It's complicated. I don't blame Omegle, but sometimes there's no one to blame, except the perpetrators.
Now, thanks to AI, we could recreate Omegle and make it safer, like detect children using it, and detect abusers. Of course this may trigger an arm's race of filters. But I think we have avenues to try.
It could be safer but it's up to you to decide your family's risk/reward ratio. Safer getting a dick video online then in person and a teachable moment. These dicks are out there in the world. This could belong to your teacher, friend's dad, brother.. if you ever see this again call 911 and rin.
Any reductionist stance that "only" parents matter and society doesn't, or "only" this or "only" that betrays a lack of basic common sense. A child is a product of its environment, and the child and its parents exist in a society (so says Jared Leto). A child is like a radio antenna, it picks up information and influences from everywhere and reproduces them. A child that hits puberty also wants to do exactly the opposite of what you teach them, and be rebellious with the worst specimens in their class. Opening a chat site is probably the most innocent thing they can do, and if that innocent act can trivially lead to dire consequences, yes, society has a problem to solve.
The problem isn't Omegle in particular, but rather how unstructured the Internet is. Anything goes, you can therefore not shape and mold a child's environment to be nurturing and educational. If they have Internet you basically drop the entire world on their shoulders at once. Any filters and controls are at best leaky.
Okay, but I'd still call the parent the most important pillar in a child's life. Not the only one, but they have the most influence on a child. Every child is different, but most children will take a parents' action and words to heart and use those to form a world view. which can end with an accaptance or rejection of the parents'.
>The problem isn't Omegle in particular, but rather how unstructured the Internet is. Anything goes, you can therefore not shape and mold a child's environment to be nurturing and educational
sure you can. plenty of filters and blocks.
The key to elevate this from controlling your kid to parenting is to then explain why those blocks exist. We shouldn't be coy to tell kids that there is danger, that they should know how their body and feelings work, and that there is content they are not ready to view. They may still find workarounds anyway, but hard locks under "because I said so" or "I'll tell you when you're older" caused me to rebel way more than "because there are bad people out there" (as an oversimplified explanation).
And that's the crux that no one seems interested in solving. Why are we so afraid to educate our kids on this stuff?
Piling on responsibility on parents for the world they grew up in and are raising their children is one step away from saying "if you can't be a good parent, don't have children" which is one step away from "just don't have children" and that's why "developed" societies are in a deepening demographic collapse.
Also living in a global world is not just about your trinkets being made in China. Internet is a global network and it connects us globally. This "parents have most influence on a child" thing was I'd say valid maybe a century ago. But now parents are much more busy working, and children are engaging much more with society and the world at large, at much earlier age. This is not a choice a family makes. It's imposed top-down from society and its rulers, because the alternative is to not survive. And therefore it's society's responsibility as a whole to get things as straight as possible, before we can attack parents.
Again. Those parents are just products of their own parents and so on. And humans in general have absolutely no clue how this works. We go by vibes and superstition and events like the World Wars, depressions, recessions, cultural revolutions have completely disrupted and wiped out centuries of knowledge on what it means to raise a child, and everyone has to keep rediscovering this for themselves, which means they look out and copy what society gives them. We have no other way to operate. We copy, transform and emit.
But our ability as individuals to transform is limited. This is why you yourself are speaking the languages you speak, have the beliefs you do, you're just an amalgamation of things you saw and heard, and adopted them as your own. Including the belief we should blame the parents. That came from the society you live in. The irony.
Society and norms change. My "former children" were whipped by their parents, they didn't pass that down to me (but I was also raised partially by grandparents, who did the same thing). "we" decided spankings weren't acceptable anymore in a relatively recent time frame. But "we" still can't seem to teach future adults about their bodies and that bad people will take advantage of it.
It's a societal issue and I will critique society as they continue to brush the real issue under the rug. Perverts aren't some ancient monster wiped out by war, unfortunately.
>This is why you yourself are speaking the languages you speak, have the beliefs you do, you're just an amalgamation of things you saw and heard, and adopted them as your own.
Indeed. And my society taught me to think critique every practice, and to unshackle from tradition. "because that's how things were done" is the worst justification in my mind. Which you seem to be using to excuse this behavior.
I don't accept it. If only because of this simple norm: if we were thst influenced by our upbringing and this happens, that means we have an entire societal line that thinks it's okay to prey upon children. I hope we aren't taught that by friends or family or education.
>Including the belief we should blame the parents.
If society believed that, this story blaming a website for facilitating the abuse of a child instead of the parents who should have been aware of the child's browsing activity wouldn't be here, no?
I don't really subscribe much to the "you criticize society but you live in one" retort. Societal participation isn't very consentual in and of itself but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
You can watch documentaries on big scale disasters, and while in isolated cases you can blame few specific parties for failing on their responsibilities and therefore it's "their fault", the truth is that disasters occur when many many layers of a system fail, and eventually the whole construction collapses at some point, causing an unmitigated disaster.
In another comment I discussed how we could make a safe Omegle with identity confirmation and AI monitoring and so on. That would help. Not fix all problems, but help significantly. Parenting also helps, and so on. It's not either or, but "and". We can try to sort things by priority, but this is often crude and based on our limited understanding of what is most important.
Also saying "it's the parents" is particularly fruitless, because "parents" is not a specific entity, like government regulatory institutions or large businesses are, which are controlled centrally and therefore they can be designed, engineered, and monitored for specific outcomes.
When we say "the parents" everyone nods along and says "oh yes, absolutely" and nothing follows from that. Everyone believes themselves a good parent who's doing the right things, and to whom bad things won't happen. And when they happen, they see the problem outside themselves. It's also particularly cruel to pin blame on parents who have one or two children, and purely randomly their child may be taken out by freak circumstances. And then what? Make more children?
While a corporation may be involved in hundreds, thousands, millions of incidents, and they can and SHOULD learn from them and strive to minimize them. They have the scale to monitor outcomes, adapt for better outcomes and then monitor that change.
We could say "but OMEGLE was not a large organization with large staff able to engineer their outcomes". Well, then maybe they should've not taken on this project. Going viral by doing the minimum is easy especially when luck is on your side. But doing things RIGHT takes effort, money, time and people.
Personally my goal isn't to solve the entire problem. Because humans have a great talent of breaking even the most secure solutions. And on the internet that simply means "don't go to secure website, lure children to seedy website". So the problem occurs again and it's harder or impossible to target the seedy website (you know, unless parents properly parent. You know, the unproductive solution I keep bringing up). It may be more holistically safe but on a micro level that parent still has to suffer and that child is still traumatized. But you exhausted your easy target to sue.
In some views, Omeagle may be that seedy website as it. It wasn't this hyper popular trillion dollar company that entrenched itself in the recesses of the internet, Alexa ranking last month was in the top 700. gen alpha may not even know what people are talking about when hearing the name. But it was too honest and good hearted in intentions of and no good deed goes unpunished. So here we are.
>When we say "the parents" everyone nods along and says "oh yes, absolutely" and nothing follows from that.
Sure because "everyone" is in fact not "everyone" ajd certainly not any important lawmakers. On a micro level that solution is some sort of therapy to heal and maybe counseling to figure out how to parent for this stuff online if it wasn't taught in school (and for reference, my mid 00's middle school was already teaching about social media safety. This isn't that unheard of for millennial/Gen Z folks to learn). I can't make that decision for a single parent. Large initiatives include awareness, tools, and general tips for parents.
This is an absentee parent problem using the internet as a nanny.
Just because it is ubiquitous does not mean it is the correct way.