Comment by joe_mamba
13 days ago
>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends
As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology.
BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men donating them money to the point where tiktok live is basically a preteen strip club. We can't ignore these obvious problems just because we grew up with internet in the 90s and turned out alright.
We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow even though i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity but a solution is inevitable even though it will be faulty and unpopular and people will try to bypass it.
The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.
If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them.
If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websites and a flag to apps giving an age/rating.
Australian laws decided to explicitly not blame the parents and place the responsibility on the platform. Turns out not all parents are responsible adults with a diploma in dark pattern navigation, and some kids don't even have parents. So if the goal is to help the kids, rather than have someone to blame when they get abused, you can't just pass the buck.
Curious: are you ok with the other laws that are in place in the world to prevent underage people to engage with all sorts of activities? Like, for example, having to show an ID to being able to purchase alcohol?
They aren't comparable. Showing an ID to a staff member isn't stripping my anonymity. I know the retailer won't have that on file forever, tied to me on subsequent visits. Also they stop ID'ing you after a certain age ;)
There isn't any way to achieve the same digitally.
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The difference is the internet is forever. A one-time unrecorded transaction like showing your ID at the bar is not. It is a false equivalence.
Not only is the internet forever, but what is on it grows like a cancer and gets aggregated, sold, bundled, cross-linked with red yarn, multiplied, and multiplexed. Why would you ever want cancer?
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I'm a lot more okay with that because alcohol purchasing doesn't have free speech implications.
It's weird how radicalized people get about banning books compared to banning the internet.
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> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.
This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network access.
Parents can only do so much, realistically. The other parties that need to be involved are the social media companies, ISPs, and most importantly the children themselves. You can't stop them, but they need to be educated. And even if they're educated and know all about the dangers of the internet, they may still seek it out because it's exciting / arousing / etc.
I wish I knew less about this.
>> This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive
Not if the rule includes easy rule circumvention. For example, if you could parent-control lock the camera roll to a white list of apps.
Want to post on social media so your friends would see? No can do, but you can send it to them through chat apps. Want to watch tik-tok? Go ahead. Want to post on tik-tok? It's easier to ask parent to allow it on the list, then circumvent, and then the parent would know that their child has a tik-tok presence, and — if necessary — could help the child by monitoring it.
The current options for parent control are very limited indeed. You can't switch most apps to readonly, even if you are okay with your child reading them — it's posting you are worried about.
But in ideal world there would be better options that would provide more privacy and security for the child, while helping parents restrict options if they fell their child isn't ready to use some of the functions.
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In what universe do you live where children have enough disposable income to buy a smartphone ?
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if you make smartphones an 18+ item like alcohol many of these problems would go away.
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Many parents of preteens and young teens that I know simply do not allow their childrend to use social media on their own devices. Doesn't sound like that bad a solution.
Age verification clearly does not work either. Teens will circumvent it, or use alternative technologies.
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I think firstly the kids need to get education about this subject in school. The dangers online, the tools to use to protect oneself etc.
Secondly the parents need some similar education, either face-to-face education or information material sent home.
It will not prevent everything, but at least we cannot expect kids and parents to know about parental control features, ublock origin type tools or what dangers are out there.
We have to trust parents and kids to protect themselves, but to do that they need knowledge.
Of course some parents and kids don't care or do not understand or want to bypass any filters and protections, but at leaast a more informed society is for the better and a first step.
>The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.
Yeah but many parents are stupid and want the government to force everyone to wear oven mitts to protect their kids from their poor/lack of parenting. What do you do then?
Remember how since a lot of men died in WW2 so kids were growing up in fatherless homes which led to a rise in juvenile delinquency, and the government and parents instead of admitting fatherless homes are the issue, the "researchers" then blamed it on the violent comic books being the issue, so the government with support from parents introduced the Comics Code Authority regulations.
People and governments are more than happy to offload the blame for societal issues messing up their kids onto external factors: be it comic books, rock music, MTV, shooter videogames, now the internet platforms, etc.
Chat rooms in early 2000s were full pedos.
And they didn't even try to hide very much.
Look at the story from darknet diaries, where the interviewee talks about setting up an AOL account with girlie name and instantly getting flooded with messages, 9/10 of them being from pedos.
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/56/
Don't have any examples myself because I was a spectrum kid at that time, quite oblivious to the idea.
> but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s
Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.
> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow
I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.
So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.
> i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity
I think it's technically possible to build a privacy-preserving age verification. I also think it should be done by the government, because the government already has this information.
> As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s
There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.
There were ~16mn users of the internet in 1995. As of 2025 there are 5.56bn. Are you saying paedophilia has dropped by 99.7% over 30 years? If so, please provide a source for that claim.
I think what matters are the percentages. Out of the 16mn users where there more or less than in the general population? I think it is reasonable to think they were as many percentage wise, if not more - because internet provides anonymity which is an advantage.
Nowadays with the number of users of the internet converging slowly to the total populations, the percentages are probably converging as well.
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