Juice Media are always great, but this is excellent even by their standards. The fact that they lead with the fact that banning kids is just a patch on the real problem (which is harmful algorithms) is just bang on. Also highlighting the many beneficial things social media can do, the fact that the ban introduces major privacy risks, and the incredibly untransparent way in which it was rushed through Parliament.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me that what should actually be done is regulation of the algorithms.
It’s incredible that social media companies can basically give free crack to people and not have to disclose the recipe…at bare minimum behind closed doors to an ombudsman.
Of course, we are talking about the same Government that commissioned a study into problem gambling, and then completely ignored it after it came back with 31 recommendations, including the phased-in banning of gambling advertising (recommendations 16 and 26). Two and a half years later, the Government has given no response. This despite the fact that they are required by House of Representatives rules to respond within 6 months. So actually solving problems, even when they're given a clear roadmap to how to solve the problem, doesn't seem to be high on Albanese's agenda.
I’m not even Australian…Canadian. I just like chiming in because somebody down there is at least trying to do things…even if it’s usually shitty things.
Up here in my province in the last decade the flood gates opened on gambling…booze…everything. The government basically says “fuck you if we raise you to be an addict…give us your money until you die so rich people can pay less taxes”.
Australia's gambling problem is huge. We have 0.3% of the world’s population, but 18% of its poker machines. And 75% of the pokies outside of casinos. Nearly every pub, bowls club, RSL club, etc. has a room full of pokies. That's allowed in every state except Western Australia, though it was banned in my home state until the '90s. I don't know much about Canada, but I've heard there's been a relatively recent surge in the problem of gambling over in America over the last few years. I believe it is the case that Australia led the world in allowing gambling to totally overrun professional sport, setting a template that America could follow, for the worse.
That’s horrible. We have a couple provinces that do that.
The city near where I live was hit bad by outsourcing…it was a manufacturing town back in the 80s. A few years back they brought in a giant Casino with promises of making it a tourist destination. Predictably, nobody wants to come to a town that’s an armpit…so most of the gamblers are locals.
Yeah, unless you can succeed in turning your city into the next Vegas or Macau, gambling is pretty much all negatives. We're at a point here where I honestly wish the giant casino was the only problem we have with gambling. And the casino itself is a big enough problem even aside from app-based sports betting and ads for that. Our huge new casino opened up a year or two ago. It has its own bridge that funnels people directly from the extremely popular pedestrianised tourist/cultural area on one side of the river (if you happen to be a parent of a child who's watched a lot of Bluey, you'd recognise Southbank from its appearances in that show, though I don't know if they call it by that name) into the casino's landing area. And they've been allowed to degrade the major riverside bike path, the city's busiest commuter route for cyclists, into a shared path and plaza, with even further degradations regularly when they use (sorry "activate") the area to run commercial events. So the casino is allowed to significantly degrade the entire area even for people who never have anything to do with them.
YouTube's parent controls allowed me to set "age appropriate content" sort of(my kids are older) disabled comments, remove ads with premium. But they never allowed me to remove shorts or recommendations either for myself or my kids because they want the addiction dial set to 11. The government have made a mess of things but the companies are far from innocent. It's a shame the govt went after age verification instead of consumer rights to disable all the crap. Very poorly advised. Big tech will come out of this stronger and more evil and will work out ways to target vulnerable people without logins.
But they never allowed me to remove shorts or recommendations either for myself or my kids
Enhancer for YouTube works on your computer. YouTube ReVanced works on Android phones, if you want these features.
These are unofficial workarounds for features that could be regulated if esafety had a clue and weren't working for the industry. Google could add options in acct settings and in family link. They don't because they make more profit by driving engagement.
Kids will now watch YouTube without logins,.lose their hand picked educational subscriptions and get lowest common denominator engagement bait on their front page. The ALP just handed kids over to the bad guys. I am furious. I will probably block YT via DNS now because the gov took my parental control away. They clearly don't give a fuck about my kids.
For my youngest I use pipepipe on an android tablet.
No ads.
No feed / recommendations.
Just the channels I subscribe to.
The final straw with stock android apps was years ago with my eldest when it showed an add for women's g strings in the middle of a fucking educational video about cats.
Yep. The ads are worse than the content. I am sure the government doesn't care. They love that industry almost as much as the gambling and mining industries. I was happy to pay family premium and have some portion of the revenue go to creators though I wasn't happy about the multiple price rises.
I would be using specialized apps if I had little kids but I gave my little kids ABC for Kids and a media library instead when they were young. They are older now and I want them to learn to be responsible media consumers with some assistance. I also want them to be able to use their settings across a wide range of devices. They have access to a large number of devices with an assortment of operating systems. A kiosk solution isn't what I am looking for. Youtube's family accounts and premium gave me everything apart from removing shorts and front page which I could do with browser extensions. Those last two are what should have been regulated IMO.
I was happy to pay family premium and have some portion of the revenue go to creators
Yeah same. I was a super early adopter in fact, and paid for it back when it was called YouTube Red. But then in the wake of Elsagate, YouTube cracked down on a bunch of long-established good creators, cutting off small-time creators from any revenue, and introducing stricter algorithmic checks on bigger creators. That was the last straw for me, after years of them doing the wrong thing by creators by ignoring fair use and censoring valuably content. I cut off my Red subscription then and there, and started installing adblockers.
Today, I pay for Nebula to give back to some of the best creators on the site, as well as get some exclusive and early content.
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I hope the search engine signin verification doesn’t make this annoying. I have no idea of the extent it affects the actual email address.
Context: An android I intended to use for Revanced requires a previous Gmail login to unlock the phone (although it’s brand new), and the sneaky workaround also hinges on the Gmail signin. (Though if done right it may not need a complete one. It depends also if it works on that phone.)
And it won’t make calls until unlocked so I can try to call from another phone with the IMEI number but if that doesn’t work… can’t use the phone.
If it’s too much of a stuff around I’ll just have to buy a secondhand unlocked android.
Welp…I work with kids and I previously supported the ban….but I’ve done a 180.
Yeah…you’re going to save a couple kids…but you’re also going to prevent many more kids from accessing community or services, and that going to be bet bad.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I 100% support the stated intent of the ban. It's just a terrible method to go about it. Facebook is known to have commissioned internal studies about the psychological effects of changes to their algorithm, and then when those studies show the change causes harm, but also produce a little more profit, they go with the profit every time. Why don't we make that illegal?
If we have to do age-gating, why not require it to be done in a privacy-preserving way, such as parental controls, zero-knowledge proofs, or blind signatures? Parental controls would, in fact, be by far the easiest for everyone involved, and the only information that would actually need to flow is from the parent to their kids' devices, and then the devices reporting "yes, this is a child" or "no, this is not a child".
The answer is: because the government didn't care. It didn't want to actually fix the problem. It didn't want to listen to experts' opinions or consider the broader public's concerns. It wanted to win some quick easy PR. That's why submissions into the legislation were open for just one day, and why Parliament didn't even take the time to consider the small number of submissions that were able to be made in that limited window. A government that is acting seriously in response to a chronic threat (I can make some exception for quick responses into sudden, unexpected, acute crises) does not behave in this way. Ever. Good legislation takes time, and this sort of hurried response only indicates that it knew it was doing the wrong thing, and wanted to minimise the amount of time it was exposed to criticism.
👆 All of this.
Parental controls can still be used to isolate if the parents are extremely religious or abusive but this is a much more reasonable and effective way to go about it.
Will some kids get around it? Yes, some kids will get around whatever. They will also get around this impending legislation.
Because aim of this low is not to protect kids, but to erase last drops of privacy in the internet. Just another brick in the wall. Kids are just collateral.
Honestly I don't think so. It would have been so easy for the politicians to not include a rule that specifically bars sites from using government ID as their only age verification method. And to not include a stipulation that any information gathered for age verification must not be used for any other purposes. But they did include those.
Hanlon's Razor seems the best thing to apply here. There's a lot of evidence of incompetence. Not a lot of good evidence of nefarious purpose.
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It wanted to win some quick easy PR.
This is what baffles me. I may be out of touch, but I haven't seen a single response in support of the thing. Seems more like a big PR fail to me.
Not seen any of the polling, the comments under politicians' Facebook posts about it, or heard interviews on the ABC? It most definitely is a very popular policy. Unfortunately, that's mostly because of a lack of understanding of the nuance. They just see "social media = bad for kids, therefore this bill that says it's going to stop that must be good".
I guess I am out of touch then.
Oh, I loaded up the page previously before your edit. Regarding the edit, not only will it prevent kids accessing community, but it may also drive them into darker, more unregulated parts of the Web. Similar to how porn bans (whether outright bans or stricter age-gating) only really affect Pornhub—probably the most well-regulated and "safe" porn site out there. Block that, and you'll get people going to sketchy Russian sites where they might encounter much, much more terrible stuff.
Nods. The ban is only going to protect kids that have parents who want them protected/have the technical expertise to do it.
Meanwhile all the fee range kids out there…which, let’s be honest, is most of them…are just going to find a bunch seedy apps and workarounds…and guess who else is going to be lurking in these spaces.
ETA I’m really bad at hot taking, editing, and not saying I edited.
ETA I’m really bad at hot taking, editing, and not saying I edited
It's weird. Usually edited comments display a little asterisk telling you they're edited. I wonder if somehow the interaction between Piefed and Lemmy means that doesn't happen.
edit: just testing editing
edit again: oh no, it seems like Lemmy might have removed that feature??
edit the third: ah, this is intentional
Don’t show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes
Kind like Reddit, though I think it was 3 minutes over there.
An old forum I used to frequent had the feature that let you edit a comment up until the point someone replied to it, at which point it was locked. That worked pretty well.
That's pretty interesting. Personally I prefer being able to edit at any time, door example if that reply is pointing out an error, you can then fix the error. Keeping a visible change log of edits is also great, to provide transparency. A forum I still frequent has that.
I prefer it this way as well, but it is open to abuse. Can you see the change log in Lemmy?
No, you can't, unfortunately.
Now I know!
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All good, I feel like we're in total agreement here.
They've done something stupid.
Now we all get to see how far they'll take it.
yeah I get the noble cause and all that shit..but a government body should never mandate what is or isn't a "dangerous influence" on its population. Ever
Urm. Not sure what you mean. Isn’t that’s the only thing it should do?
I have been very proactive as a parent keeping my kids away from shit social media. The government never asked me. I sent them feedback. They gave me a form response. I support being able to opt out of algorithms and attention spam. I should be championing what they are doing. I support protecting kids from immoral corporations who don't give a fuck about their welfare. But the response is half arsed and full of bullshit. We deserved better.
And we deserve more variety in politics. Sensible moderate parties with sensible policies as an alternative to the ALP for Labor voters. I suspect a lot of trad liberal voters feel the same about their mob.
Beyond the above, I feel there's an inherent value to anonymous conversation that will be lost.
Sure, anonymous conversation allows echo chambers where cookers come up with nonsense - but every societal upheaval in the past would have started with unsanctioned conversations happening behind closed doors.
Woman's suffrage?
Same sex marriage?
Person-hood/voting rights for indigenous Australians?
It's easy to see them as obvious now, but once they were illegal.
Those changes occurred in public referendums that started with private conversations.
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Resisting the urge to send this video as a reply to the boot licking email my kids school sent to the parents regarding this bullshit.
Why resist?
Mostly because I fear the kids might get unfavourable treatment.
Our school principal reminds me of south park's PC principal.
Thinking piefed for my next instance when I get banned? Any other suggestions lads?
fwiw I just DMed a link to this comment as my age verification. I don't think Lodion is being too strict about it. Just DM a story about some cultural touchstone from your childhood and you'll probably be fine. No real need to go elsewhere.
If you do decide to move elsewhere though, Piefed sounds pretty good these days. I'd probably avoid quokk.au (even though it would actually be my first choice otherwise). Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are pretty much the entirety of the threadiverse as far as I'm aware, though I'm not sure how feature rich Mbin is and I'd probably avoid it on that ground.
They can take my word for it
Unfortunately I don't think the law allows for that.
😆
I think this about sums everything up. I just pinned it to the top of Local with the non-satire post. 😀
Fantastic video
Also, I miss Robert Foster, the old Juice World News anchor.
Holy shit, I didn't realise Juice Media went back that far! I think I first discovered them about 5 years ago, and it seemed like it was pretty new at the time. I had no idea until your comment that 10 years ago they had a series old enough to wrap up gracefully.
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