While all of that might be true, YouTube is also a for-profit cesspool of trash content, hate speech, and misinformation. An entire generation of gen z manosphere Nazi bootlickers got where they are watching "gaming videos" on YouTube.

It auto plays by default and their algorithms are dogshit, so you might start watching an educational video with your kid, but end up on a flat earth video fifteen minutes later, or much much worse.

When my son was younger, we severely limited his YouTube time and closely monitored what he was watching on it. Most parents don't do that.

I dislike legislation like this too, but we're not talking about PBS or a library here. Kids truly shouldn't be on YouTube unattended.

While all of that might be true, YouTube is also a for-profit cesspool of trash content, hate speech, and misinformation. An entire generation of gen z manosphere Nazi bootlickers got where they are watching "gaming videos" on YouTube.

It auto plays by default and their algorithms are dogshit, so you might start watching an educational video with your kid, but end up on a flat earth video fifteen minutes later, or much much worse.

When my son was younger, we severely limited his YouTube time and closely monitored what he was watching on it. Most parents don't do that.

I dislike legislation like this too, but we're not talking about PBS or a library here. Kids truly shouldn't be on YouTube unattended.

YouTube is totally blocked for my son at home and on his phone and I myself avoid it as the plague as well. If he wants to learn stuff, I'm eager to buy him all the books he wants. The moderate amount of useful resources on YT is 100% available elsewhere, on less addictive platforms or media.

Youtube very consistently ranks lowest in terms of reacting to reports of hate speech and is a massive vector for it worldwide.

I mean, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measure, but Youtube is a massive contributor to the decline of democracy around the world.

Tiktok, incidentally, has way better stats on addressing hate speech complaints than Youtube. As in, by far. As in, industry leading, so in the exact opposite end of Youtube's.

What's the deal with gaming videos? Do game streamers tend to be Nazis? Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.

Look up gamergate and Steve Bannon. The gamer to Nazi pipeline is, unfortunately, very real.

Good, social media is a bane on growth

All this child safety is just because they don't want to do proper moderation. What about user safety? Scams and hate speech don't belong for adults either

Can someone explain what "Albanese" means, please? Obviously not Albanian, but I'm still confused.

edit: got it, his name is "Albanese"

Seems like a strange place to push right-wing propaganda.

Gamers are easy to rile up, already have exposure to a lot of counter culture language in VC, and generally young or ignorant enough that they can't see the obvious propaganda they're being fed. Add into that content creators that intermix rightwing talking points and you can slowly poison their minds into becoming Nazi shitbags.

As the other commenter mentioned, gamergate is where all this shit first came up, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't there with the people who fell for the poison. I was just aware enough of what I was seeing to pull away from that culture before it really poisoned my mind.

Albanese is the name of the prime minister

Anthony Albanese is the name of Australia's prime minister.

Oh. Thanks. I'm not a native English speaker, but it seems the phrasing of "The Albanese Labor Government" is a bit unfortunate if you don't know that?

It's no different to saying "The Trump Repliblican Government".

I guess this was written for Australia.

I guess that country really is better represented by Paul Hogan than Steve Irwin...

It’s no different

But it is. Try to substitute "Albanese" for "Lebanese", maybe you'll understand what I mean.

I think there's not much Nazi gamer shit out there because it's incredibly rare for any to slip into my recommendations.

But if I let YouTube go it would probably take me from normal people like anyaustin to hype people like xQc. And then from there all the popular people can show up, including asmonmold. And people like him are legit brain rot.

Edit: for overwhelming Nazi content in your feed, try gun YouTubers. I binged gun Jesus and nothing. Watched Brandon Herrera (spelling?) build aks and look at cursed weapon memes and somehow that means I'm a flaming Trumper.

YT well known for radicalizing users. It as bad as ticktock or Instagram. there's a lot of quality educational content on public TV.

Youtube is the second largest Social Network

I never saw it that way I till I saw a report on what the preferred social media platforms for teens… and it was the number one slot at that time. Apparently teens (and others) have entire conversations in the comments, share videos with friends, and doom scroll YouTube.

And I don’t know if you’ve read YouTube comment threads (I don’t usually) but they can get pretty toxic, even on tame content. Not to mention all the FUD and propaganda being distributed there.

Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven't been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we'll watch with them on the account.

The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren't comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.