[throwaway803453]

When I think of my 5 year old nephew and all the threats our world faces, it all seems small compared to the threat he poses to himself. And of those threats smartphone porn-addiction seems the worst. It's like giving every child a pot vape pen or alcohol flask and then wishing them "good luck".

Seriously how do parents manage this and is there any young reader that cares to comment on how it affected them? If my high school had a dropbox filled with nudes and buddies sharing links there is no chance I would be able to concentrate. At least a filter on my phone would raise the barrier between study time and porn browsing. Not saying this law is the answer but it appears to address a real problem.

[junipertea]

Most of us millennials grew up around near unlimited amount of free online pornography and we turned out pretty functional. It might help a lot to have functioning sex education from parents instead of pretending it does not exist.

[ReactiveJelly]

And if the parents fail that (as they do), functioning sex education from schools and non-profits is a decent fallback.

[jackson1442]

Right-o, if we keep up with this "IF YOU HAVE SEX, YOU'LL DIE AND BURN IN HELL" curriculum (if you can even call it that), we're only compounding these problems. It's time to get over ourselves and start preparing teens to have safe sex instead of saying "no don't do it" because that just means they'll have unsafe sex.

[nate_meurer]

My own online addiction involves news. It sounds lame, and it is, but in terms of distraction and wasting time, it can be as bad as a porn addiction. I cope by locking down my computer with LeechBlock, and my phone with AdGuard. Both share a common blocklist hosted in a text file on Pastebin. That blocklist now has nearly three hundred websites in it, everything from NY Times to local new sites. Without exaggeration, this has saved me thousands of hours of wasted time over the years.

For whatever reason, porn holds no attraction for me, but I'm sure this system would work fine for that as well.

I have two preteen kids. We live in a very small house, and all of our computers are out in our common living space. We've long been in the habit of using our phones and tablets out in the open. Everyone can see what everyone is doing. Not because I'm paranoid, rather it's always been that way so it feels normal to all of us

Occasionally I'll take a peek at my kids' chats and browsers. As long as I own the devices and the kids are still young I feel entitled to a bit of oversight, but it really is very minimal.

[jackson1442]

I'm a college student, first year, so I definitely grew up in this age. Honestly, web filters do more harm than good in my experience.

Usually the filter starts with porn. Blocking pornhub and the other known sites is honestly fine, but there's only so much you can do. There's always google, bing, duckduckgo images (and ddg proxies those images).

So companies set out to make a stronger filter. People can post porn on Twitter, so let's block that. Reddit too. Instagram's bad for your child's development so we'll block that and FB as well as a plethora of other forum sites etc.

YouTube can have nudity too, so we need to lock it to restricted mode as well as google search.

You can see how this continues.

A web filter was installed at our house when I was younger (maybe 13, 14) and it took me a whopping 5 minutes to get past it, permanently, since I couldn't access imgur to see a picture on StackOverflow. I wish I was kidding.

At school, I believe people spent _more time_ off task on computers because they were constantly trying to find new things that got around the web filter. The school at one point had enough and installed a hyperstrict web filter that used some AI/ML bullshit to block sites. Not even 3 days later all teacher websites hosted on google sites (which was the standard district protocol) were being blocked. I couldn't continue my journey of teaching myself to code at school because so many of the tutorials I leaned on were on sites that also hosted tutorial content on how to make "the g word" (games) and were therefore blocked.

I personally believe these web filters are a net negative for kids and learning to self manage your access to inappropriate content is an important part of being a citizen of the internet. Kids will do what they want regardless, so you might as well make it into an educational experience instead of saying "no, this is forbidden," because that will only make them want it more.

[throwawayhuh]

As someone who grew up in the "enlargement of the internet" (20 right now), I'd say that porn negitavly impacted me for sure. I think I was like 13 when I first found porn on a nook tablet I was given for my birthday.

The issue, looking back on it, really stemmed from my mom not knowing how to stop me from accessing it, she, and all my mentors, grew up in an era like you described, the infinity of the internet (and therefor porn) did not exist yet.

Today's parents, in their giving of ipads to toddlers as a de-facto baby sitter or whatever, really need to understand the consequences of such, and how easily one can stumble into porn, and what they can do to combat that. Laws like this are doing a service, sure, but in a way that feels like the antithesis of the country/the internet.

I don't know, porn isn't inherintly bad, the porn industry seems to be based on the research I've done, but it really seems to exist in a similar place that any addiction does, and the negative implications that has.

I don't know if this answers your question, never commented on here before, but I thought I fit the bill of what you were asking. Really, parents just need to be more alert, and maybe that's impossible, I've never had a kid, but I know its a huge responsibility, and that you gotta know what you are getting yourself and your child into when you give them the entirety of the internet.

[MBlume]

> When I think of my 5 year old nephew and all the threats our world faces, it all seems small compared to the threat he poses to himself.

Really? When I think of my 4 year old daughter I'm a lot more worried she'll get hit by a car crossing the street.

[throwaway803453]

Statistically a child is more likely to suffer eventual chronic illness such as diabetes due to their own bad diet choices than a permanent injury from crossing the street. A person is more likely to kill themselves than die from a traffic accident. So yes, really.

[colordrops]

I don't know, i got tons of illicit imagery on my WWIV BBS from other sysops that didn't know I was a young adolescent back in the day. And my usage of said online media has only gone up throughout the decades and I somehow came out fine. Anecdote, I know.