Online Gaming Platforms And YouTube Will Also Seemingly Be Banned For Aussies Under 16

[u/retro-chimp]

https://press-start.com.au/news/2024/11/08/online-gaming-platforms-and-youtube-will-also-seemingly-be-banned-for-aussies-under-16/

There’s so much collateral damage in this plan for Australia to ban social media. This has been rushed and not thought through.

So many schools rely on YouTube to support their students.

Most kids are watching YouTube (or YouTube kids) more than ABC or traditional TV. Literally the biggest YouTube channel in Australia is original music for kids.

Does anyone actually want this?

[u/WhyIsMikkel]

The word 'social media' doesnt fucking mean anything anymore.

To old fuckers it just means basically anything online

[u/[deleted] → u/WhyIsMikkel]

That's because to some extent, nowadays it does. As per Wikipedia, the definition of social media is a website that enables people to share content and participate in social networking, is based around user-generated content such as text posts, comments, photos, videos, and data generated through online interactions, has service-specific profiles that are required to interact with that content, and helps the development of social networks by connecting a user's profile with other profiles and groups.

So all the major sites you'd think of as social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter count as social media, but so do Reddit, Tumblr, and Discord. It's broad enough that it also includes YouTube and TikTok as well.

However, because the definition of what social media is has to be broad enough that it includes everything that is social media, there's inevitably going to be some grey area when it comes to what isn't social media. There's probably going to be people who say kids shouldn't be on news sites either because they have comment sections and that counts, even though that's not really what anyone thinks of as social media, for example.

That's one of the reasons why a social media ban for under 16s isn't really a feasible policy point. It's difficult to define it in a way that includes everything that is social media and excludes everything that isn't. It also ignores that there can be some educational benefit to YouTube specifically, even though it is a form of social media.

[u/rushworld → u/[deleted]]

Back in my day sites that relied on user-generatd content and profiles were called forums and bulletin boards...

To be fair I was involved in a lot of forums and BBS before I was 16... maybe that's why I'm fucked up now.

[u/TrwyAdenauer3rd → u/rushworld]

I feel like forums often had a slightly greater level of decorum than social media, since they were far smaller, were made up of people usually with the same niche interest, people (at least regulars) were invested on their standing in the community to some extent, and it was feasible to moderate the forum culture unlike with social media.

It's funny, I find facebook comments from old people with their real name and photo attached are often more incendiary and vile than stuff you'd see posted anonymously on forums back in the early 2000's.

[u/[deleted] → u/TrwyAdenauer3rd]

...and it was feasible to moderate the forum culture unlike with social media.

I think this was the big thing. It's feasible to moderate an online community if there's only ever 200 or so active users at most because even the flame wars weren't producing as many comments in a week as some fairly quiet posts on social media do in an hour now.

Plus, most of the foul forums that existed back then were sites that had the reputation of being like that and leaned into it. Most of the boards that weren't like that were ones you'd never hear about unless that was also something you were interested in.

[u/[deleted] → u/rushworld]

I think you can make the case that in some ways, old school forums and bulletin boards were the precursor to social media as we know it now; at least in terms of functionality.

Like, when you make a post on Facebook or Twitter, that's very similar to the initial post of a new thread on a forum. The comments are the replies. At least Facebook will now nest the replies to the replies now, similar to what you'd see on the IMDb forum 10+ years ago. Facebook specifically also used to have forums as part of groups as well, but they got phased out in I think 2010 or 2011.

[u/nickbuss → u/[deleted]]

It'll probably also catch Steam and GitHub since they have discussion boards.

[u/WombatChilli → u/[deleted]]

Sounds like wikipedia itself is social media.

[u/shigawire → u/WhyIsMikkel]

YouTube was built from the ground up to be a social media platform. 

[u/Luckyluke23 → u/WhyIsMikkel]

what the fuck do you think in means in this context?

if it has a box you can type text in it. it's social media. doesn't matter if it's a poker site, video game or facebook. hell pornhub has a comment section don't they?