Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?
How about: If you don't want your kids to see it, that's on you. Either accept that you are a shitty parent who can't raise children to your satisfaction, or get better at parenting. Don't force consequences on me just because you are incompetent.
I'm against forcing people to provide their ID in order to see pornography. Indeed, I am, if anything, supportive of adults being able to understand and fully experience their erotic lives, as long as no one is harmed, and to do so anonymously where possible.
But your attitude is, in a historical context, weird. At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents. If you look, for instance, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the Parenthood article section Parental Responsibilities), you will see, for instance, that throughout most of western history and for most people, there is an explicit or implicit understanding that it is, in fact, the parents who operate as stewards of children _on behalf of_ society and that the ultimate locus of responsibility for the security and well being of children is the society at large, not the parents. This is why, for instance, the state is typically understood to have the right to remove a child from the home of an abusive or neglectful parent. Given that understanding, there is a commensurate power in society to make rules which may protect children and in our particular historical moment these rules take the form of laws at multiple levels of government.
It places a powerful (and disordered) burden on parents to make them _exclusively_ responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their children.
It very much lines up with the historical context.
In Hammurabi's Code fathers could literally sell their kids into slavery. This seems strange, shouldn’t society protect kids? But it turns out that’s a relatively recent idea, instead there were rules around what happens when both parents die but children were plentiful and many where injured or even killed by their parents without consequence.
If someone makes an appeal to tradition/history, I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that they're advocating for things which happened 4,000 years ago in a society completely alien to our own.
Historically the level of privacy we have now is a recent phenomenon. What would nudity, sexuality and pornography be like if it weren’t taboo at all? Maybe societies role in this matter is creating the problem in the first place. And the best thing for it to do is to abandon the puritanical principles that probably lead to the issue in the first place.
If the community’s role is to protect children, maybe the community shouldn’t be creating the trap in the first place.
Children are curious creatures. It’s natural that they are curious about sex and the human body. In the past they could look around and see members of their family, tribe, etc nude and having sex. Now we’ve taken that away and made it taboo. You can either do nothing, try and lock it away harder, or go the other way.
It’s a very complex issue though so there’s nothing close to easy. But this kind of legislation seems like a fight that has just as much to do with a particular religious viewpoint as it does anything to do with “protect the children”.
I have no desire for “society” to make rules that govern my kids. Especially seeing that between gerrymandering, the electoral college and the fact that each state no matter what the size has two senators means that people who would love to impose their religious beliefs on others have an outsized influence on laws that are passed.
You may not have any such desire but imagine if you died and your kid was adopted by an abusive person you _would_ want the state to intervene. I'm as unsatisfied as you are about the current political situation in the United States, but the solution isn't to just demand the government withdraw. It is to actually engage _more_ politically and with an understanding of what the true responsibilities of the state are.
The state will _inevitably exercise power_. Only a vigilant citizenry can hope to modulate it.
So exactly how is “engaging politically” going to help when the majority viewpoint is already ignored because they know they can just appealed to their gerrymandered system?
Republicans can completely ignore California and Democrats can completely ignore the Bible Belt (except GA which is now Purple)
As far as what the state can do. Again as a parent, when my children were minors, we chose trusted family members to be their guardian. If that wasn’t an option, we would have chosen friends.
No matter how you feel about the abortion issue for instance, even in conservative states, the majority of people don’t want more restrictions as proven by recent ballot initiatives, yet the politicians are still passing laws.
In my home state (Florida) the government is wasting all kinds of taxpayer money going after Disney and out of the list of things Florida and especially my city (Orlando) cares about is that Disney spoke out against a policy.
Meta comment: Your attempted use of markdown italics multiple times in your comment made it a little unreadable (I made this mistake for a long time myself). So pro-tip: On HN, italics are the * * rather than markdown's _ _
It very much restricts people who want to marry more than one person from doing so and until a few years ago, the government restricted marriage to heterosexual couples.
We don't apply this principle to something like peanut allergies. "If your kid touches a peanut, that's on you as a parent"? No, people recognized that peanuts are harmful enough to a certain segment of the population that it's worth making changes, even changes that might inconvenience others.
Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
What does society do to solve the peanut problem? Outside of schools, it seems totally on the parent to stop the kid from eating peanuts. The parent does the grocery shopping, asks the right questions when taking the kid to a restaurant, and lets friends/other caregivers know not to give peanuts to the child.
People do "make changes" for specific allergies & food restrictions by making the information available & creating some allergen-free zones (just like adult content is currently kept out of schools and family-friendly locations, and there are adult-content warnings most times) but peanut access is absolutely currently up to the parent, in general.
I'm not even sure what the billboard thing is getting at. We shouldn't have nudity on billboards (except female breasts in nonsexual contexts), just like we shouldn't keep peanuts where we know anyone allergic has to be. Counter-hypothetical: it would be incredibly stupid to lock up peanut butter because kids might take a $5 bill to the store and buy the clearly-labelled jar.
> What does society do to solve the peanut problem?
We mandate labeling. We could not do that and just say "parents, you must run a peanut-detection lab or have extremely restricted diets of only food you make yourself, to keep your kids safe", but we don't.
I have no issue with labelling requirements for large commercial operations. To be honest I thought we already had that for adult content, given the specific TV/radio limits and the "confirm you're 18" popups so popular on the web.
I realize I'm beating a dead analogy here, but I don't think we should impose
those labelling restrictions on independent hobbyist websites, just like we don't require licensing or ingredient labelling for small bake sales.
But even if we did, "label obviously-adult content" would be way more reasonable than "collect personal information to verify the real-life identity of site visitors, and log this sensitive data so it can be accessed (/hacked) later"
Writing "produced on equipment that also processes peanuts" on a food label is hardly inconveniencing others.
It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.
As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.
Do you have kids in school? Our kids aren’t allowed to pack peanuts in their lunches because parents can’t put an allergic kid in a cafeteria otherwise.
Also, when you know something contains peanuts, you just stick a label "CONTAINS PEANUTS" on the packaging. You don't get the grocery store to ask everyone for a peanut allergy certificate before selling them a jar of PB, and also keep a log of who bought PB from them.
And we already have something similar for porn sites, in the form of the "Are you over 18?" landing page banners.
This sounds like a smart response until you think about the possibility of an academic study researching exposure of minors to hardcore porn. Think that would pass ethical muster?
The fundamental questions are
1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
> In 2019, 37% of US high school students reported lifetime use of marijuana and 22% reported use in the past 30 days.1 Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019. However, large percentages of middle and high school students reported past-year marijuana vaping—8% of eighth graders, 19% of 10th graders, and 22% of 12th graders.
Laws against murder haven't stopped murder, so I guess those laws are useless.
Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
I'm not seeing the irony, unless you believe that opposition to pornography being available to kids must necessarily have a religious motive. I oppose it, and I am an atheist.
How about: dissolving all labor unions, schools and governments?
You do parenting and education yourself, protect yourself and your kids from any kind of harm outside. If you can't do it, just admit you are incompetent and don't force consequences of paying taxes on me
just because schools and the "government" exist doesn't free you from educating or taking care of your kid outside of those contexts. learn to be a parent
I believe they are facetiously pointing out the logical fallacy the original commenter was making by claiming that the law unjustly punished everybody to protect poor parents. But that same logical stretch could apply to any and all laws, thereby making all laws unjust in the same way. While that line of thinking may appeal to a anarchic-libertarian extremist minority, the overwhelming majority of people see this as stupid.
Sounds good to me, honestly. Or rather better than a system where moral busybodies seem to think they can get me to attach my name to porn consumption.
As a parent myself, I'd like to say that it's not that easy. There are measures you can take, but it doesn't always work.
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
"If you don't want your kids buying cigarettes that's on you."
If we want to live in an environment where children have any degree of autonomy, that means delegating some aspects related to restricting age appropriate behaviors to the state. Now, I'm not a fan of government mandated age restriction on websites, but your point is obviously not well thought out.
I was a free range kid (we just called it "being a kid" though). I feel bad for the kids of helicopter parents - the parent is hiding them from the world and blocking them from learning about the world as it exists and from discovering how they can/will interact with it. Then one day they cross a threshold of "number of days alive" and are expected to know how to live in the world they haven't ever been exposed to. Sounds like a derange science experiment carried out by insane control freaks more than parenting.
I agree. But if you aren't going to be a helicopter parent there needs to be some safety valves for when kids go too far off the rails.
Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents. Kids are individuals that gain preferences the minute they gain any sort of mobility and trying to reign everything in will backfire.
I don't have strong opinions on this particular topic. I don't think porn is quite so damaging as others to the point where society needs to protect them. But the rational response to the views you expressed seems to contradict your actual views on the subject of how parents should raise their kids.
> Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents.
Kids are going to do things their parents don't like. It's literally part of the kid learning about the world and themselves. It's shitty parenting to not know how to deal with this rather than trying to pass laws so that they can pretend the kid is just a miniature clone of their worldview.
Yes education on content filters is absurdly low despite how crucial they are for general use. There are so many layers of filters that exist today (and almost every major player has their own family filter app/system), but outside of the ones that are forced before use, many have absolutely no idea they exist. It gets tucked away in a settings menu somewhere under your account menu basically. Or like on iOS where you have to also go into screen time to set filters, it can be confusing!
This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
I don't understand - if I did this kind of thing as a kid I'd just lose progressively more and more privileges. My parents never put technical obstacles in my way - there were just clear consequences for braking the rules. If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever? No?
tldr: if your kid keeps breaking the rules, ramping up enforcement is not going to change that for the same reasons that punitive punishment in the judicial system is not effective. Your kid has to understand why the rules are if they're ever going to function well within them, and that also requires a level of parental compassion and understanding that often isn't present.
> If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever?
The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering
and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight.
Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt.
My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering.
I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock.
Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset.
There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members.
Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed.
As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
I support the education driven approach, but I still think there is room for content filtering. In the next few years, I hope turning on suite of content rules across platforms will mitigate explicit material from automatically being included in normal content feeds and prevent casual searches for porn. I have no expectations that blocking material from enterprising children will be effective and consider it a more of a parenting strategy failure anyway.
Interesting dichotomy among the sibling comments. One is about removing privileges, the other is about (ostensibly) empowering a smart kid to continue learning how to hack and eventually possibly make a career out of it.
Getting around network restrictions started my software engineering career. You had to learn all about TCP/IP, transparent proxies, SSH tunnels, DNS, Linux boxes, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, John The Ripper, write Perl scripts, cron jobs, CGI, how automate things and become the ghost in the machine. Best educational tool ever for kids.
Your overconfidence just got you hacked by your son because taking away the admin access did nothing. The kid just installed a scummy Chrome plugin that gives him a "free" VPN (I say "free" because it's surely logging everything he does) and it works directly from chrome. no admin needed. Source: my son did this to me
I posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox. Apparently some policy is needed to allow content filters to work in the first place, especially as everything is using TLS these days and it's being made increasingly difficult to install root certificates to do MITM filtering (not that it was ever easy).
I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.
A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
> posted this in another thread, but how are parents supposed to set up content filters for social media sites that allow pornography? Reddit's posts are ~40% marked nsfw, and they host hardcore porn of all types on the same domains as discussion forums for minecraft and roblox.
You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult.
It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
>You're kind of missing the point here. Parts of reddit are fine. Kids should be able to participate in forums about children's interests. The problem is a site is comingling children's forums and porn in a way where filtering is unreasonably difficult.
I'm not missing the point at all. Reddit is a product. Your job as parent is to evaluate whether or not a product is appropriate for your child.
You know that Reddit doesn't have parental controls. If you can't trust your child to not go onto the NSFW subreddits, you should block Reddit so they can't access it. Sometimes you have to tell your child 'no' and they don't get the thing they want. The other thing you could do is write Reddit and advocate for parental controls.
It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them. I personally think Robolox is terrible for kids. Should Reddit install a parental consent form to make sure that parents who don't want their kids to consume Robolox content can't access it? Where does it end?
>It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software.
It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn. If a product doesn't meet your needs in terms of parental controls, be a parent and say 'no'.
>The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work.
Again, you should write Reddit and ask for these parental controls. I'm fine with that. It's when you pass laws making me jump through hoops that a problem exists.
>n reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
And those are the companies choices. I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
Reddit is a company that has products targeted toward both children and adults. If they want to do that, they should act like any other business and ensure that children aren't allowed access to products that are only for adults, or at least enable parents to make that decision. Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
> It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them.
Where did I suggest you should have to jump through hoops? I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected. Similar to how that little "TV-MA" pops up at the beginning of a TV show; every TV in the US market can be configured to block content above a desired rating level, and broadcasters are required to include the rating in their signal. I don't see how this would be so onerous to require a similar standard for businesses providing content online, particularly when that's information they already categorize out of politeness to their customers anyway.
> It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn.
I didn't suggest they should filter anything; I suggested they should label content and that the industry should be regulated to use standard way to do this that parental control software can understand. There's already precedent for how to solve this problem in TVs. It can be done in a way that completely preserves privacy and only requires action from people who want to configure their client to have filtering. Note that I also suggested they should label content categories. The person configuring the client can decide which categories are appropriate.
Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
> I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist. With something like TLS with Encrypted Client Hello and DNS-over-HTTPS, and with most sites being hosted on large CDNs, the choice becomes "block all of cloudflare etc." or "block nothing". It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.