As a parent, I thought a YouTube ban was absurd. I’ve realised I was blind to the dangers

Our 11-year-old loves YouTube. This hardly makes him unique, even in the family. I use it, his mum uses it, his much older siblings use it. It’s been a goldmine, from the how-to-draw channels that helped us through lockdown to the DIY videos that inform various household projects.

There’s no question that he uses it very differently than I do. For him, it’s entertainment rather than information. His favourite genres include Minecraft analyses, animal documentaries and size comparisons between different versions of Godzilla. He recently became fascinated by the monsters of Trevor Henderson, a Canadian horror artist whose work is genuinely disturbing, but it turns out that he actively avoids the original art. He prefers other people’s creepy-cute animations based on the Henderson art, which, weirdly enough, is a thriving digital ecosystem.

Horrors are out there: “Cartoon Cat in his Mall”, by Canadian horror artist Trevor Henderson.Credit: Instagram

As much as he enjoys YouTube, he doesn’t get to use it a lot – less than half an hour a day on average – and it’s always on an iPad with parental controls. Perhaps because of the illusion of safety created by those controls, and perhaps because of my own innocuous experiences, I’ve never been too concerned about him spending time on the platform.

So I was surprised when Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s online safety chief, recommended that YouTube be added to the list of social media platforms banned for anyone under 16. At first, the idea seemed not just absurd and unenforceable, given that you can access it without an account from any browser, but also unnecessary. Now, I’m not so sure.

It’s not that I’m keen to police a ban on our son doing one of his favourite things until 2030, given that parental surveillance would be the only way to ensure compliance. And even if it was possible or healthy to constantly monitor his online activity, I’m not sure I would. I was slightly embarrassed to discover this week that YouTube is already “restricted” to those over 13, which means we’ve been unwittingly letting him break the rules for at least nine months. (I was further embarrassed to find that exactly none of his preferred channels are on the junior version of the platform, YouTube Kids.)

Is it possible to control what kids view online? Credit: Getty Images

But the proposal has made me rethink YouTube’s place in the toxic pantheon of social media, most of which are undoubtedly not suitable for children. It was originally excluded from the ban because of its educational and informative aspect, but in Inman Grant’s research, 40 per cent of children reported encountering harmful material on the platform – the same sort of violent, misogynistic, hateful and psychologically unsafe content found on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram etc. YouTube also shares many of their worst features, such as algorithmically suggested feeds, endless scroll and autoplay.

I have no reason to believe our son is among that 40 per cent. We’ve warned him many times that dangerous content exists online, and that it’s possible to see things that can’t easily be unseen. In the Trevor Henderson case, he made an excellent choice – he knew he would be upset by something, so he has consciously avoided it.

But I would be kidding myself not to admit there’s a degree of luck involved too. As frequently pointed out, on social media you don’t always get to choose what you see. Keeping yourself safe is hard at any age. You’re dealing with a deliberately addictive and manipulative product that as often as not dishes up misinformation and material designed to confirm prejudices and promote extremist views. And as our son gets older and his interests change, the dangers will grow.

His now-adult brother, who hit adolescence in the wild west early days of social media, has told me that he saw things online in his early teens that took years to process. It’s one of the reasons our youngest may be the only grade 5 at his school without some form of instant messaging. But at the same time, I’ve had a massive blind spot about YouTube.

It’s impossible to keep your children safe forever. All you can do is try to give them the tools to deal with danger. When you teach them to do something risky like cross a road or use a sharp knife, you supervise them until you’re confident they can manage it on their own. Online safety is the same, except the dangers of social media are ever-changing, and in many cases they’re a design feature of one the most ingenious products ever devised.

Ultimately, a YouTube ban is just another parenting dilemma. It can probably be used safely, but is it too much to ask of your child to negotiate these perils? Do the risks outweigh the rewards? If so, how do you stop them using it?

There’s no answer that’s right for every child. For now, ours is to let our son keep going as he has been. His judgment has been good so far, and we’ll use this to open more conversations about online safety. And while I’d be lying if said I didn’t have reservations, I’d much rather he use it with our permission, knowing he can talk freely to us if he does encounter anything distressing. In a world of constant connection, that might be the most important communication of all.

Michael Coulter is a Melbourne writer.

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