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Comment by ed-209 | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside my personal concerns and frustrations with the state of parental controls (it’s hell), what does the author propose here?

By his own admission the controls which companies have been pressured to implement thus far are incomplete / can be bypassed.

There is of course only one, complete solution that comes to mind - universal digital ID for all humans on the internet - which is a different kind of nightmare. But we can’t have that conversation because the author won’t stake out their position there.

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One possibility: hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children or connects them with predators, and let them figure out how they'd like to avoid that liability. Could be through building something more robust (e.g. only allowing kids to play with pre-whitelisted friends, not any anonymous user), or hiring a legion of moderators, or through not building such a platform at all. That's up to them.

We don't need to prescribe what they ought to do. It's sufficient to say what we have here is unacceptable and make fixing it be a them problem.

"hold executives, product managers, and engineers personally criminally liable for building a system that puts inappropriate material in front of children"

If that didn't happen with pornography websites in the 90s/2000s it's probably not happening now.

This !! 100% Match the relation between power/control with reliability/consequences, instead of damning us all to ID for every Internet use (and that is coming) and so immensely risk that we get access to critical information and/or face increasing censorship. That would require a change of perception, but it would solve so many problems, from the one discussed here with Roblox as an example to food contaminated with whatever to appliances quality.

> e.g. only allowing kids to play with pre-whitelisted friends

if any of your friends are playing the game and the server is not full, they already try to put you in the same server

> author won’t stake out their position

Casey Newton is a journalist - it would not be appropriate for him to have a "position" on this topic.

If it's inappropriate for him to have a "position," he should not be saying things like claiming "Roblox is a problem"

No, it’s not.

Just because proposing a solution would be helpful, that doesn’t require he propose a solution.

Related, sometimes articulating a question in the right way is the hard part.

Indeed, it's editorializing.

But more broadly, all journalism is necessarily axiologically loaded. Why report on X but not on Y? Obviously, because the journalist/editor/owner thinks X is "newsworthy" while Y isn't.

Whether that means proposing a solution is another question. I can sympathize with annoyance at nonconstructive complaining, however.

Whatever the technical/legal solution, I think an important factor is also parental involvement. If Roblox is dangerous enough, don't let your kids use it. They might get around your ban, but at least you did your part. That means a great deal already. And people circumvent and break the law all the time, but that doesn't invalidate the law, and parents are lawgivers.

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