Good.
This is the digital equivalent of making sure the cigarettes and liquor are locked up, because there’s a wealth of evidence that social media is harmful to young people.
If you didn’t want to have to actually parent your own children instead of parking them in front of a screen that’s driving them toward self-hatred and fascism, you shouldn’t have procreated in the first place.
Now they can be parked in front of traditional television like Millennials and Gen X.
It’s objectively a healthier option. All for it.
Having a parent in charge of programming instead of an algorithm makes a world of difference.
Why do you think a parent is in charge of the TV? Algorithms and statistics are determining that schedule too. Even the ads you see on there are targeted towards your area and demographic.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
But that’s okay.
I’m not trying to be pedantic, but how is it apples and oranges? Both are media delivery systems that are fine tuned to manipulate your opinion. The internet is more fine tuned for individual targeting, but both systems are designed to be exploitative of viewers.
The mainstream media and those who follow it have been confidently incorrect about the state of reality for 10 years or more now—they haven’t proven themselves to be any better than the internet for a source of truth.
Sure but you really don’t see the difference between an algorithm aimed at a large sample and set months in advance and one that is changing in real time aimed at individuals? The difference in scale is staggering. Hardly the same.
Agree to disagree, I guess. In my opinion, it is echo chambers that are the biggest danger, and TV is a bigger echo chamber than the internet.
There are leftist and activist websites you can visit if you choose. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have a diverse set of creators you can watch, even if they arent pushed by the algorithm. There is no major leftist or activist news organization on American television, and they tolerate no opposing viewpoints on their respective channels.
Nanny State. Been saying it.
This kills the crab.
Back to LAN parties? Because those were pretty fun to be honest…
And social.
And really, they’ve never been easier, with the advent of gaming laptops and the Steam Deck and etc. - no more having to lug a desktop PC, mouse, keyboard, CRT monitor, and a box of cables and find room in your friend’s garage to set it up.
And there were always fun SMB shares to look through 😅
sed ‘s/fun/disgusting/’
In a city, maybe, though some Australians live on pretty remote farms. Going to be hard to set up a LAN with your buddies down the street.
kagis for discussion
https://flemmingbojensen.com/2007/08/07/the-australian-outback/
Stations (Australian for a ranch/farm) in the Outback are absolutely huge and the nearest neighbor is usually hundreds of kilometers away. People stay in touch through satellite phones, internet, cb radio and kids get their education long distance through the brilliant School of the Air.
Even this should be pretty easy — just connect directly (easy on IPv6) or through whatever tunnel you need depending on the game. Tailscale comes to mind, but you could do L2 tunneling with OpenVPN if you need to simulate an actual LAN.
I don’t understand why you’d need a central server at all.
This will never work. YouTube is a part of education now.
Maybe that explains democracy falling apart everywhere
They said “a part of” not the sole providers of. Also there is tons of education content on YouTube. I have learned so much from YouTube. It’s actually a really great place to go if you are looking to learn a new skill.
Maybe that hasn’t been your experience with it but that’s what I use it for the majority of the time.
I have learned a lot from YT, it’s a really good plataform for that. Languages, programming electronics, and the list goes on… that was my YT experience during the 2010s. But there is also a lot of bs out there, maybe fuled by monetization, extreme groups or just because mankind is stupid at its core, that is purely aimed to diffuse nonsense, catch peoples attention or plainly influence people views.
Where I live, revisionism is teach at schools as if it is the real thing. “A part” sometimes is enough.
My comment was originally thought more as a joke than as a real complaint, but in all seriousness, YT has become an extremely good tool both to learn and to influence people. I understand that “regulating it” would be also another double edged sword, but something has to be done.
My entire subscription feed is hundreds of edutainment channels pretty much. It’s my alternative to the discovery/history/science channel for the modern age (and tbh it’s higher quality too in many cases)
It’s also really really good for learning practical skills like home repairs and automotive maintenance.
Some favorite channels:
Nilered
Styropyro
Practical engineering
Technology Connections
Breaking taps
The thought emporium
There are tons of highly educational YouTube channels, and traditional media has completely abandoned that kind of content. The average YouTube video has more educational content than “The Learning Channel.” And you are more likely to get accurate information about history than “The History Channel”
This is a boomer take.
What you say is true, but also ignores the alt-right pipelining that YouTube and others are seemingly complicit in, or at the very least is the result of perverse incentives.
And I’ll say the exact same thing about TikTok. It’s serving as primary sources for many problems around the world, it’s giving more broad and informed, collegiate level discussions of the world, and it’s full of brainrotting limbic hijacking. All true and I don’t think any generation is fully equipped to deal it.
We can also see historically that banning a “vice” has never effectively removed the vice from society.
Yes the acquiescence of all editorial and publishing decisions by these tech companies to “the algorithm” (which somehow absolves them of responsibility) is the main culprit there.
These platforms are more like radio infrastructure or TV infrastructure than any particular channel, and for the most part anything they specifically promote and fund doesn’t tend to be that alt right content which is completely algorithm driven and ad/sponsor/dark money supported.
We need to employ nuance when discussing these platforms.
are you under 16
no
ok cool here’s a youtube short when an AI voice tells you an AI-written story over vaguely related stock footage
The planet is fucking melting and elected leaders are writing laws on herding cats
I’ve been using the internet for longer than I’ve been an adult.
I still sometimes add +10 years to date of birth fields out of habit.
Might as well have issued a mandate to nom a spoonful of sand daily.
easy to just always set your birthdate as jan 1900 or 1950
Notice how 11 year olds aren’t making bank accounts? It’s actually very easy to enforce age-restricted access online; more to your point, the US just doesn’t do so. Which will be our downfall as a generation raised on YouTube and instagram just hit voting age and overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump.
I had a bank account when I was 11.
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Doing a real good job of building bridges to convey your ideas, I see…
Unless of course you don’t want to share thoughts and just want to be right.
With banks there’s a financial incentive for private institutions to provide barriers. Barriers that can still be bypassed with the right tools and initiative. That incentive doesn’t exist for media providers. They just want their content as accessible as possible. Meaning any roadblocks they’re forced to utilize will be half-assed at best.
Not to mention it’s a stupid idea in the first place. Banning something doesn’t make it better, it just makes it more tantalizing. Just look at prohibition, or abstinence only education. All it does is create a more unsafe environment for those outlets.
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I understand where you’re coming from, but if you dig deeper into the problem, I think that it becomes clearer and clearer that social media is more of a symptom than the cause of the problem. The real issue is that people are becoming more and more aware that the system is failing them - wages are stagnant but prices are soaring, protections against the worst excesses of corporations are eroding, climate change is causing people to lose their homes and livelihoods…
People are desperate for someone to blame and for an alternative. Fascism offers easy answers that let people blame some “others” but just makes things worse. Leftists have uncomfortable answers that require you to admit your complicity in the system before you can begin to dismantle it.
That comparison is completely out of touch. You making a bank account means entering a strictly regulated contractual relationship. And for starters banks will require you to have an address and send letters to it. Do you want every online website to first send you an activation code by post?
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Banks require a valid ID and a social security number lol
Yes, correct. Congratulations on understanding the basic premise of this discussion.
And therefore will be prime targets by the government to act as an identity broker for services with an online age requirement.
Soon in EA games, pay this microtransaction to verify your age.
You should have learnt by now that eating and having a home trumps (pun intended) the luxury of environmentalism. I suspect these liberals will have the same outcome that happened to the democrats
We can’t fix global warming, let alone anything else, if the trend of alt-right radicalization of an entire generation continues — already a 30 point swing in just a decade, as evidenced by this last election. It’s a global phenomenon. There is simply no reason why a child should be on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok. And btw, it’s extremely easy to enforce, because in Australia they’ll just fine the corporation for every infraction. Camera + ID = problem solved.
The radicalisation of young men stems from blaming them for being straight and white. It also stems from a dividing culture of men and women. This is the product of all of those “girls / boys” memes.
They grew up in a good, progressive world, where they understand sexualities and understand mental health. They grew up being taught that it’s okay to be diverse and that it’s okay to be as you are. But then it turns around and suddenly they’re all to blame for their race, or their orientation, things that they cannot prevent–Well, no wonder they’re going backwards. Once their favourite games and hobbies are infiltrated by wokeness and forcefulness, this is how they respond.
Should’ve realised that perhaps forcing social equity isn’t a good idea, and blaming young men and boys for the faults of society doesn’t gain their favour. Nah, instead let’s double-down even.
Honestly, you kinda said it yourself. The whole “woke” phenomenon doesn’t exist in real life. It’s a purely online reactionary movement. The young men I work with have zero issues; they live their lives in peace. Then they get online and are told by the manosphere and red pill communities that everyone hates men and that being masculine is bad and all kinds of other UNTRUE crap that has nothing to do with reality.
I’m not saying young men aren’t struggling. They are, don’t get me started. I’m saying that the whole game of gender wars is happening exclusively online; it’s mostly imaginary; and it’s toxic as fuck.
I’ve experienced wokeness in real life. I was told by a woman that I hate Taylor Swift because of sexism.
No, I hate her because she’s an environmental hazard and bland. There is also a lot of mockery of lonely men, where their anxieties and fears are handwaved away
You also can’t say it isn’t present in real-life. Online interconnectivity is reality now.
There’s a big difference between a sexist defense of Taylor Swift by an ignorant fan (much as men might react to the news that red meat is carcinogenic), and the hyperbolic reactionary paranoia that everything about masculinity is under attack by a woke feminist Marxist mob, which is what Jordan Peterson claims.
This is straight up standard right wing propaganda. A much simpler explanation is that the platforms are feeding people false realities for profit. Rage gets the most engagement. Right wing propaganda works extremely well for that and as an added benefit it produces cohorts who vote in the interest of the platform owners. It’s a twofer.
It actually goes both ways
Nope. The radicalization is a global phenomenon that started in 2016, coinciding perfectly with the rise of the online manosphere and red-pill movement.
It goes much more than that. It started as the rise of atheism, where impressionable young boys, wanting to be rebels discovered the dopamine rush of dunking on religious wackjobs like the Westboro Baptist Church. Not blaming atheism, just pointing out it started here.
It then extended further to video games and gamergate. Then they started getting political, which naturally led them down to 2016 and current times.
The point remains that the majority of them blamed wokeness
Sure, atheism was a big online movement in the 2010 era, but it was co-opted in 2015 by the “intellectual dark web,” from Sam Harris to Joe Rogan and the Weinstein fuckheads. That’s when things really started to get bad.
The atheist movement was already fizzling out after the death of Hitchens a few years earlier, and was then metastasizing into something ugly (as you said, video games, anti woke bullshit), until it was eventually subsumed by reactionaries like Jordan Peterson, who burst onto the scene with his crypto-Christian nonsense. Joe Rogan started to get more and more conspiretarded, and the rest is history.
Anyway, the YouTube alt-right pipeline is a well researched and documented phenomenon and when I have to spend all day arguing with 15 year olds about why Andrew Tate sucks, please take my word for it, they need to be kept off of social media. They’re too stupid and vulnerable.
I vomit in my mouth every time I see these dumbasses.
You can’t educate them or parent your own child? I don’t want to have my ID forced online just to engage in social media.
Apparently not. Right wing radicalization has all but won worldwide. It’s clear we can’t have nice things. Maybe we can save the smaller platforms? I’m open to other ideas, personally.
As an American I think the color key of that chart is designed to annoy me… Actually now that I look closer I am sure the whole thing is designed to piss me off. Why aren’t they using the same date ranges?
The charts seem to show the time span for each country where the opinions of men and women were fairly similar and how they’ve diverged since. Some countries started diverging more recently than others.
Camera + ID = zero privacy for anyone
is a child watching tom scott really a bad thing?
also if someone doesn’t want to provide service to Australia because they don’t want to handle IDs, how would you block Australians? ip bans won’t work because a child can use vpns, and if you want to verify by foreign ID for this then you still need ID checking
australia doing this makes it worse for everyone in the world
also a child could also just ask their parents to verify for them
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Let’s research the effects of social media on teenagers before making up our minds. As for anonymity on public forums — maybe on unpopular websites, we can keep that up, but for the big ones where everyone congregates, we tried anonymous trolling for 20 years and, as a result, every democracy is dying. We can’t maintain civilization without shared space of public knowledge, and that has been severely degraded by trolls and foreign agitators.
Yeah Facebook isn’t anonymous at all and is full of more trolls, liars, bad faith actors, and corpos than anywhere else.
root cause solution: outlaw advertising
advertising is what makes social media bad, because it creates an incentive system such that more traffic = more profits, and so companies are incentivised to create conflict (radicalise people) so they stay on the site more
Jordan Peterson was making 50k a month on Patreon when he flipped his shit in 2016. His videos were unmonetized. Similarly, creators are very vulnerable to audience capture.
If we get rid of advertising on YouTube they’d adopt a subscription model which would suffer the exact same fate.
I’m telling you, easiest thing is to keep kids out. There’s just no reason for kids to be on Instagram and for foreign agitators to be using social media pretending to be Americans.
Online gaming and related entertainment (e.g. streaming) is a breeding ground for red pill ideology. It’s an epidemic. All this rizz, sigma, whatever stuff is toxic red pill, value-based ideology bleeding to the younger generations’ culture.
“Sigma” sure, but saying “rizz” (etymology: short for charisma) is red pill is like saying talking about dating at all is red pill (and black Americans used it before Kai Cenat made it mainstream.)
Do not use the Trump victory as an excuse for an unfettered fear and disdain of young people unless you wish for more news like it.
Never said anything about disdain for young people. You think kids 10 and under should be concerned with rizz and how attractive they are? Potentially how their rizz can get them sex? It’s part of the value-based thinking that red pill ideology is based on. Just because it might have origins in AAVE doesn’t mean it’s divorced from red pill influence.
The problem is that the way we talk about dating has been dominated by people with a political agenda.
Because 10 year olds have been talking about dating longer than red pill has been around. Not dead seriously, but they’re not unaware.
Not saying kids of past generations were less influenced by misogyny, but I think the evolution of underground incels to the rising popularity and openness of red pill podcasters/youtubers is shaping the way kids are influenced by misogyny. Think American Pie vs. Andrew Tate.
Does this mean a rise in single player and couch-coop games? 🤩
Might I add: they also are finished day one with no massive 70gb patches to fix a slew of problems.
Omg stop teasing
ksp 2 cyberpunk starfield
single player corporate games are still corporate games, removing the multiplayer aspect doesn’t remove the shittiness entirely
… Yeah, about that.
The vast majority of the industry kind of… forgot… how to do that.
Also basically every big name single player game requires an online account to work.
I’d would not expect either of those things to change.
Maybe Australian kids can learn how to emulate retro games?
Of course one could also make the effort and instead force these platforms to provide actually useful parental supervision,guidance and parental information. But a blanked bann of course is far easier and much more catchy.
So the 14 year old that moved overseas/away can no longer legally play a game free for 6year and above in a private lobby. Neither can a 12 year old play with his divorced dad living out of state,even when they play a coop without any interaction with third parties.
All educational resources on YouTube? No longer available. Renowned youth programs from outside Australia? No longer available.
Even parents who let their kids use responsible to make sure they slowly adapt to social media are now criminalised. Getting your 13 year old a Facebook accounts have full control of so it can be member in two closed groups (local clubs) and chat with relatives? Nope,not possible.
Technically even using WhatsApp or Matrix can fall under this ban,btw.
Because it’s wording is so bad.
- The sole or primary purpose of the service is to enable online social interaction between two or more end users;
- The service allows end users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end users;
The first two rules basically just mean no one can interact. A version of YouTube could exist within these rules.
- The service allows end users to post material on the service.
So that’s basically the Internet. You can’t visit Rotten Tomatoes for film reviews. Maybe you only show the critics score. But aren’t they also end users? How about a newspaper? Newspaper has an opinion section. How many opinion writers can you have?
All children must now be locked alone in a windowless room and fed via robot until the age of 16 for their own safety. ~/s if that isn’t obvious. But seriously I thought US conservitives were draconian.~
How?
To the “can’t enforce this because it can be circumvented” argument - this is missing the point of most laws. The intention is to apply to the majority, not to be foolproof. Getting most to stop a harmful behavior already gets us most of the benefits. We can never stop everyone.
Ok, and how will it be enforced at all?
Hopefully it’ll just be a “Are you over 16?” box.
Digital ID sounds fucking disastrous.
The US in 6 months: “fuckin watch me.”
It’ll be more than a question. But again, how will Australia enforce that? Even if Australia provided a free API for age checks, it would still be a hassle to implement it. Are eg Fediverse devs going to do that?
Australian law enforcement can seize servers that are physically in Australia. It can also cut off cash flow for any business with paying customers in Australia. And all the rest? Even aside from free VPNs, there is a lot of internet that they can’t touch.
They can lean on the likes of Youtube or Facebook to steer people in a more government approved direction. But as soon as people become annoyed or bored, they just go elsewhere beyond government control. If ID requirements are onerous for ordinary people, they will avoid compliant sites from the start.
The government could make Australian ISPs use a blacklist or a whitelist. Serious enforcement is possible, but not without going full totalitarian.
And that is the thinly veiled real goal here. If you need a proper age verification process on most platforms, you need an identification process on most platforms. And that conveniently allows to associate everything you do on every platform to you personally. So if the government doesn’t like what you do, they can oppress you more easily.
According to the 3 criteria mentioned in the article, YouTube wouldn’t need to be banned, logging in to YouTube would be banned. YouTube is still functional (mostly) when logged out, and wouldn’t violate those 3 criteria. The other services mentioned, like gaming, would be banned.
Not everyday I’m on the fuck you got mine side of the argument
watch this space, australia is the testing ground for new services overseas. If this rolls out effectively in Australia, you can expect it in your own country soon.
Amazing news, honestly. First ray of hope for the future of humanity I’ve seen for as long as I can remember. Ideologically, things have been spiraling out of control with the amount right wing and authoritarian misinformation.
So a government issued id linked to whatever your watching is going to fix this problem?
Because that’s the only way to implement this
Yes, probably. We’d get rid of the 90% of content that’s just Chinese and Russian trolls, for starters. It’ll also lower the temperature of discussions.
Not amazing news if it means rolling out digital ID. say goodbye to anonymity.
Anonymity on social media is how we got here. You can have anonymity elsewhere on the web. Wanna post on instagram comments? You shouldn’t be anonymous.
So how exactly would you decide which platforms are allowed to be anonymous then?
Number of users is an obvious example. There are others.
So what happens when a platform grows and that threshold is reached one day? Force everyone to de-anonymize and potentially reveal sensitive information about themselves or abandon their account?
There’s just no good way to force only some to de-anonymize without running into problems.
While I believe in the right to online anonymity, I also don’t think that de-anonymization would even work, when I see the same garbage being posted in places that enforce real names. It just doesn’t seem like a detractor to those types of people.
Instead, I’d rather want to see harsher punishments for big sites failing to moderate their content. I’d also take a look at these personalized “recommendation” engine and maybe ban them altogether. (Bonus points if it also affects personalized ads.)
Try to come up with a reasonable process for transitioning between the thresholds or stop pretending you’re interested in anything but proving your point.
Does it align with my opinion. If not, it’s misinformation.
Agreed. I’ve grown up with the development of the WWW and where we are today is completely different than where we used to be in the 90s and 2000s. The consolidation, universal access and the profit maximization via rage farming has put societies globally in an unprecedentedly precarious position. This isn’t your uncle’s Internet anymore. It’s a hyper-personalized engagement-maximizing corporate experience for all but a small fraction of people who were lucky enough to escape it. Anyone feeling I’m overreacting should spend an hour with their old account on Facebook.
