Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?
Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
You're not arguing that "laws don't actually do anything", right?
Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
that assassin was motivated by an extreme religious affiliation to the lawmakers. There is irony here.
> In 2019, 37% of US high school students reported lifetime use of marijuana and 22% reported use in the past 30 days.1 Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019. However, large percentages of middle and high school students reported past-year marijuana vaping—8% of eighth graders, 19% of 10th graders, and 22% of 12th graders.
> Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019.
I've got a guess about why the number might be rising, and it rhymes with "egalization", in which case, yes, making drugs illegal reduced use of drugs. I guarantee fewer people in general, including fewer kids, smoked when it was illegal, and less was consumed overall. I'd further bet there's a lot less pot consumption by kids now, than there would be if dispensaries didn't verify age.
But I also suspect it's just kinda hard to get clean data about teen drug use. I'd also guess the real figures are extremely uneven (that "8% of eighth graders", if accurate, probably means 20% some places and 2% in others) and high use correlates to places where it's easy to get, which supports the notion that carding or outlawing should reduce use (since they make it harder to get).
(Nb. I'm pro-legalization, I just think carding and outlawing almost certainly strongly curb use, though of course they don't stop it completely, and I think "this wasn't perfectly effective, so it's necessarily useless" isn't a strong point in most situations)
*Citation needed
The fundamental questions are
1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, yeah, it would...
>1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
I'm not sure what this question is asking. Porn usage may or may not 'line up' with patterns of addiction. That doesn't mean that porn always or even the majority of the time is. Can you rephrase this question into something more coherent?
>2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
LOL absolutely not. Children, especially American children, are given huge amounts of sugar, which is actually physically addictive. Many are given huge amounts of caffeine which is again, physically addictive.
Millions of children around the country have tons of access to video games and TV, which can be addictive.
>If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, you're first question doesn't make any sense, and your second question is a resounding no.
The best way to keep your child from becoming addicted to anything is to act like a parent.
A kid with a peanut allergy who came into contact with peanuts, even accidentally one time, could be fatal.
And we already have something similar for porn sites, in the form of the "Are you over 18?" landing page banners.
People do "make changes" for specific allergies & food restrictions by making the information available & creating some allergen-free zones (just like adult content is currently kept out of schools and family-friendly locations, and there are adult-content warnings most times) but peanut access is absolutely currently up to the parent, in general.
I'm not even sure what the billboard thing is getting at. We shouldn't have nudity on billboards (except female breasts in nonsexual contexts), just like we shouldn't keep peanuts where we know anyone allergic has to be. Counter-hypothetical: it would be incredibly stupid to lock up peanut butter because kids might take a $5 bill to the store and buy the clearly-labelled jar.
We mandate labeling. We could not do that and just say "parents, you must run a peanut-detection lab or have extremely restricted diets of only food you make yourself, to keep your kids safe", but we don't.
I realize I'm beating a dead analogy here, but I don't think we should impose those labelling restrictions on independent hobbyist websites, just like we don't require licensing or ingredient labelling for small bake sales.
But even if we did, "label obviously-adult content" would be way more reasonable than "collect personal information to verify the real-life identity of site visitors, and log this sensitive data so it can be accessed (/hacked) later"
It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.
As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.
But your attitude is, in a historical context, weird. At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents. If you look, for instance, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the Parenthood article section Parental Responsibilities), you will see, for instance, that throughout most of western history and for most people, there is an explicit or implicit understanding that it is, in fact, the parents who operate as stewards of children _on behalf of_ society and that the ultimate locus of responsibility for the security and well being of children is the society at large, not the parents. This is why, for instance, the state is typically understood to have the right to remove a child from the home of an abusive or neglectful parent. Given that understanding, there is a commensurate power in society to make rules which may protect children and in our particular historical moment these rules take the form of laws at multiple levels of government.
It places a powerful (and disordered) burden on parents to make them _exclusively_ responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their children.
The state will _inevitably exercise power_. Only a vigilant citizenry can hope to modulate it.
Republicans can completely ignore California and Democrats can completely ignore the Bible Belt (except GA which is now Purple)
As far as what the state can do. Again as a parent, when my children were minors, we chose trusted family members to be their guardian. If that wasn’t an option, we would have chosen friends.
No matter how you feel about the abortion issue for instance, even in conservative states, the majority of people don’t want more restrictions as proven by recent ballot initiatives, yet the politicians are still passing laws.
In my home state (Florida) the government is wasting all kinds of taxpayer money going after Disney and out of the list of things Florida and especially my city (Orlando) cares about is that Disney spoke out against a policy.
As to that specific example, I trust my own judgment for who my kids would be reared by more than I trust a bureaucrat with the same role.
So you can’t have multiple marriage licenses, but you can legally hold a public polygamist civil ceremony followed by “cohabitation.”
Granted people want the legal befits of a recognized marriage rather than the state to treating it as two actors preforming a ceremony as part of a play. But such distinction are relevant when you say something is banned.
“On December 13, 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups,[25] struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.[26] The state of Utah appealed the decision, arguing that polygamist Kody Brown (whose relationships were documented in the show Sister Wives) lacked standing to bring his civil suit, since his county prosecutor, Jeff Buhman, had not followed through on any plan to prosecute the Brown family. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Denver) agreed with Utah and overturned the previous decision, thus effectively recriminalizing polygamy as a felony.[27]”
Of note, the state of Utah won the appeal because they didn’t bring action against the group rather than because the lower court’s decision was incorrect. Thus polygamy can remain illegal as long as nobody is ever prosecuted for it.
It also mentions: “Given that almost no polygamists bother to seek a second marriage license, the practice of forming a family with more than one spousal-styled relationship is very difficult to criminalize. In the majority of cases, the additional partner is considered a wife in the context of religious beliefs. Legally speaking, the practice is more akin to adultery.”
> If even one of the marriages is a legal, civil marriage, then Kody and the wives are probably guilty of bigamy under Utah's definition. The Utah Code states that a "person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." This is broad in three respects -- it criminalizes the behavior of both purported spouses, not just the one who is already married; it, as interpreted by the state's highest court, includes religious ceremonies undertaken without a civil license as falling under the heading of "purporting to marry"; and it criminalizes cohabitation (as well as actual marriage) with a second person while married to someone else.
The family brought the lawsuit, which was thrown out because they didn’t have standing. They lacked standing because the government hadn’t prosecuted them.
In Hammurabi's Code fathers could literally sell their kids into slavery. This seems strange, shouldn’t society protect kids? But it turns out that’s a relatively recent idea, instead there were rules around what happens when both parents die but children were plentiful and many where injured or even killed by their parents without consequence.
Which doesn’t mean I disagree with them, just that their argument isn’t sound. Slavery was also depressingly common and I am glad it’s become vastly less common today.
generally, human civilization is us picking and choosing sensible/humane parts of cultures we encounter. the romans who conquered greece were of barbarian culture, only civilized by their adoption of the greek culture, which they later spread to parts of the world the conquered. the greeks remained uncivilized for a long time as well. they attribute most of their development to encounters with egyptians and babylonians. thus, it's almost possible to see a primitive culture that upheld some of the core values of our civilization today: human rights (not too far back but pericle's athens abolished slave trade), etc.
If you go to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
“Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent.”
“Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium.” Except if you dig into the details those bans where very local, it continues:
“Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Yet, infanticide was not unacceptable in some wars and infanticide in Europe reached its peak during World War II (1939-45), during the Holocaust and the T4 Program.[2] The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.”
Thus as far as we can tell it was common globally from the Stone Age, through Bronze Age up until quite recently. Also of note, those bans wouldn’t necessarily be reflected as a change in all cultures in that area only the options of those running the country.
> At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents.
If the community’s role is to protect children, maybe the community shouldn’t be creating the trap in the first place.
Children are curious creatures. It’s natural that they are curious about sex and the human body. In the past they could look around and see members of their family, tribe, etc nude and having sex. Now we’ve taken that away and made it taboo. You can either do nothing, try and lock it away harder, or go the other way.
It’s a very complex issue though so there’s nothing close to easy. But this kind of legislation seems like a fight that has just as much to do with a particular religious viewpoint as it does anything to do with “protect the children”.
Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents. Kids are individuals that gain preferences the minute they gain any sort of mobility and trying to reign everything in will backfire.
I don't have strong opinions on this particular topic. I don't think porn is quite so damaging as others to the point where society needs to protect them. But the rational response to the views you expressed seems to contradict your actual views on the subject of how parents should raise their kids.
Kids are going to do things their parents don't like. It's literally part of the kid learning about the world and themselves. It's shitty parenting to not know how to deal with this rather than trying to pass laws so that they can pretend the kid is just a miniature clone of their worldview.
You do parenting and education yourself, protect yourself and your kids from any kind of harm outside. If you can't do it, just admit you are incompetent and don't force consequences of paying taxes on me
just because schools and the "government" exist doesn't free you from educating or taking care of your kid outside of those contexts. learn to be a parent
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
If we want to live in an environment where children have any degree of autonomy, that means delegating some aspects related to restricting age appropriate behaviors to the state. Now, I'm not a fan of government mandated age restriction on websites, but your point is obviously not well thought out.
Not a comment on the policy; I'm a parent and AFAICT none of my cohorts in town know how to do this.
> If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever?
The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight.
Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt.
My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering.
I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock.
Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset.
There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members.
Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed.
As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through.
Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
I can't speak for all children, but I have five of them and this works pretty damned well in most circumstances.
Why is punishing misbehavior such a universal practice across all human cultures? Because it works. It never works perfectly but it does work generally.
This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.
A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html
It's called being a parent
It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
I'm not missing the point at all. Reddit is a product. Your job as parent is to evaluate whether or not a product is appropriate for your child.
You know that Reddit doesn't have parental controls. If you can't trust your child to not go onto the NSFW subreddits, you should block Reddit so they can't access it. Sometimes you have to tell your child 'no' and they don't get the thing they want. The other thing you could do is write Reddit and advocate for parental controls.
It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them. I personally think Robolox is terrible for kids. Should Reddit install a parental consent form to make sure that parents who don't want their kids to consume Robolox content can't access it? Where does it end?
>It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software.
It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn. If a product doesn't meet your needs in terms of parental controls, be a parent and say 'no'.
>The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work.
Again, you should write Reddit and ask for these parental controls. I'm fine with that. It's when you pass laws making me jump through hoops that a problem exists.
>n reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
And those are the companies choices. I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
> It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them.
Where did I suggest you should have to jump through hoops? I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected. Similar to how that little "TV-MA" pops up at the beginning of a TV show; every TV in the US market can be configured to block content above a desired rating level, and broadcasters are required to include the rating in their signal. I don't see how this would be so onerous to require a similar standard for businesses providing content online, particularly when that's information they already categorize out of politeness to their customers anyway.
> It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn.
I didn't suggest they should filter anything; I suggested they should label content and that the industry should be regulated to use standard way to do this that parental control software can understand. There's already precedent for how to solve this problem in TVs. It can be done in a way that completely preserves privacy and only requires action from people who want to configure their client to have filtering. Note that I also suggested they should label content categories. The person configuring the client can decide which categories are appropriate.
Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
> I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist. With something like TLS with Encrypted Client Hello and DNS-over-HTTPS, and with most sites being hosted on large CDNs, the choice becomes "block all of cloudflare etc." or "block nothing". It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Is Reddit targeted to children? My assumption has always been that due to the nature of having intermingled NSFW content, lack of content filters, or literally any other control that Reddit was squarely aimed at older users.
>Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
Tobacco is a lot less subjective of a thing than 'inappropriate content' or 'porn' and its bad health effects are actually substantiated. Is fine art porn? Is a naked person porn? It might be to you, it isn't to me. Who gets to decide what is porn? The government? Religious activists?
>I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected.
I would be affected because there is now a whole system that dictates what content is. How does one do that? How much does it cost? Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts? What if one host has a different labeling system? It's not simple. It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
>Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
If reddit wants to implement that, that's fine with me. What OP said and what I responded to was this
"I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be *to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange*, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed."
>The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist.
You can black list the reddit domain right now. How do they not exist? It might not exist in the form that you want, but that's life. I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
> It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Among other child-oriented boards, they have a teenagers board with 3 million subscribers, so evidently, yes.
> Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts?
The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
> What if one host has a different labeling system?
I proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV. Browsers from commercial entities (i.e. Chrome and its variants, Safari, and Firefox) would be required to implement the filter settings, just as TVs must contain a v-chip.
> It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
> I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show. Currently companies self-enforce with ratings, but that's because if they didn't, they were going to have it forced upon them. The problem here is that we don't have any kind of rating system for web content, and clearly tech companies aren't going to develop one on their own, so it's reasonable to make them develop one.
> Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so.
Any user can make a subreddit about whatever they want. I'd wager the large majority of those users are not teenagers. Regardless, 'used by teens' != 'targeted for teens'.
>The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
> proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV.
Yes! We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
Of course that's the end game. We start with forcing companies to 'categorize' their content. Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
>It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it. What's to stop a host from just refusing to label stuff porn? You full well know that what you are advocating for is the governmental review of all content on the internet.
>But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show
The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
>Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so. hey If that's you're understanding, you don't really understand Reddit in the first place.
Look, just be a parent and stop forcing draconian policies on everyone else because you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
You think a significant number of those people are adults who have nothing better to do than larp as teenagers? And yes if you have millions of children in your audience, it's fair to say you are targeting them. Reddit is a company with a 10 figure market cap and 60 million daily users. They're capable of targeting multiple segments at once.
> Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
Reddit has hosted their own media for years. If you go to e.g. /r/nsfw right now, you'll see plenty of content hosted on reddit domains (along with thumbnails for the other links).
> We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
I'm literally advocating that we make that awareness easier by requiring sites with adult content to appropriately label themselves. The point is to empower parents to do their jobs without needing to helicopter parent.
> Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
The entire point of my scheme is to put the end user in charge of what they want to see. You're arguing with a straw man here.
> It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it.
It's already there. They already label posts. Most people don't want random porn mixed in with their hobby discussions, so sites already do that categorization and have some tools for users to control what they see. We just need a standard for http headers to expose it, and have browsers consume those headers.
But yes, business models that include adult material need to account for the cost of not distributing it to children, which is already illegal to do. I'm proposing labeling as an alternative. The current situation is that they should be prosecuted for negligently distributing porn to minors.
> The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
Yes I mentioned that it's "voluntary". The deficiencies are why I proposed labeling categories, not ratings. The parent can configure what categories they deem appropriate. If categories are too much work for a site, they can just label it generically as "adult", and use that to comply with existing relevant laws about distributing things like pornography to minors.
> you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
Reddit has plenty of content that is appropriate for children, which is the whole point. If they want to be all things and include both content for children and content that's illegal to distribute to children, then they should provide parents with tools to segment those things. Or they can choose to exit one of those markets and e.g. ban all users on /r/teenagers, and start putting their over 18 splash page on all pages like every other porn site.
There's also an age range where it's better to set guard rails and then let the kids do their own thing, and you trust that you don't need to spy on them/monitor everything they do. It's helpful if the guard rails are reasonable and actually work. It's absurd to have to block major video game forums because they're also porn sites.
That isn’t, however, an argument against restraint in such arbitrariness, but the opposite.