Nanny Oz Again.

I read a news report yesterday which said that Australia is enacting legislation requiring age verification to be a condition of viewing YouTube. This seems silly to me. Google responded by saying that ‘YouTube is not social media’, and for once I agree with them.

Social media carries pressures and concomitant risks which are entirely lacking on YouTube. Social media attracts the group dynamic factor. It carries the risk of propounding the view that what is commonly believed must be the truth. It encourages cliques and clubs, thereby exerting peer pressure on young minds, and peer pressure is a major influence on young people.

YouTube is different. It’s true that a very great deal of what’s on YouTube is utter rubbish which attracts views using click bait methodology. But so what. How are children going to learn to differentiate between quality and trash if they’re not subjected to both? And of course there are examples of people spreading hate, prejudice, and extremist views on YouTube. But so there are in life generally, and responsibility must lie with parents to guide innocent young people to recognise the dark side of human nature when they see it. All you do by hiding it from their sight is to keep them in the darkness of naïveté, and that can make them even more susceptible to dangerous influences later.

And so I believe that Australia’s position is seriously misguided. It seems that I should suggest, as I did in earlier posts, that dear old Australia is the very grand-nanny of all nanny states.

Edited to Add:

I have since learned that this piece of nonsense has already been enacted in the UK. I think the BBC must have buried that bit of news in a corner of the website overlooked by me. Apologies to Oz.