YouTube to restrict teenagers' exposure to videos about weight and fitness | Hacker News Reader

YouTube to restrict teenagers' exposure to videos about weight and fitness

theguardian.com

39 pointsvasco63 comments

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You know what's far more common than eating disorders and body dysmorphia? Overweight and obesity which afflict about 75% of America(not hyperbole, look at the stats). Kids shouldn't believe it's possible to have a body like Arnold naturally, but if we're going to err I'd think it should be heavily in the direction of promoting fitness a little too much. I know first hand both the physical and mental health effects of being overweight and unfit. What the average American looks like is not healthy and should not be normalized, and I bitterly resent the healthy at any size propaganda I bought into for a short while.

I would have made a similar comment, and I mostly agree, if it weren't for the caveat that I don't think anyone should be repeatedly watching content that's based primarily on appearance, rather than fitness. This move seems to be based less on fitness and more on the pursuit of a different appearance, which I do think is a dangerous path to follow. Looking fit is fantastic and it can be a fine goal, but promoting that type of content repeatedly seems way worse than promoting things that will incidentally tone your body.

Then they should ban makeup and fashion channels as well.

Most of the fitness content I see is focused on correct form and training technique and not on physique.

There is way too much money in makeup and fashion for them to restrict that.

Likely this is a preemptive move to try to avoid regulators banning those lucrative areas by virtue signaling and restrict the channels that doesn't make them lots of money.

Eh, the fitness industry has it's own set of garbage content. There aren't enough topics to really cover and keep making content about. And yet, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fitness content creators exist. At a certain point they start pumping out garbage or intentionally disagreeing with the current status quo to cause outrage/engagement and get more views.

Also pretty much anyone can call themselves a personal trainer, so you have people doing 6 week courses and then considering themselves professional coaches.

I keep trying to convince a friend whose a "proper" (top powerlifter, played rugby, can olympic lift, masters degree) personal trainer to make "garbage" content. e.g. instead of having an upper/lower split or something else sensible, make it a left/right split. So every day you do full body, but only the left or right side of the body.

Call it a revolutionary training method that fixes muscle imbalances since you only do unilateral exercises. I bet that idea could trend despite it being mostly garbage advice with a few facts mixed in.

I've noticed this as well, particularly with problems that aren't likely measurable or are likely genetic/anatomical differences, such as shoulder position or gait. Of course you can fix it, just do this thing that seems plausible enough, every day for some amount of reps for some amount of sets that I came up with, consistently forever, and you'll totally straighten out what is clearly a bone deformity on one side of your body.

Given a monetary incentive, people will turn themselves into bs promotors.

> Then they should ban makeup and fashion channels as well.

They're not banning anything, they're just not encouraging people to continuously watch that type of content. But also they did mention that.

Lifting for appearance is a fine goal to promote and requires different routines than e.g. powerlifting. If they're going to restrict something, it should be people who promote drug use or people who obviously use PEDs. Someone like Natural Hypertrophy is fine and has plenty of good information about bodybuilding.

E.g. the attitude at 41:46 https://youtu.be/eKBDacpRYSU?t=2506 seems like a good one to promote.

Lifting for appearance might be a decent goal in general (not a specific look that may or may not be attainable), but all this does is let that be decided by whoever's watching, rather than potentially giving them a gun or needle to shoot themselves with. It's also often just total bs.

That fellow's opinion in that short segment seems fine enough, but he's just saying that it's good to work out and get stronger, and that it'll probably help you stave off depression (also somewhat dubious in the context of this subthread, even though I'd agree). He's not saying why I should have six pack abs, or 3d shoulders, which are all vanity driven and potentially obsession creating. It's a pretty subtle difference.

I don't agree that lifting for appearance is something to promote to teens, because it just starts from a place of banking off perceived anxiety about one's image, and I tend to find that people who are mostly concerned about their image, tend to kind of suck. That's just different than talking about how working out will help you feel better by being stronger, being more capable, and yes potentially more attractive.

It's like gambling advertising imo.

This is disturbing. Most of social media is promoting unrealistic aesthetic standards, fitness might be the one aesthetic standard you can actually control with hard work, but yes lets ban that one.

* not restricting plastic surgery content * not restricting skincare content * not restricting fashion content

Fashion and skincare are big advertisers on YouTube.

I‘m so grateful I got into bodybuilding at 16 thanks to the internet. I was a chubby kid with no self confidence and now 20 years later am still quite athletic and eating healthy. No I never ended up looking like Zyzz, but for all its shortcomings if it hadn‘t been for the online fitness community I‘d be much worse off today, be it mentally, socially or physically.

Zyzz died of cardiac arrest and took plenty of anabolic steroids.

You are natural and alive to see wonders of the only planet that hosts life.

Some context, it’s (likely) the continuation of a long “thinspo” war started with tumblr and google image search. They now figured out how to do that for videos.

The topic is actually complex. On one hand, it is/was a beauty standard which drifts with time and visits corners. On the other, for a huge part of population anatomy and genetics simply don’t allow to be “beautiful”. Internet raised that up to 11, so people invented this “everyone is beautiful” idea, which is controversial. As a result, some people started praising “the body”, which sometimes get obviously unhealthy and, tbh, repulsive.

Personally I see it as a typical western craze. You had one problem, now you have two and there’s no middle cause it means undo both and do nothing and you’re unable of neither.

Added:

The platform will still allow 13- to 17-year-olds to view the videos, but its algorithms will not push young users down related content “rabbit holes” afterwards

Actually sounds reasonable. Wish they did it for all topics or at least halved the suggestion rate or whatever knob that is. Or split recent interest from long interests, with the ability to purge the former without plowing through history.

How is “repulsive” anything other than a social construct?

evolutionary instincts to dislike biologically unhealthy traits

A crash course in art history will plainly show that obese people were considered noble and desirable throughout the ages.

Noble and wealthy, yes. Beautiful, no.

Yes, beautiful. Time to revisit your priors.

Desireable. Not beautiful, or at least not more beautiful than women of average or slim build. It wasn't attractive to be heroin chic or rail-thin like a 90's supermodel, but it also wasn't attractive to be obese or heavily overweight.

It really depended on what lifestyle was considered expensive and heavily varied with geography and food regimes. Although for a long time being well fed was a primary indicator for wealth, until it lost importance.

That said, I don’t think that ancient malnourishing is comparable to modern fitness.

Other factor in this decision appears to how fitness/workout content tends to have a politically right-leaning slant that can push one into reactionary rabbit hole: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/pandemic-fitness... (2022)

Which appears to be related to how gym people/environment tending to lean conservative in general.

Frankly that reads like a conspiracy theory from someone in the middle of a crisis. I highly doubt that even if real it has anything to do with thin-obsessed female minors.

It is a legitimate growing concern for men's fitness content and the (young) men who watch those. But if their focus is on women's thinspo stuff (given the title concerns both weight and fitness), that could be a "one stone, two birds" situation, assuming the exposure restrictions work.

> Or split recent interest from long interests, with the ability to purge the former without plowing through history.

These are all current youtube features, you can purge any video from history and you can go into separate "recommendation holes" that youtube splits by interests

Do mewing next for the love of humanity; if I hear another 6yo talking about their jawline, I'm gonna lose it

Why? There’s actual science behind the benefits of breathing through your nose.

Mewing is exercising the jaw muscles. What does that have to do with breathing through the nose?

No its breathing through your nose which forces your tongue to the roof of your mouth, this provides support to your nasal cavity and can change the entire shape of your face over time.

Mewing is essentially slang for correct tongue posture. Look up myofunctional therapy if you’re curious.

over how much time? The entire shape of your face changes regardless of what you do.

Timescale of years.

Correct tongue posture is a thing, much like sitting up straight it’s not going to change your life overnight but generally a good thing long term.

I don't believe sitting up straight is anything more than myth in terms of how intentionally doing it impacts your body

That is pseudo science, there is nothing to support it works. John Mew lost his dental license due to misconduct, the "mewing" movement should be seen like homeopathy movement.

And a few doctors ~150 years ago were ridiculed because they insisted that you should wash and disinfect your hands before surgery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orofacial_myofunctional_disord...

what? do people not breath through their nose?!

breathing through the mouth is hard and dries the lips / mouth

never thought I'd see people talking about mewing on here lol

And 6 year olds? That's kind of terrifying

Yeah I actually listen to what my kid's friends say. Kinda always regret it but I'd rather know

wait what the fuck? 6yos talking about their jawline? what's going on?

I remember talking about maybe six packs or abs muscles at that age... Did not make me fitness nut. Kids talk about lot of stuff, most of it doesn't really stick.

Feels like people forgot their 4-10yos and got general anxiety. A kid talks about something, bring in the measures!!!

Kids talk about all kinds of shit, from jawlines to how much actors in movies get paid to get shot. Stop taking it seriously, ffs.

This is on you. I have never heard of "mewing" and I am on youtube all the time.

Even more so, I would never watch a video of a 6 year old doing anything.

If you watch stupid videos, don't complain when the platform pushes you more stupid videos.

If you watch stupid videos, don't complain when the platform pushes you more stupid videos.

There’s a whole world of recommendation solutions that don’t cling on a single stupid video you just watched for whatever reason. I’d suggest you to change your view and complain instead, because that’s how things change.

Also, you are generalizing from personal experience which differs from person to person. I’m not interested in women bad, lounge music and pseudo-pop-sci content. Guess how much of it sits in my “don’t recommend” list.

Hello, green account. I have a child of my own. There isn't just nothing wrong with me consuming content for kids; there would be something wrong if I wasn't monitoring what my child consumes.

As the site keeps reminding you, please familiarize yourself with the site guidelines.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

Hey Google, here's a suggestion: how about you make it possible to restrict a kids' account to only be able to view certain channels, disabling "the algorithm" altogether? I'd even be willing to pay for that.

Of course, that would lead to kids seeing less videos, so that is apparently not an option, so while Google now tunes the algorithm a bit w.r.t. weight and fitness, it is of course no problem that any young boy wanting to see some gaming videos will still be led straightly to "Jordan Peterson destroying this feminist", Logan Paul shilling bullshit and Joe Rogan interviewing some nutjob and saying steroids are fine but vaccines are evil (yes, I'm paraphrasing).

So here we are, but fortunately, there's a solution: Disable Youtube everywhere except on a little Linux desktop PC, install freetube

https://freetubeapp.io/

Add channels that are fine, set a PIN for changing the channel list, and voila, a safe Youtube environment.

Which is great if your child never socializes with anyone in the rest of society, who will pass those opinions on to them even without direct access, whether through abstract social osmosis or a more direct "check this video on my phone".

False dilemma. This is not about shielding my kid from every bad influence on the planet. This is about escaping a toxic algorithm which deliberately pushes kids into endlessly engaging with rage and scams. It's not like when my kid goes out onto the street, he will immediately meet Piers Morgan who'll introduce him to Andrew Tate.

Ironically, men's fitness content creators are also seen as pipeline for the "nutjob" stuff, straight from the fitness content creator themselves.

We published a preprint last year with an algorithm for content restriction that YouTube might find useful: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3708350/v1

Essentially it's a dynamic regulator that restricts content based on one's recent viewing history. So the more somebody watches harmful content, the less it gets recommended to them. And it can be applied to any type of harmful content.

It's designed to oppose the positive feedback loops that lead to addiction.

What is harmful content?

what about all the crypto scams? all the state media sponsored propaganda?

Did they ever remove that 1M+ subscriber chanel that pretends to be SpaceX and show launches only to pivot to a deepfake of Elon promoting a cryptoscam?

YouTube allowing that scam channel to get so large is dumbfounding.

There is an ongoing lawsuit regarding the Steve Wozniak version of those videos, by the real Steve Wozniak and a number of the victims. Youtube's efforts to get it dismissed completely on s230 grounds has failed, apparently on the basis that youtube awarded verification badges to the scammers and also running targeted advertising on behalf of the scammers.

I worry about what that would do to future viability of verification and chilling future verification efforts. Lawyers once again being the reason why we cannot have nice things due to not doing so being the safe option.

Now, a flawed verification process isn't a good thing but flaws would necessarily come with widespread access even if there was some sort of government support infrastructure for it. (The DMV doesn't prevent the existence of fake IDs.) A situation where verification is maximally reliable above all else would be "literally give it to just heads of state", would open up the exact sort of harms that lead to verification being a thing in the first place. Like being able to Spartacus Steve Wozniak.

Perhaps that's going down a slippery slope, and there's some happy medium between YouTube's current verification process and a maximally reliable verification process.

Indeed, the very first paragraphs of Wozniak's lawsuit seek to set out a contrast between an appropriate response and an inappropriate response:

On July 15, 2020, Twitter suffered a massive hack that hit 130 Twitter accounts of celebrities and public officials, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and many others. The attackers sent tweets from those accounts offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous bitcoin address. That same day, Twitter acted swiftly and decisively to shut down these accounts and to protect its users from the scam, issuing the above apology.

In stark contrast, for years, Defendant YOUTUBE’s lax security practices have led to a steady stream of security breaches in which countless popular YouTube channels have been hijacked and taken over by criminals who use the channels to perpetuate a scam that has defrauded, and continues to defraud, YOUTUBE users of millions of dollars.

Several of the Plaintiff's causes of action, such as negligence, would allow for a far more limited ruling than to be applicable any time a company accidentally miscommunicates about the identity of another person.

For example, it could be negligent design that after 6 years of these scams, YouTube still allows hacked verified accounts to change their name to "MicroStrategy" or "SpaceX", without flagging or limiting usage of those identities due to the fact those names are used daily to run scam videos.

Good regulation often seeks a delicate balance, striving for a happy medium that satisfies no one entirely but works well enough for everyone.

I also have "this is why we can't have nice things" response, but flipped around: the grossly negligent, even outright abusive behavior by a few companies are going to cost us S230. This sucks all the more because google's legal power means they hardly need S230 while smaller sites such as HN or Wikipedia, for example, are much more in need of it.

(and at the same time these other sites are much better at not being embarrassingly bad at moderation)

The best situation I think is where there is robust protection in the law to prevent the huge waste of litigation, while at the same time sites work diligently to remove unambiguously illegitimate material and at least behave compassionately about whatever slips through the cracks.

But that's not what youtube has done, they've hardly even taken basic measures. E.g. take down obvious scam content when mass reported, block reuploads of bit-identical copies (Or matches with the same perceptual hashes they use for copyright takedowns as part of their covenant not to sue agreements with studios and record labels which they use to rob artists), block varrious low false positive scam identifying keywords associated with the scam, remove the validation flag when an account changes names. etc.

Having missed things like this the first time around might be excusable, but to refuse to take measures like this after years of abuse while throwing up a hard S230 wall to seemingly justify continuing to distribute the scams. It's outrageous, it's offensive, and it will ultimately deprive us all of S230 protection.

> all else would be "literally give it to just heads of state",

Twitter had some "government official" badge which they happily gave to a bunch of crypto grifters after they just invented a fake country.

This is sickening. If you don't have children, just let me tell you the videos they get recommended by Youtube are bizarre.

Weird Russian/Eastern European shows where actors act like kids in a classroom but with overt sexual overtones. The first time I saw one I legitimately thought she had stumbled on porn. There was no nudity or anything, more just the setup and way they dress and behave. Think basically the beginning of every terrible plot porn ever made. It was called Ratata if you're curious.

Minecraft and Roblox videos voiced over with themes like divorce, abortion, running away, suicide, etc. It's almost always voiced by some text to speech woman voice. It's all so weird I just blocked Youtube altogether.

But sure, let's go after that pesky...fitness stuff.

For anyone interested in more information on this weird affliction of the platform: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Wow, thanks. I read a lot but somehow never came across this. I will say, the videos I saw never had famous kids characters like Elsa in them, at least. But this was also in 2020 or so, which means Youtube's supposed action mentioned in the article were completely ineffectual.

Ratata

There are thousands of channels like that on youtube, all with acidic thumbnails and brainrot content. Yours resembling beginning of porn is still okay, most simply shoot clinical nonsense with no plot or meaning.

So muckbang videos are acceptable, but fitness videos aren't.. oh my

I would say probably the best thing to come out of the social media tiktok and instagram obsession has been a renewed focus on health: workout, diet, food, lifestyle, etc.

The fact that YouTube would announce this instead of just implementing behind the scenes is also shocking - they are getting bold with their manipulations

How about we not let dystopian megacorps paternalistically decide what we are and aren’t allowed to watch?

Can't have fitness videos.

But you CAN have all those processed food ads!

In fact, we INSIST that you watch all those processed food and pharma ads!

Just make sure you don't try to use any non-pharma ways of getting healthier!

It's able-ist to get fit!

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