as strong-arming creators into this paradigm).

jazzyjackson
I think what you're thinking of the "made for kids" checkbox, which just decides if YouTube can collect data on the audience if the video is the target audience of a video is kids: "To help protect kids’ privacy and meet legal requirements, we have to limit data collection and use on videos that are set as “made for kids." [0] I agree its very confusing for creators.

The age restriction is a separate option, and it's unclear whether the restriction on this Harris/Weinstein is self-imposed or imposed by the platform.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9684541?hl=en&ref_...

rayrag
If you don't want to verify your ID use FreeTube (desktop) or NewPipe (Android).

https://freetubeapp.io

https://newpipe.net/

smnrchrds
My first answer to "why do we need alternative app stores and sideloading on iOS" is always NewPipe.
crocodiletears
You can't watch age gated content on newpipe, ime. Throws an error.
rayrag
I currently don't have NewPipe installed but from I remember age restricted videos are hidden by default. Go to settings and toggle show age restricted videos to see them.
supernes
I'm worried this and other recent developments signal that there will be a major push to practically end anonymity on the Internet over the next couple of years. Services like Stripe Identity that make it trivial to implement, age gating in the name of "protecting children" from harmful content, real-name policies at account creation time for fighting misinformation and abuse, and more.

It's already here to some extent with the obligation to provide a phone number, but unlike a phone you can't just change your legal identity if you need to. Determined bad actors on the other hand will have no trouble farming ID docs from disadvantaged people to assume their identity online, through coercion or social engineering.

And soon everything you do and say online will have immediate, real-world ramifications.

8458e112e7b2
Maybe. Maybe only on the big-tech "major" platforms. There will likely be a pushback, specially from the "blockchain/crypto" world on pseudonymity [0]

[0]: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1249372482412273668

kodisha
Ye, good luck trying to sell/trade your crypto without verifying your self with a photo of your face + passport or driver's license.
ixacto
Wonder if the is verifiers will be using a gov backend for identity verification?

It’s kinda easy to photoshop an ID + passport so these systems can be abused. Could also use a convolutional neural network to generate a new photo.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
alpaca128
I've never had trouble downloading age-restricted videos using youtube-dl. So it's worth a shot using it to access the video that way. I think with mpv + youtube-dl you can alternatively watch the video directly.
aaron695
This no longer works.

Discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27353917

jazzyjackson
Just tried it since youtube-dl is updated every so often, and yeah that's quite unfortunate. After the latest brew upgrade:

  youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id6AqKIxd94"
  [youtube] id6AqKIxd94: Downloading webpage
  [youtube] id6AqKIxd94: Downloading embed webpage
  [youtube] id6AqKIxd94: Refetching age-gated info webpage
  ERROR: This video may be inappropriate for some users.
npteljes
And the embed trick doesn't work either. It just tells you to go to YouTube to watch the video.
new_guy
I think people forget that youtube is just one of literally hundreds of tube sites out there.

There's a lot of exciting innovation in the space and every day there's more and more niche orientated sites.

Bitchute, WTV, Rumble, Odysee, Joshwhotv, brandnewtube etc etc.

If Youtube wants to enforce this everyone will migrate to other services.

hdjjhhvvhga
Let's stop calling this process "age verification" and use the proper name, "identity verification".
rootsudo
This, 100%.

There is no need to know the identity of who you are. That flag, that index, that registry that records the timestamp of when you saw this content, from what location, from what region.

aeternum
Depends on the regulation. Often the law says that just asking for a date-of-birth is insufficient. I've written software in which I want nothing to do with PII but am forced to collect it due to short-sighted laws.
TechBro8615
I had to do this too (I didn’t do it obviously), despite the fact that my Gmail account itself is 17 years old
cygned
YouTube asks me to verify my age for some videos despite me paying for Premium with my credit card every month.
machinehermiter
I mean clearly youtube has poor control if a group of some sorts does an attack on a specific user to lower views.

With that said I just watched Timothy Nguyen's video about Eric Weinstein this weekend and it just confirmed everything I suspected about Eric. I didn't realize he even put in his paper he is not a physicist but an "entertainer".

I think Eric gained traction and brought Brett in on this. They are doing a new form of science fiction IMO. It doesn't really work though if they break character.

The occam's razor between two brothers who have had revolutionary ideas in physics, economics and biology all shelved by an establishment vs two brothers who are podcasters creating content is pretty straight forward.

I am not sure restricting the age like a rated R movie is the worst thing with what they are doing.

cdot2
"I just watched Timothy Nguyen's video about Eric Weinstein this weekend and it just confirmed everything I suspected about Eric." That's quite the sentence
8458e112e7b2
There are easy ways around this (for now). Youtube-dl, Newpipe (on Android).
[dead] foolzcrow
Censorship is never used by the good guys.
cpach
[deleted]
evv555
Consider supporting Bret. He is already broadcasting through alternative channels. The stance against youtube is deliberate and principled.
cpach
I support free speech, but I will not endorse him or donate any money to him.
jasode
If there's an automated algorithm that determines the prompt for "Sign in to confirm your age" ... it's has strange false positives.

Here's a video that requires age-confirmation:

"Weed Identification of Cool and Warm Season Weeds in the Lawn" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znCi9lpIy60

His channel is just typical lawn care stuff: https://www.youtube.com/c/bluecreel/videos

Maybe that's happening with Bret Weinstein's video.

jareklupinski
... it can't be just because of keywords like "weed" can it (a lot of his videos mention weed/s)
jazzyjackson
I am pretty tired of websites flagging content for "Community Standards" (more like corporate standards amirite) and then not telling me which standard has been violated. YouTube just links to [0] guidelines that cover all of your typical stuff, except I did learn that you're not allowed to contradict the World Health Organization on YouTube when it comes to COVID [1], but this video is from 2019 so that's not it...

Edit 1: Maybe their Hate Speech policy is a little wide by including "statements that one group is less than another, calling them less intelligent, less capable, or damaged" [2], as the last half hour or so engages in a bit of religion-bashing. Not saying the restriction is appropriate, just wondering what quote could possibly register as inappropriate.

Edit 2: Age restriction can be self imposed by a creator, it doesn't appear to me there's a way to tell if the restriction is from the user or the platform.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/community-g...

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en&ref_...

[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939?hl=en&ref_...

Trias11
That's their platform and they could do all kind of nonsense to users.

This of course gives users permission to use their platforms in any ways users see fit, including suggesting them to shove theor TOS down their bottoms.

xyzzy21
YouTube is doomed - they are already a zombie - already dead but doesn't know it.

I'm pretty much off YouTube at this point.

LargoLasskhyfv
The funny thing is they do this even when you're already logged into your account, where they have all sorts of data, including postal address and land line. Just not your mobile number.

Why is that? One hand not knowing what the other does, or what?

I noticed that with several other totally harmless videos over the last months.