Sydney (AFP) – Australia will use landmark social media laws to ban children under 16 from video-streaming site YouTube, a top minister said Wednesday stressing the need to shield them from "predatory algorithms".
Communications Minister Anika Wells said four-in-ten Australian children had reported viewing harmful content on YouTube, one of the most visited websites in the world.
"We want kids to know who they are before platforms assume who they are," Wells said in a statement.
"There's a place for social media, but there's not a place for predatory algorithms targeting children."
Australia announced last year it was drafting laws that will ban children from social media sites such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram until they turn 16.
The government had previously indicated YouTube would be exempt, given its widespread use in classrooms.
"Young people under the age of 16 will not be able to have accounts on YouTube," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on Wednesday.
"They will also not be able to have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X among other platforms.
"We want Australian parents and families to know that we have got their back."
Albanese said the age limit may not be implemented perfectly -- much like existing restrictions on alcohol -- but it was still the right thing to do.
A spokesman for YouTube said Wednesday's announcement was a jarring U-turn from the government.
"Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens," the company said in a statement.
"It's not social media."
On paper, the ban is one of the strictest in the world.
But the current legislation offers almost no details on how the rules will be enforced -- prompting concern among experts that it will simply be a symbolic piece of unenforceable legislation.
It is due to come into effect on December 10.
Social media giants -- which face fines of up to Aus$49.5 million (US$32 million) for failing to comply -- have described the laws as "vague", "problematic" and "rushed".
TikTok has accused the government of ignoring mental health, online safety and youth experts who had opposed the ban.
Meta -- owner of Facebook and Instagram -- has warned that the ban could place "an onerous burden on parents and teens".
The legislation has been closely monitored by other countries, with many weighing whether to implement similar bans.
Social media is a subset of social networking. Twitter -> social networking. It’s not social media. Anyone claiming that fucking Wordpress or LiveJournal is social media is out of their goddamn mind. Just because you’re talking to someone in a comment section doesn’t mean it’s a social networking site and it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s social media.
Social media -> a social networking site where the majority of users are sharing media. Example: Flickr. A literal social networking site built around all users sharing their photos. YouTube -> not social media, barely a percentage point of users are commenting much less making their own videos. It’s more akin to a TV station than any sort of social site, and this is readily apparent when you actually compare it to TV show websites!
Social media was never a broad Web 2.0 term, how old are you!? It literally referred to sites like MySpace where you friended others and put fucking MEDIA on your goddamn profile page! It has never once included anything like LJ or WP and that’s such a backwards rewriting of history it’s pretty apparent you’re just saying shit to make it match up with the definition you have in your mind.
Somewhere in your life, you have gathered a misunderstanding to the definition and categorization of social media. You are absolutely incorrect based on the understanding of others and every single dictionary I have at my disposal. (we're up to 7) Honestly, I can't even make up a solution to answer where you learned that they weren't social media. The term is used so often and is so clear about the sites being social media. I can only guess that you've been going off for a decade now every time someone says social media because you heard It wrong once, or someone you respect ultimately told you that's not what they were.
Social networking platforms are a subset of social media, not the other way around. You have that backward.
The insanity of it is you saying that it doesn't matter what everyone else thinks or what the 7 dictionaries I've reviewed now say.
From your post history, you're not generally this obtuse, dying on this hill is frankly silly with the mountain of evidence against you.
I think the words were used not just by different generations, but also different level of users.
As someone who was around and heavily involved in tech during the bbs days, then walled garden services, then internet forums, THEN social networking and media, I agree not with you but with the prior comment.
The dictionary definitions are rewriting history based on a word that hadn’t even been coined yet. They created a definition which retroactively lumped nearly the entire internet under that term. It’s incorrect and unhelpful to do so.
However, given that language changes and us old geeks don’t make the rules, “social media” now indeed includes the entire internet. I can’t argue with the dictionary, but I can explain the reasoning behind my disagreement with the term. I think that’s the same the last person was saying.
The majority of humans weren’t on the internet before social media. So that’s all they know.
Exactly. The only thing that I really have to add is that I personally draw the line between social media and other types of websites or internet services is whether the service is intended to be used anonymously or connected to a real identity. I’d further divide the anonymous stuff between whether they are intended to be used with handles or without an account at all.
Under that personal definition, I would not consider stuff like BBS, Usenet, forums, AIM, etc., to be social media.
I also wouldn’t consider Discord to be social media tbh, it’s a messaging application. If Discord is social media why isn’t iMessage?
Something like Twitter, BlueSky, or Mastadon could be social media depending on how you use them, but since many people do utilize them with accounts linked to their real identity I would consider them social media.
Then you have the obvious social media stuff like FaceBook, and LinkedIn.
Now that I’m typing this out, stuff like Insta, TikTok, Snap, etc., get weird. I would personally consider them social media, but tons of people use those apps with handles. Maybe in addition to the anonymous or real identity thing there’s also the consideration of whether the site or app is intended to connect you with people you know in meatspace or online.
Yeah, I guess the distinctions I personally use are becoming a bit meaningless now.
I also used to make a distinction for apps where the majority of content was rando internet user created. But all the apps are now just fulltime creators and very rarely does a true rando go viral.
The “going viral” technique got ruined similarly to how seo ruined search. Completely ruined to the point that the little guy never appears.
Yeah when musically/tiktok came along, twitter, insta, snap, and YouTube all copied the model so you’ve got this dual use thing going on there where you can scroll short videos, but you don’t have to
Exactly. The 'academic' source that roguetrick (not who you replied to) supplied that apparently '37 thousand citations' are using, was written in 2009 and states that Usenet was a social networking site. Just a complete rewrite of history. Notably that 'academic' source was from a business school.
Thank you for understanding my point of view. This is complete rewriting of history by (mostly) news corporations that serve only to make people mad. And 'social media' became an easy buzzword to refer to anything that had something wrong with it. This got very bad in the past 5-10 years (time passes weird now).
you can argue with the dictionary, that's what I'm doing here. A term that refers to everything under the sun is a meaningless word, especially when it's weaponized against its citizens, exactly like the UK is doing with 'social media' currently, by having it literally encapsulate every website out there, but making citizens think that it doesn't. The only way you convince the dictionary to change is by telling people that social media doesn't mean forums. That social media doesn't mean YouTube. That social media doesn't mean Wikipedia. (I have some other words I'd like to argue as well, but they're completely unrelated to this thread).
So that's what I'm doing here. Telling people that including these things in this all encompassing meaningless word not only devalues the word, but makes it so that politicians can fuck us over anytime they want by using the 'social media' boogeyman, and then firewalling Wikipedia, or anandtech.com, or fordf150ownersforum.com, etc.etc.etc.
What you're hinting at is a little broader. It's not so much language redefining things as much as users rejecting labels doesn't matter. For a functional definition like social media, people do and did reject being defined as that to preserve some sense of community distinctiveness. But just like punk artists rejecting that they're in the genre or even musicians, the small groups view on the subject isn't as important as the functional reality and the greater social utility of the term. Instead of functioning as a descriptive definition, such things are actually acting as shibboleths.
In regards to rewriting history, it'd be like rejecting calling da vinchi's helical air screw a proto helicopter. Just because the term was coined later doesn't mean that it's rewriting history to apply the concept. It's not unhelpful to define a concept and review it's impacts. I honestly think it's very helpful in examining eternal September myself, for example, and seeing it's parallels in the walled gardens and subsequent social networks and how they all approached the same challenges and implemented some of the same tools.
In essence, the broad term exists precisely because it defines something that is useful in ways "the Internet" is not.
nah I've never 'gathered a misunderstanding' of it. Somewhere in the past 5 years, everyone and their mom has started referring to idiotic things as being social media, like roguetrick claiming that Wikipedia is social media (they even provided an 'academic' source (from a school of business mind you)).
Social media must be a subset of social networking because the literally concept of a 'social' website implies networking. So if all you're adding to the social element is 'media' (rather than just text, like Twitter), then it is by definition a subset. If you see 'adding' media as expanding the category, rather than restricting the set of social networking sites to only those with sharing of media, then sure I could see how you think that social networking sites must be a subset of the media sites, since they don't have media. But I see it as a subset of sites that allow for connections and follows of other users, which would make it a subset in the direction I stated.
I honestly do not care what 'mountain of evidence' there is. Some things people are just frankly idiots about and it doesn't matter what the actual justification for it is, in the current world it's dumb to continue calling it that. I can give two other examples if you would like, where the majority of people in any given region might refer to something as but it makes no sense from any logical, political, social, ethical, moral, legal, etc. standpoint. The only reason being historical (or etymological), which frankly is a dumb reason, especially in this day and age. We should use words so that they communicate something.
If 'social media' refers to anything that exists on the internet (which by the arguments I've seen so far, it would literally include 99.99% of websites out there) then it's a pointless, meaningless word that serves only for politicians to use as a battering ram to remove civil liberties and personal freedoms from citizens. Instead of a law stating "You are now required to verify your ID on every website on the internet" they instead can state "You are now required to verify your ID on social media sites" and then that suddenly includes Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, a website bookmarking service called Delicious, and the General Motors blog site (all of these according to roguetrick's 'academic' source of what social media is)! What is the point of the word if it refers to anything and everything under the sun...
You ignore everything presented to you as stupid, and demand the world is defined by whatever vibes you've developed. It doesn't work that way. Language doesn't work that way and you defining history in ways that are wildly against reality doesn't work that way. You're not making a historical argument and you're not making a usage argument. You're making an argument that the world should align with Tyler's vibes. In this often repeated phrase: "I don't care" about that.
You’re the one redefining history dude. Even another person in this comment section is telling you how it never meant that to start with. You linked an article from a business school that literally makes up history. Your “source” calls the General Motors blog “social media”.
You're defining Twitter and Tiktok as not social media and calling everyone else out of their mind. You have lost the plot entirely. You're far from the academic and long accepted meaning of social media and are confusing social networks as an integral part of social media. That has never been the case.
It has always been the case. Please provide a few sources for your claim of “academic and long accepted meaning of social media” because as far as I’ve seen the only places calling these things social media are you and news sites. And I’ve literally never even heard a news corp call fucking Wordpress “social media” because that’s so meaningless even they aren’t dumb enough to do that.
How about this top result on Google scholar from 2010 with 37 thousand citations reflecting on the historical meaning of social media: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andreas-Kaplan/publication/222403703_Users_of_the_World_Unite_The_Challenges_and_Opportunities_of_Social_Media/links/5a2cd570aca2728e05e0a561/Users-of-the-World-Unite-The-Challenges-and-Opportunities-of-Social-Media.pdf
Jesus Christ, since you've never heard it obviously it must not exist.
I'm just gonna rewrite this comment in a nicer tone. Your 'source' is from a business school, it states that Usenet is a social network, it claims that the General Motors blog is social media, and it claims that World of Warcraft is the highest level of social media. I really think that is all I need to respond with.
Good luck, I really don't want to talk to you anymore.
Uh huh. Sure. A foundational paper with 37 thousand citations. Dictionaries. Just ancillary stuff that has no meaning. Not in your constructed reality I'm sure.