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Comment by altairprime

4 months ago

From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:

Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:

> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse

And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?

This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.

3 comments

altairprime

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begrid  4 months ago

> Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:

>> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse

Like wikipedia?

  • altairprime  4 months ago

    Any world history source, such as Wikipedia, yes. (If that’s not the reason you brought it up, I only saw your first two words in the discussion; perhaps your reply was truncated unexpectedly?)

    This definitely ties into a weakness in the U.S. speech laws — we rarely view obscenity as relevant to non-erotic topics, so our social edifices are ill-equipped at considering this topic at all: by social assumption, a non-erotic text such as the old testament bible is unconsciously assumed exempt from obscenity concerns even though it is blatantly NSFW. (I can’t speak to how other countries handle this topic.)