| 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. |