Comment by thinkingtoilet
7 days ago
Right. Just like kids would hang out outside a 7-11 and ask someone older to buy them a Playboy. Or pay a homeless person to buy them beer. Should we remove the age limit on alcohol purchases because kids aren't clueless? That's not a rhetorical question. Should we remove all laws that can be abused? Your argument falls apart very quickly.
Your analogy needs modifying. If we remove the laws, a child could walk into the store and buy beer with their pocket money, no questions asked. This isn't the same as them browsing the internet no questions asked.
The child is not paying for their devices or internet access. Their parents are paying and providing the needed equipment. In a way, it's like giving keys to after hours access to the local mall, where all kinds of stores can be browsed including adult magazine stores, without any shopkeeper to apply the laws.
So one solution is don't give kids the keys. Or, since their online activity leaves a digital trail, even if they did have keys, there's a chance to moderate their activity via seeing what they have done rather than police where they might go.
So because a kid could go stand outside a store and ask someone to get them porn, we should not allow kids outside. We should not give them the "keys" to go to the outside world.
We should make spaces that are suitable for children (most of which should not be age-segregated spaces), we should tell them to stay in those spaces, and we should treat their en-masse disobedience as a policy failure.
Children are getting into debt on online gambling sites? Investigate. Suppose we find that half of children saw a betting ad and wanted to play, and a third just really like online poker: banning gambling ads and providing no-money online poker would be good interventions. "Remove computers from the public library" and "require ID verification to participate in pub bets" are not sensible interventions.
> "...we should not allow kids outside"
That's not an equivalent analogy. Freedom of movement, to stand outside a store, is a human right. It is not the same as "freedom to lurk around online spaces on Mummy's laptop and Daddy's internet account."
The Internet itself is the loophole in this analogy.
Minors shouldn't have unfettered + unsupervised access to the Internet, that's the solution.
The open Internet isn't a kid friendly place, isn't meant to be, and won't be no matter how many laws you pass.
Children grow up to become adults, and spend most of their lives as adults. It's important to weigh the lifetime cost of safety laws.
A child with unfettered access to the Internet at say 8 years (IMO, way too young should be 15+) is only protected for 10 years. Then goes on to spend ~60 years negatively impacted, fighting ever growing censorship and risking extortion/blackmail when data leaks. It just doesn't seem worth it in this case.
I'd much rather laws mandate special child-safe phones/laptops that could only access a subset of the Internet, rather than forcing every website/app to collect PII and inconsistently enforce age verification for all visitors for all time.
And all of this is besides the point anyway. Social media and cyberbullying are the real threats to minors online. Porn access isn't good, but it's not causing suicides and mental health crises left and right.