Comment by donmcronald

The solution is education. The most well adjusted kids I've seen are told flat out about the risks they'll face and, in general, helped to understand there are break points where things get too serious for them to try to deal with on their own.

I think that if you block all porn, social media, etc. all that does is create an opportunity for kids to be shifted to platforms controlled by bad actors. Adults fall victim to pig butchering schemes where they're given 100% fake investment apps that look completely real and they don't realize they're getting scammed until they try to get their money out of the system. There was a story in Canada about a guy and his daughter that thought they had $1 million in savings and it was a pig butchering scam with a fake app.

Are kids today equipped to deal with that? What happens when someone tells a kid to get app XYZ because it's un-moderated, but that app is controlled by a bad actor? Imagine a Snapchat like platform promising ephemeral messaging with simple username / password on-boarding so parents don't see account creation emails, but the app is run by organized crime.

I don't even know how you handle it if they manage to normalize the idea of children sending ID to random platforms. In addition to getting platform shifted and exploited, kids will be vulnerable to sending their real ID to bad actors.

The whole thing seems insane to me. Spend some money on education. That's the only long-term option.