[crowcroft]

It baffles me that more countries haven't put legislation in place to severely limit what ads can be served to under 18 year olds (or at least under 16).

I worked in an ad agency a number of years ago, and Phillip Morris approached us with a deliberate plan to launch big budget ad campaigns on social media platforms specifically because they could get in front of younger demos more easily (traditional media having existing regulations in my country).

The original idea was to build a large database of prospects to sell direct to even after regulation eventually cracks down on them. Amazingly no regulation has come yet, and Meta has done little to no self-regulation.

You can blame parents, but even then one under appreciated problem with digital ads is the lack of shared experience. With TV advertising, you know what your kid is seeing, everyone can see a verify what ad ran at what time on what channel etc. If a parent and a kid are scrolling social media their experience is entirely different, and you can't go back and see what someone else has seen.

[Fnoord]

My kid recently got a second hand iPad tablet. On it, she uses YouTube Kids. I made an account for her. Now, they ask _me_ for consent, since she cannot legally give it. They throw ads at her about toys, but this is illegal in my country to target children with ads. Ads are supposed to target parents, not kids. Now, if it were one ad at start, I'd hate it, but they go further: in a 10-minute movie, the thing quits like 3 times to show my kid an ad. She barely has the attention span to watch the bloody vid! You know why they do it? Not because it is legal; because they get away with it. Law is irrelevant if it isn't uphold.

[dghlsakjg]

You have the power to stop this: disable the app if you believe the ads are harming your child, or opt to pay for YT or another kids video service that doesn't serve ads.

One issue is that YT is possibly violating the law. A separate issue is that parents are allowing children to continue consuming harmful ad content on an app.

[crowcroft]

Not sure if YT for kids falls in this category exactly but the social nature of a lot of these products means that cutting your kid off also has negative effects in their social circle when all their friends are on the networks. That’s why collective action is needed, not just the action of individual parents.

[Ntrails]

If we all stand around and wait for the collective action to start, it never will. imo start by making informed choices and sharing your reasons when asked.

Shrugging at brainworms being inserted into your child and shrugging with a "well that's just the world we live in" is mind boggling to me. Heck, when i grew up there were kids without TV at home. They survived pretty well, despite a bit of social disconnect.

[littlecranky67]

I always hear this argument - is there any actual evidence that this is true though?

[pyuser583]

This is one of the worst parts. Social participation requires access to screens.

If you think having screens hurts kids mental health, wait until you take them away!

[Fnoord]

I have a pretty staunch policy for my kids. I don't mind paying for something if price us reasonable. Malware, nagware, adware however? No.

However there's two parents. So I draw a firm line at malware but allow adware. Especially also since grandma is OK with playing a F2P game with them helping them get past the ads. On the bright side: they certainly do learn to hate advertising. And dark patterns. Their little fingers are better at clucking the small X than mine!

Either way, I will figure out how to stop the nonsense without paying the mob my overly expensive contribution.

[type0]

You could use https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

[crowcroft]

That’s the other thing as well, we need to spend more time upholding laws that already exist instead of getting distracted with these weird news publisher content regulations like Canada has.

[troyvit]

And Programmatic advertising makes this extremely difficult. Once you add a giant, automated ad exchange to advertising you've created opaque supply chains that help make it trivial to obfuscate who actually makes money from an ad. This article on ad fraud goes into more detail: https://xenoss.io/blog/programmatic-ad-fraud-detection

[crowcroft]

Agree on issues with programmatic. Compared to the number of dollars, and in particular number of dollars being spent on ads served to under 18s, programmatic is a rounding error compared to Google, Meta, TikTok etc.

https://www.emarketer.com/uploads/pdf/US_Ad_Spending_2023.pd...

[troyvit]

Whoah good point. Man for how small that market is they sure spend a lot of time screwing it up. Given their closed systems, do Google, Meta and TikTok have tighter controls over ads served to kids that they just aren't applying, or is it something else?

[crowcroft]

Over the years it’s hard to grok just how small ‘traditional’ media has become. Messing up programmatic and letting a ton of scam tech vendors take most of the money out of the system is a large part of that problem.

My experience is that the big vendors are better than scummy programmatic platforms in terms of ‘safety’ but even then not by much.

Even YouTube’s ‘for kids’ product consistently has scandals break out about it which says where the company’s priorities are.

[autoexec]

I don't know if apple will allow you to do it on an ipad, but even very young kids can learn to use something like newpipe or yt-dlp which can download videos and removes youtube's ads. If nothing else you could download ad-free videos and copy them to a device so there's a massive library of safe media you've vetted and wont have to worry about.

[Fnoord]

I use YouTube ReVanced and NewPipe on my own snartphones but I have not figured out of how block ads on the iPad (it does use DNS-based blocking via Unbound blocklists on OPNsense), she just got the iPad for a few days. On our smartphones, the children are the primary users of YouTube (on STB too, there we use SmartTube). Even YouTube Premium Family I had was primarily for my children. However they increased the subscription costs and went after people who set a different country than where they were located (I used India and paid 2 EUR a month). Now I am forced to pay the price if The Netherlands which is an illegal geolock since I should be allowed to define I am from elsewhere in EU (because I might be from Romania, living in The Netherlands).

[EasyMark]

Probably because being tracked across all platforms is a bad idea in a democractic/liberal type of country, and not worth the "think of the children" argument. At some point parents have to take some responsibility.

[ben_w]

> At some point parents have to take some responsibility

By voting for the party that promises to enforce bans against it?

There's more than one way to be responsible, and it's not good to be a "helicopter parent" even if you have enough free time to actually pair-browse the internet with your kid, and even if you did that doesn't stop them seeing inappropriate content or ads it just means there's a witness who knows they saw inappropriate content or ads.

[petre]

Even voting is influenced by social media campaign as recently seen in Romania, Moldova and Georgia. The right approach is ban the behaviour and fine the perpetrators like the EU does. If you can't punish the perps, fine the ad delivery network instead.

[crowcroft]

First, I’m not sure being tracked across all platforms is actually a requirement here. On device age verification and device attestation and/or simply assuming anonymous users are under 18 from an ad safety perspective would allow a level of anonymity across platforms. It might also help solve a large chunk of ad fraud.

Second, I think you really need strong evidence to say that the upside you’re asserting is truly worth sacrificing kids safety.