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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted.
These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.
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?
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.
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
Mass Internet censorship in the Western world started in 2020 with restrictions on Covid information and discussion. This is just the logical conclusion.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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. 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
104 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadAnd 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)
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
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
No silly age IDs and selfies, no unstable and unsafe procedures, no permanent damage.
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.
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 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.
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.
Government: lol, every HTTP request must include your government ID, period :)
These are also the people who have essentially outsourced a lot of upbringing of their kids to the govt. They couldn't be bothered with the nuances of the lives their kids lead.
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.
Not in the idealistic sense that you imply, so this has always been normalized, and variations of such policies have always been implemented
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/
Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.