Comment by sarchertech
17 hours ago
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
> But kids are under extreme peer pressure
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.” Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
> I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
Sure I’d rather address addictive app behavior as well. But algorithmic feeds are almost certainly protected under the first amendment, so good luck there.
So you are saying that we should buy stock in VPN companies that serve Missashity?
"As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting."
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
Find yourself on the bad side of child protective services (rightly or wrongly) and you'll discover rather quickly how hard the government can come down on your rights as a parent.