The whole idea of this is broken, since so much of our collective knowledge is locked away in YouTube/Reddit. It's making a law against children in libraries because there are adult books in it.
That's a problem. Reddit is already dead, half the subreddits are banned, half the remaining OG posts have been edited into random words in protest, 80% of content is now LLMs farming karma. Maybe we should have built human society on a more stable foundation?
This will be a controversial statement here, but for better or worse, Youtube is a modern Library of Alexandria. It archives a significant amount of human knowledge and culture in video form, and for a lot of it, there is no backup.
Big, popular channels do push their viewers to alternative platforms like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship guidelines and arbitrary demonetization, but a lot of valuable content is on smaller channels where the owners may not have the wherewithal to transfer all of their content, much less their audience.
> It’s only not trash if you use it correctly.
> Watch some videos by some racists, you get fed videos making you racist.
So don't watch some videos by some racists, and curate your feed properly. I don't see why the government needs to get involved here.
>This is the dividing line which should apply for under 18s.
The problem is the dividing line won't stay there. A lot of people want social media regulated or banned outright for adults as well. The incentives to restrict freedom of speech and control narratives are all-consuming. Definitions will be intentionally vague so that they can apply to any platform that governments want to censor.