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by Hermitian909 1024 days ago
This is just as lazy a take as the UK government though.

Many societal problems would be trivial if you could get perfect compliance from the population. You can't, so if you're interested in solving problems you need to be willing to grapple with the world as it is. So far as I can tell online safety has not meaningfully improved since the late 90s - "enforce safety at home" has been the advice for all of that time and it has never worked.

I don't have a solution but "blame the parents" seems to be a very clear non-answer without some plan for how to make creating safety at home more easily actionable.

1 comments

It isn't, though. I'd say it's 50/50.

I started using the Internet in 1998, and the only advice my parents gave me was "Don't reveal anything about yourself online." (Thankfully I heeded their warning and still to this day I'm very guarded about disclosing any form of PII.)

Whilst admittedly a lot has changed in the last 25 years, I'd say only half the parents will actually try to keep their kids safe online.

The other half will sit around watching crappy reality TV shows getting angry at their five-year-old children finding porn on their own personal smartphone* because they don't want to look up how to prevent them from doing that, and instead absolve that responsibility to the gov't...

...who in turn use that as an excuse to censor the Internet.

*not entirely sure why a five-year-old needs a smartphone, but anyway.

> I'd say only half the parents will actually try to keep their kids safe online

Ok, so is our answer then to abandon safety for the remaining 50% of families? Do we think that's fine, or tragic? I'm going with the latter.