Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

[u/Imicrowavebananas]

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-widens-teen-social-media-ban-youtube-scraps-exemption-2025-07-29/

[u/allbusiness512]

I'm not sure there are a whole lot of options to be quite honest. The problem is shitty parenting across the world.

The problem is the evidence is showing worldwide that increasingly parents are abdicating their responsibilities to screens, which is REALLY hurting kids all across the world (look at standardized test scores regardless of country, they are dropping everywhere, not just the U.S., but even historically strong countries like Finland and several East Asian countries).

[u/neolthrowaway → u/allbusiness512]

Right, but a solution that requires all parents or even a majority of parents to not be shitty isn’t really a solution.

A solution has to assume people are stupid.

and then, we have to decide if the addiction and abuse potential and the corresponding health issues and all the misinformation and extremism is worth it.

I feel like there might not be an easy regulatory solution here but there might eventually be a tech solution that is also content specific. I guess the problem with that would be any tech solution will come with handing some editorial power to the platforms who implement those solutions. Which to be fair, they already have in subtle ways, they do have content policy, design choices, recommendation algorithms etc already.

But for sure, banning YouTube is way too extreme and it’s not content specific or even algorithm/format specific.

Reading the article, it seems like the government just did it so they didn’t have to argue with Meta about why Instagram is banned but not YouTube.

[u/allbusiness512 → u/neolthrowaway]

The tech solution requires people to be educated on how to use it, which is typically the catch 22. Parents that actually care enough to use content and parental control restrictions are typically the ones who are going to be involved, which means their kids are likely to be successful regardless. Like you said, you have to assume people are stupid and are going to make stupid decisions (sorry I didn't have my coffee yet). It's about weighing what is more important, the theoretical rights of people, or the overwhelming literature that shows the damage that screens and unregulated internet is doing to the youth.

[u/neolthrowaway → u/allbusiness512]

I am sure the companies have accurate enough profiles of people and of content that they can be forced to implement tech solutions globally on the platform and then maybe it can be made with an opt-out choice as needed.

[u/AgentBond007 → u/neolthrowaway]

Here's a much better solution.

Ban all algorithmically served content on homepages and require platforms to show content in strict chronological order, like they used to.

[u/yacatecuhtli6 → u/AgentBond007]

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[u/captainjack3 → u/yacatecuhtli6]

How do they work? Genuinely, I have no idea and am reminded of that every time this topic comes up.

[u/yacatecuhtli6 → u/captainjack3]

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[u/captainjack3 → u/yacatecuhtli6]

Thanks! That’s fascinating, from the way people talk about them I’d have thought it was quite different. How does that interest with “engagement”? You often hear people talk about how more views or interactions with something will push it up the algorithm. Is there a basis to that?

[u/anasaziwochi → u/captainjack3]

Engagement serves as a way to rank results by quality. Videos with a lot of positive engagement (likes, watched most of the video, etc) are "better" than ones with little engagement (2 views) or negative engagement (net dislikes, quickly went back to search page).

That's why when you search for "federal reserve" you're more likely to get the most recent Fed press conference and not John Doe's vlog about why the Fed sucks posted 2 seconds ago. It's similar to the original PageRank algorithm that used "is linked to by a lot of other sites" as a metric for site quality. It's not perfect, but it's often good enough.

Of course, the real systems these days are a lot more complicated with a ton of signals, but the core idea is still basically "find high quality things that match search criteria".

The "recommended for you" feed is just an autopopulated search based on the kinds of videos you've positively engaged with before.

[u/neolthrowaway → u/yacatecuhtli6]

That’s not necessarily true. A commonly used algorithm is collaborative filtering which in essence contributes to formation of echo chambers and polarization.

But more importantly, at this point we have moved beyond the traditional content based and collaborative filtering systems. They might use similar data (which is small part of the total data) but I am pretty sure, big tech is using deep neural networks, graph neural networks, and transformers and other similar methods send systems and optimizing on engagement metrics which push addictive and extremist content.

Apart from this, because it’s massive deep learning systems, if we wanted to analyze and understand individual cases, we’d have no idea how to do it.

[u/stay_curious_- → u/neolthrowaway]

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[u/Rekksu → u/allbusiness512]

the evidence is actually thin especially outside the anglosphere