By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s government carved out an exemption for YouTube when it passed laws banning social media access for children under 16, but some mental health and extremism experts say the video-sharing website exposes them to addictive and harmful content.
Australia will block video-sharing platforms TikTok and Snapchat, Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook and Elon Musk’s X for minors by the end of 2025, forcing them to impose strict age restrictions on access or face hefty fines. At the same time, the government will keep Alphabet-owned YouTube open for all ages because it is a valuable educational tool and not “a core social media application”.
The initial ban was meant to include YouTube but after hearing from company executives and children’s content creators who use the site, the government granted an exemption.
“While YouTube undoubtedly functions as a source of entertainment and leisure, it is an important source of education and informational content, relied on by children, parents and carers, and educational institutions,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s spokesperson said, adding that the exemption “matched broad sentiment in the Australian community that YouTube is not a core social media application”. The landmark legislation passed in November sets some of the world’s most stringent social media limits. However, six extremism and mental health researchers interviewed by Reuters say the exemption undermines Australia’s main goal of protecting young users from harmful content.
Surveys show YouTube is the country’s most popular social media website among teenagers, used by 9 in 10 Australians aged 12-17.
FAR-RIGHT MATERIAL
The academics interviewed by Reuters said that it hosts the same sort of dangerous content as the prohibited sites.
“YouTube is deeply problematic, not just because of its role in terms of extremism and the spreading of extremist content and violent content and pornographic content, but also because it delivers highly addictive video content to young people,” said Lise Waldek, a lecturer at Macquarie University’s Department of Security Studies and Criminology who has run two government-commissioned studies on extremist content on YouTube.
Helen Young, a member of the Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism Network, echoed those concerns, saying YouTube’s “algorithm feeds really far-right material, whether it’s primarily racist or primarily sort of misogynist, anti-feminist stuff, to users that it identifies as young men and boys.”
