I certainly don’t think there should be a social media ban, but YouTube has just as much of the worst of what they want to ban the other platforms for, it would be nonsense to exclude it if one does exist.
A carve out for a much improved YouTube Kids maybe - but the Shorts product is just TikTok with all the negatives, and a non-logged in YouTube account slides people so quickly into awful content.
There’s plenty of good on YouTube - but that’s true for most of the platforms they seek to ban. Carve outs for the companies with better lobbying is a bad outcome.
If YouTube is indeed included in the ban, paging @Leo_Puglisi6 and @austip could you please launch a new streaming service for 6 News, in the form of an app for phones and tablets? Kinda like how independent media outlets also have their streaming service apps?
That would be the best move, and under 16s could still follow you there. Seems we’ve all pretty much lost the fight to stop YT from being included in the ban at this rate.
In my opinion, rather than a ban on under 16s, we have a code of conduct for platforms such as changing algorithms to be less addicting, automatic filtering of harmful material that you could choose to turn off once you are over the age of 18 as well as a ban on Advertising to under 18s at all.
Being in the UK where the new draconian laws have started regarding digital ID’s, I now have to use a privacy browser to look at certain news and anything it deems “adult content”. It’s bloody stupid.
I am very concerned by this ban and the privacy implications it causes. As I said before, it would only lead to disaster and god forbid the implications of uploading your face or Id on the internet to access a service such as the information being misused or used to track down types of people that Pauline Hanson doesn’t like if she becomes Prime Minister.
I don’t know if that’s proposed there. I started using Brave browser as it has inbuilt ad-blockers that block YouTube ads perfectly, and luckily it has a TOR private browser function that gets around any UK censorship things as it hides your location. Otherwise people are paying for VPN’s now.
Children will be banned from having YouTube accounts from December, with the federal government backflipping on an earlier decision to exempt the video platform from the national under-16s social media restrictions.
The decision, to be confirmed by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the communications minister, Anika Wells, on Wednesday, is likely to set off a furious reaction from the Google-owned YouTube, which will hold a major event for politicians in Parliament House on Wednesday night.
YouTube will be included as one of the age-restricted social media platforms, alongside Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and others. Last month, the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, citing a survey of 2,600 children, said nearly four in 10 children had reported exposure to harmful content on YouTube – “the most frequently cited platform in our research”.
Inman Grant noted that children would still be able to view YouTube videos when logged out as the legislation was limited to preventing children from having accounts.
That’s a bummer.
But I am pretty sure that there are similar platforms like YouTube that have even worse and more harmful content than YouTube. Very hypocritical if someone cannot subscribe to a positive channel or comment on a video on YouTube but can subscribe and comment on a video on say Rumble or Bitchute which hosts harmful and hateful material that YouTube doesn’t allow.
Don’t forget the upcoming lawsuit, looks like the gloves are off.
