Submitted 8 months ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/albanese-government-protecting-kids-social-media-harms
Oh boy, it’s Online Safety Act 2: Electic Boogaloo! Get ready for:
The trend of using child abuse as argument to implement media control mechanisms, is dangerous for society. There, i said it.
I was thinking about this being wrong. But then I realized that parents can still grant access to YT for their children. However the unattended restriction age should be lower imo.
The problem is too many parents not supervising their children at all, and letting the algo make them go down in a truly despicable pile of shit of auto-play queues. My oldest one is six, and if I leave her alone on her tablet or the family room TV with YT, setting her on a path of kpop dance practice videos or some popular non-english kids show, if I check back half an hour later, sure enough the thematic changes from (likely with the help of recommended videos as well) to mindless marble/magnet builder videos, some yanky animated minecraft story or even worse.
So now imagine a kid that gets no supervision at all, and an impressionable youth without critical thinking is seeking answers and then believes whatever they are told by a late millennial just saying bogus shit for the views.
I am not sure what the right solution is, and this may not be it, but at least Australia is trying something. Let’s see how it works out.
IMHO the best parental control is to disable the recommended videos sidebar on platforms like YT, be it via uBlock element hiding picker or via usercss.
Good. YouTube is a contributor to increasing massive societal polarisation. We don’t want kids these days turning to Nazis. Some of the kids and people I grew up with became extremist.
Wonderful. It’s already banned in my household.
Rare Australia W
Is Australia speedrunning into CCP ideology?
Can someone explain what “Albanese” means, please? Obviously not Albanian, but I’m still confused.
Albert Albanese is the name of Australia’s prime minister.
Oh. I’m not a native English speaker, but it seems the phrasing of “The Albanese Labor Government” is a bit unfortunate if you don’t know that?
Albanese is the name of the prime minister
All this child safety is just because they don’t want to do proper moderation. What about user safety? Scams and hate speech don’t belong for adults either
Sure, but adults should make their own decisions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a nanny state.
Good, social media is a bane on growth
Lol
youtube? the place with free quality documentaries, free knowledge in the easiest to digest video form about a huge variety of topics? the spot where you can learn life skills, cooking, hobbies, maths, physics, programming, among many others, with visualised tutorials showing every part of every step with explenations?
what on earth is happening to the internet these days? absolute insanity
social media is shit and i get restricting twitter or tiktok, but youtube? it seems so bizarre to me
Elsagate
The degree to which some of you stick your heads in the sand is stunning. How do you even reply to this in good faith? Between the algorithms, mis/disinformation, propaganda, hate speech, bullying, and general bullshit, I don’t understand how someone can either be this naive or this fucking dishonest.
There is tons of useless and polarizing stuff on YouTube.
There’s a lot of really bad slop on YouTube. Your algorithm might be curated to “documentaries”, but that’s far from the norm
it’s mostly “curated” to long form video essays about random bullshit, but i see your point
Youtube is the second largest Social Network
I never saw it that way I till I saw a report on what the preferred social media platforms for teens… and it was the number one slot at that time. Apparently teens (and others) have entire conversations in the comments, share videos with friends, and doom scroll YouTube.
And I don’t know if you’ve read YouTube comment threads (I don’t usually) but they can get pretty toxic, even on tame content. Not to mention all the FUD and propaganda being distributed there.
YT well known for radicalizing users. It as bad as ticktock or Instagram. there’s a lot of quality educational content on public TV.
YouTube is totally blocked for my son at home and on his phone and I myself avoid it as the plague as well. If he wants to learn stuff, I’m eager to buy him all the books he wants.
While all of that might be true, YouTube is also a for-profit cesspool of trash content, hate speech, and misinformation. An entire generation of gen z manosphere Nazi bootlickers got where they are watching “gaming videos” on YouTube.
It auto plays by default and their algorithms are dogshit, so you might start watching an educational video with your kid, but end up on a flat earth video fifteen minutes later, or much much worse.
When my son was younger, we severely limited his YouTube time and closely monitored what he was watching on it. Most parents don’t do that.
I dislike legislation like this too, but we’re not talking about PBS or a library here. Kids truly shouldn’t be on YouTube unattended.
Parenting should stay with parents. The more power the government gets, the more they will abuse it. When companies are restricted, they will see this as an opportunity to better identify adults better.
Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven’t been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we’ll watch with them on the account.
The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren’t comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.
What’s the deal with gaming videos? Do game streamers tend to be Nazis? Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.
I have struggled to filter with YouTube Kids what is allowed. The setup is default allow with channel denies (opposite of a good firewall), so I have taken to yt-dlp and Jellyfin to get around it. I don’t agree with the law as written, but I get the intent. Parents should be more active in their kids’s lives versus the state.
They can still view it I believe but can’t create an account. Also the whole thing is complete bullshit and is almost entirely for censorship and tracking all activity to a real identity.
qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
How difficult would it be to mirror most popular youtube channels to peertube if instance operators picked a few channels each and kept them updated?