\u201cThis law will not fulfil its promise to make kids safer online, and will, in fact, make Australian kids less safe on YouTube,\u201d the company\u2019s public policy manager Rachel Lord said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve heard from parents and educators who share these concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n
Australian YouTube users under 16 will be automatically signed out on December 10, using the ages linked to their Google accounts, the company said.<\/p>\n
Underage users could still visit the website without an account, but would lose access to many of YouTube\u2019s features \u2013 including \u201cwellbeing settings\u201d and \u201csafety filters\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lord said the \u201crushed regulation misunderstands our platform and the way young Australians use it\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt YouTube, we believe in protecting kids in the digital world, not from the digital world.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Outright weird\u2019 <\/p>\n
Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells said YouTube\u2019s criticism was \u201coutright weird\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf YouTube is reminding us all that it is not safe and there\u2019s content not appropriate for age-restricted users on their website, that\u2019s a problem that YouTube needs to fix.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by the predatory algorithms.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Australian Government concedes the ban will be far from perfect at the outset, and some underage users will fall through the cracks as issues are ironed out.<\/p>\n
But platforms face fines of A$49.5 million ($56.5m) if they fail to take \u201creasonable steps\u201d to comply from next week.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of adolescents are expected to be impacted, with Instagram alone reporting about 350,000 Australian users aged 13 to 15.<\/p>\n
Some popular apps and websites such as Roblox, Pinterest and WhatsApp are currently exempt, but the list remains under review.<\/p>\n
YouTube said it would archive accounts so they could be reactivated when users turned 16.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not delete or remove any of their existing content or data, and it will be waiting for them when they come back,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
Meta, Facebook\u2019s parent company, has already started deactivating accounts based on information such as the age given when they were created.<\/p>\n
An internet rights group last week launched a legal challenge to halt the ban.<\/p>\n
The Digital Freedom Project said it had challenged the laws in Australia\u2019s High Court, arguing they were an \u201cunfair\u201d assault on freedom of speech.<\/p>\n
– Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThis law will not fulfil its promise to make kids safer online, and will, in fact, make Australian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14628,1344,5660,24812,1060,1559,1061,71,266,42,47148,1073,43,7254,25087,30308,11426,316,1072,40,38,41,39,109398,42541,4139],"class_list":["post-168400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-algorithms","tag-attacked","tag-attacks","tag-australias","tag-ban","tag-called","tag-children","tag-from","tag-government","tag-headlines","tag-looming","tag-media","tag-news","tag-policy","tag-predatory","tag-protect","tag-rushed","tag-shield","tag-social","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-under16s","tag-worldfirst","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}