TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale

Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by noisy_boy on Thursday April 17, 2025 @11:21AM (#43718208)

Google has created Family Link app to allow parents to control the allowed screen time, apps they can see and sites they can open etc. Conveniently, they allow blacklist/whitelist only at a domain level and YouTube shorts have the same domain as YouTube i.e. https://www.youtube.com/shorts - they could have very easily provided a regex/pattern based blacklist/whitelist feature. Blocking YouTube in its entirety is not feasible because lots of educational videos are hosted on it. The only option is to externalize the filtering via pihole etc.

I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.

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Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by sebastiennight on Thursday April 17, 2025 @11:44AM (#43718515)

I'm thinking that piHole wouldn't work for the same reason? (it's all on the same domain, so DNS-based filtering would be worthless)

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Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by noisy_boy on Thursday April 17, 2025 @02:53PM (#43720763)

Seems like piHole does support regex based filtering: https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/

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Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by sebastiennight on Thursday April 17, 2025 @03:26PM (#43721079)

Yes, but the regex is still run at the DNS-filter level, so you can use the regex to filter IPs or domains, not URL paths.

You can filter

    (.*).youtube.com

You cannot filter

    youtube.com/(.*)

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Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale by noisy_boy on Saturday April 19, 2025 @02:56PM (#43738583)

Thanks for checking it - bad news all around I guess.

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