Not wanting your children to be influenced by pornography at a formative age is a very reasonable fear in this era.
Maybe they should learn how they work instead of supporting a thin veil of totalitarianism.
Back in the IE6 days I remember there was some setting to tweak allowed content ratings for websites, which I believe was based on HTTP headers, but does anyone implement that anymore (did they ever)? I just checked reddit, and they don't seem to send any headers, and use the same domains for porn as they do for child-focused content.
The obvious thing to advocate for would be to require commercial porn sites to send some kind of standardized headers that would allow parental controls to work in the first place, and/or to require any domains with content targeted to children to not also host adult-only content (e.g. reddit should put either their child-focused subs or their porn on a separate subdomain).
Then require commercial browser vendors to implement content blocking settings based on those headers.
Alternatively, it would be possible for governments to provide an oauth style service that provides tokens that assert the user is an adult without revealing any other info about the user, and then require porn sites to check for that token.
It is unrealistic to lock your kids out of all social media.
Excuse me, what?
Is it also unrealistic to prevent your kids from doing hard drugs? Sure maybe you can’t control them past a certain age, but you certainly can AND SHOULD within a certain age time frame.
Social media has been shown to be so hazardous to developing youth’s mental health I think not only is it realistic, but you have a duty and an obligation do prevent your kids from using social media in an unrestricted manner.
They didn't say unrestricted, they said locked out. As in, not accessible at all.
And you know what is also very hazardous to a developing person's mental health? Being left out of most social gatherings and interactions with their peers.
You can block your kids from accessing social media, but to succeed you also need to force their peers to communicate and interact with them in a unique and more frictive way. And you have no right to force someone else's kids to do that. So the reality is that without a lot of like-minded families that do the same, your kids are going to be left out of a lot of things.
So is it unrealistic to control your children's access to social media? No, not at all. But locking them out from it entirely as you stated, is a good way to negatively impact their social development.
I find the argument that kids are going to unanimously ostracize another kid without an Instagram account very hard to believe. Kids _will_ be assholes for any reason under the sun, so it's not a question of will my kid have a hard time socially from time-to-time—that's just life.
Hobbies, social outlets, groups in the community—these are all ways to ensure your kids aren't socially stunted without giving them the emotional / mental equivalent of heroin.
The world's changed since you and I were at the ages being discussed here. We grew up in a different world, frankly.
> I find the argument that kids are going to unanimously ostracize another kid without an Instagram account very hard to believe. Kids _will_ be assholes for any reason under the sun, so it's not a question of will my kid have a hard time socially from time-to-time—that's just life.
They won't be ostracized. They will just be forgotten. If you are messaging a group of 10 people, and for 9/10 you can just use one platform, but for the last person, you need to use something else, then eventually they will start being forgotten unless someone is very proactive about including them. Miss one get together here, one joke there, and quite quickly you find yourself on the outside of the group. It's real, and I have seen it happen. It's not that kids are being assholes, it's that they are just behaving as young humans do.
> Hobbies, social outlets, groups in the community—these are all ways to ensure your kids aren't socially stunted without giving them the emotional / mental equivalent of heroin.
Those are all good and well, but they are no substitute for your kids finding their own friends as they grow up. Having the autonomy to organize your own social networks yourself is very important for kids.
Sadness, loneliness, isolation, these are not things that you can measure with such binary precision. They're emotions, and they vary, person-to-person, and moment-to-moment. Is it not plausible that for some people, 'social interactions suffering', even if not completely removed from social connections, is enough to make them feel a profound level of sadness or loneliness or isolation?
Yes. If they want it, it's not hard to find.
I don't have kids but am planning on it, and I don't see myself locking kids out of social media. I also don't super care if they see naked people on the Internet. If it becomes a problem somehow I'll deal with the problem myself.
I'm more worried about kids shows on TV with messages like "follow all the rules or you'll be bricked inside a tunnel". I grew up with those, and in retrospect, they are super creepy.
Certainly, I understand why people want to delegate work to the government here; parenting is hard work. But it's necessary work, you don't want the government's children to go out into the world and do their own thing. You want your kids to. And so your touch is going to be required in their formative years. There is no getting around that.
I agree -- both because it's unlikely to be effectual, and because it's not really addressing the root problem of parent involvement.
> I think you have to peek in and see what they're watching on TikTok, and provide relevant information.
Exactly. You can't just expect to go into your firewall settings, ban some URLs and expect that to solve the problem. Or at the same time, to just completely ban them from accessing social media at all (though arguments could be made for monitored/timed access at certain age 'gates') -- I've written multiple other comments about why that can backfire too.
Really? so the state blocks porn, but then that social media will have people that use bad language so the state needs to also protect your kids from bad language, maybe people say on those social media that Santa or Jesus does not exist so state should protect them again and ban this stuff too.
Do not allow your child on social media that is for adults. I am sure PlayStation offer social feature for children with strong moderation, so find similar social media that is targeted for children.
Parents are allowed to autocrat - it may feel icky but to parent well you need to occasionally put on your villain hat.
It's not about icky. If you autocrat too much as a parent your kids will simple resent you and once they're 18/left home they'll do whatever they want now that you're no longer around to control them, because they never learned any self control. Like US college kids going all out with drugs and alcohol.
Guidance is a responsibility of parenthood.
Must be interesting with other "sinful" activities, "I'd totally let you do cocain but shoot the government won't let me!".
When I went to college I was fine. I developed a new social circle quickly, and didn't end up becoming a drunk or a druggie. Sure, I did many of the things my parents never would allow me to do, but it was fine.
I totally get that some people end up in a worse place than I did, but that's not an excuse for blanket governmental bans on things. But I would absolutely 100% support any parent that decides to deny their children any and all access to social media. That shit is cancer, and IMO is worse for developing brains than nicotine or alcohol.
I hesitate to present such a hard line on social media, when I'm kinda "whatever" on teens seeing some porn. The problem is that I see what social media does to adults with fully-developed brains, and I start to feel like social media is akin to heroin: no amount of it is safe, for anyone.
A more relaxed view might be to give teens access to social media, but only in a supervised setting. Parents should be monitoring what goes on with their social media accounts, and have frank (but calm and non-judgemental) discussions with the kid whenever anything concerning comes up. Also parents need to find a way to impress upon their kids that social media is not real life, and that people present whatever slice of their lives (often an unrealistic rosy picture) they decide to paint. And then there's all the misinformation and echo chambers, and... ugh, yeah, no, just don't let kids on social media.
While i do sympathize with the impossible difficulty of being a parent in the current decade, there is realistically no way i am going to just accept the death of the adult internet. Thats likely a common sentiment and realistically the people making these laws are too stupid to enforce them against motivated opponents with technical expertise.
I dont see a way out of this other then create a whitelisted subset for children with enforcement being the responsibility of the parents. Because going death of anonymity for access control is a no go either.
Looking on the bright side, to me this looks like just a lack of safe for children platforms that are still tolerable to use.
Requiring age verification won't stop a parent from giving a kid access to porn. And, frankly, if a parent wants to show a teen porn as a way to educate them about what can be bad about it and what the dangers are, that's a private matter between the parent and the teen.
Porn absolutely has serious problems associated with it (both on the production and consumption sides), but teens getting exposed to porn is just not a big deal. It can turn into a big deal, but that's what, y'know... parenting... is for.
So I ask, why is it the government's responsibility in this specific case?
I agree, so as a developer do you think it is easier to block porn at OS level and your router or you think that is safer that some regulation that only some websites will follow is more effective ?
I read about some proposal for adult website to scan your face before granting access and other idiotic schemes, where the super obvious KISS solution is have Android, iOS, Windows, Ubuntu etc have an idiot proof way for a parent to setup a child account, this child account will set some cookie or whatever flag you want so websites can refuse to serve content to them. Also the big tech could use their combined energy to have a blacklist of bad websites that do not respect the rules like maybe advertisers.
TLDR as a parent do not wait for the goverment to protect your child from porn, open Google and figure it out,