Social media age limits are smart. Banning YouTube or Minecraft is not | David Penberthy

Kicking kids off social media was the right move but the online censorship net in the name of child safety is already widening into bizarre areas, writes David Penberthy.

A few years ago I swore myself off taking any part in school parent WhatsApp forums. The first reason was simply a lack of time. Conversations on these things can really take on a life of their own.

The second reason was that I don’t trust myself.

Many of the conversations on these forums would make easy fodder for a newspaper columnist and could almost be cut and pasted on to this page to produce killer content going to the red-button topics of the day.

It would, of course, be the height of rudeness to do so given that these are all private conversations among well-meaning people.

There was one recent conversation which I will allude to here, of which I am aware second-hand through my wife, as it related to a discussion we had both been having about our own kids.

It went to the appropriateness of the game Minecraft and whether kids should be allowed to play it at school.

A Minecraft promotional image. Picture: Telltale

Some parents had complained to the school about the fact that the game was permitted on school laptops, which led to the school hierarchy disabling the game.

After the fact other parents complained about the decision, saying that their kids were being denied what they regard as a valuable educational resource, one that teaches them design and planning skills, and also allows them to work collaboratively.

The debate raised a broader point about how we approach technology with children, and whether we try to shield them from it or teach them to use it appropriately.

Clearly, there are huge problems with social media apps being used for the worst possible purposes by children and early teens.

The downside is so big that it eclipses the upside. It’s why, like most parents, I find myself in broad support of age limits for sites like Instagram and Facebook.

The dangers of these websites are manifold – the enabling of bullying, depictions of school violence, damage to self-esteem over body image questions, self-doubt stemming from the lack of popularity of posts, the enabling of predatory and criminal conduct such as sextortion by twisted adults.

All of this eclipses the benefits of social media when you consider it in the context of kids as young as 13.

But as per the discussion around Minecraft, I am struggling to see why we are now having a debate about whether YouTube should also be included on the list of apps and websites from which children and early teens are banned.

YouTube was originally exempt from the federal government’s age-limit crackdown, but a rearguard action has now been launched by its rivals such as TikTok saying that it should always have been placed on the list.

Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner addresses the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on "Swimming between the digital flags: helping young Australians navigate social media's dangerous currents". Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Those calls have also been supported by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who has stated that in hindsight she believes YouTube should have been on the banned list. Central to her rationale is data showing that 76 per cent of youngsters aged 10 to 15 had used YouTube and of them 37 per cent had seen potentially harmful content.

I find this figure hard to believe and wonder as to how broad is the eSafety Commissioner’s definition of “potentially harmful”. My two primary school age kids use YouTube all the time – the kids’ version – and apart from some very occasional low-level swearing by some of the YouTubers it seems pretty much impossible to stumble over genuinely bad or distressing content.

The only part of YouTube that drives me mad are the so-called “Italian brain rot” videos which sound like complete gibberish, featuring cartoons of people spouting nonsensical Italian phrases such as “crocodillo peperonillo” over images of a crocodile eating a stick of pepperoni. It may yet emerge that repeated exposure to these videos, while sending parents around the twist, might be setting this generation of youngsters for future proficiency at romance languages.

But if you use it properly, YouTube is easily the most educational web service going around. Aside from the stupid crocodile pepperoni guy, the two things we use it for are short documentaries and sporting videos.

It’s become a bedtime ritual where we might watch old David Attenborough videos, such as the one in Borneo where an orang-utan teaches itself how to use a saw, or videos where people try the world’s hottest chillies, with an accompanying explanation as to how Scoville units are used to measure their heat.

The other night we watched Maradona’s best 15 goals of all time, and then stumbled into an awesome documentary about why Napoli fans turned on him after Argentina trundled Italy out of the World Cup.

The website works like a curious human brain where one cool video leads to another. And with young kids, it gels with their constant curiosity about the world they inhabit.

They end up telling us as parents things that we ourselves didn’t know, such as a few weeks ago when my 10-year-old told me that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk still weren’t as rich as some bloke called Mansa Musa, who lived in the 1300s in Mali and amassed a trove of African gold. Mansa Musa. Go figure.

As I said, I get the social media ban stuff.

But I can’t help but wonder whether this broadening war on all content to take on sites such as YouTube isn’t a form of government-mandated helicopter parenting, where we are now so paranoid about protecting our children that we will no longer expose them to anything.