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.
> It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to it's mechanics or feasibility.
It's not. Much of the world's governments (particularly those that follow the UK system) implement smaller laws and then delegate the implementation to statutory instruments/secondary legislation, written by experts and then adopted by ministers.
It seems suboptimal, but then so does the alternative of a "big beautiful bill" full of absurd detail where you have people voting it into law who not only haven't fucking read it but are now not ashamed that not only have they not fucking read it, nobody on their staff was tasked with fucking reading it and fucking telling them what the fuck is in it.
Lighter weight laws that establish intent and then legally require the creation of statutory instruments tend to make things easier, particularly when parliament can scrutinise the statutory instruments and get them modified to better fit the intent of the law.
It also means if no satisfactory statutory instrument/secondary legislation can be created, the law exists on the books unimplemented, of course, but it allows one parliament to set the direction of travel and leave the implementation to subsequent parliaments, which tends to stop the kind of whiplash we see in US politics.
ETA: for example, the secondary legislation committee in the UK, which is cross-party, is currently scrutinising these:
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.
> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.
Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.
Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.
From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.
So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.
The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.
"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."
Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after
But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.
Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
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.
> The only changes to the legislation came from some political horse trading with the Opposition to get it through the Senate.
Well that is the normal process of things, surely? I mean, (politics is the art of the possible) * (nobody really likes seeing how the sausage is made).
Yes, but it's kind of insulting when they make a song and dance of fake 'evidence-based policy' and community consultation, with a whole inquiry and inviting experts to testify in front of legislators and tell them that the bills are flawed and unworkable, and that the policy is flawed from the beginning, and they sit there asking questions and nodding and looking concerned, and then it's just roundly ignored...
This process also got thousands of public submissions, many of which would have been in opposition, but they didn't have time to go through them all so they only published a dozen or so...
> 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.
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.
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.
He literally just told you the solution. Install uBlock Origin on your teens' phone and use the right filter list. Unless of course, they are smart enough.
Yup. But apparently it seems like it might work for him. I do not know. They are probably smart enough to disable the extension. There are many other, fool-proof ways though.
> 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.
From a technical perspective there is so much you can do to secure things, including against theft. While it's hard to lock things down past 99.9% usage, it is not too hard to make token issuance secure enough for practical, wide-spread use (there are a plethora of crypto protocols out there to prove the point).
There's no guarantee that the government will pick the best standard, but one can hold out hope (e.g. when the US govt adopted Rijndael as the AES encryption standard).
> 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
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.
I was in Melbourne Central the other day and there were big ads up for identity verification platforms, where consumer brands normally put up their ads. That'll prime the brand recognition for everyone so that when the identity checks come in, people will feel more comfortable complying.
They aren't banning viewing videos, they're banning kids having an account I believe.
I'm sure their approach to enforcement will be something along the lines of relying on the websites to sort it out and fining them if they don't. The govt doesn't need to enforce the age check themselves or even provide or suggest a mechanism.
I imagine any smaller players in this market will just stay away from having an official presence in Australia.
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.
> This ban includes watching videos. The law says they must take action to prevent underage persons from accessing their services.
The law, as written:
> There are age restrictions for certain social media platforms. A provider of such a platform must take reasonable steps to prevent children who have not reached a minimum age from having accounts.
No commentary I have seen supports your interpretation.
Yes, but its also unregulated and full of shit, Moreover its designed to feed you more stuff that you like, regardless of the consequences.
For adults, thats probably fine (I mean its not, but thats out of scope) for kids, it'll fuck you up. Especially as there isnt anything else to counteract it. (think back to when you had that one mate who was into conspiracy theories. They'd get book from the library, or some dark part of the web. But there was always the rest of society to re-enforce how much its all bollocks. That coesn't exist now, as there isn't a canonical source, its all advertising clicks)
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.
YT still has the great instructional videos, but teens today (my son included) are mostly just scrolling the shorts just like TikTok. YT is heavily orienting itself as social media.
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.