Fully agree. I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family at all except for YouTube. Accounts under Family Link control should have been allowed as they are overseen by an 18+ parent.

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

> Now kids can't have these accounts, so they can only access youtube without signing in. Meaning zero parental controls and monitoring

This sounds like a device-control problem. Banning social media and then regulating devices in school should go a long way towards defusing the challenge.

Even with anonymous log-in, the new status quo is a release from algorithmic targeting. (If YouTube is building shadow profiles and knowingly serving under-16-year olds, that can be fixed with enforcement.) I suspect this group of kids will grow up fitter despite the reduced opportunities for helicopter parenting. There are lots of parents who never try, or try and fail, to control and monitor their kids’ online activities. Way more than those who effectively do so.

For that, we have to give control over clients to consumers. In the model of the past the company provides the client and so the client is accountable to the company not the consumer. Only the web browser has ever come close to changing that, but there's not many of us left still fighting for third party clients, even on the web

I agree with you in spirit , however nobody was taught how to raise their kids in an age of incessant hyperstimulation , and people in general don't go out of their way to learn things properly

> Give parents control over parenting.

The problem isn't lack of control, it's the lazy attitude from parents who're shocked that they have to actually do their own job of raising their progeny.

They'd rather abdicate that responsibility to the government, who in turn love the idea because it means more control.

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