[acdha]

> I think most American kids (sorry Ireland) are pretty much unrestricted on the internet by their tweens, since most parents buy them smartphones but don’t know how to do meaningful browser lockdowns.

It’s actually pretty hard to do lockdowns because there’s been so much consolidation. Many parents can turn on the built in controls, but then they face problems like “do you block YouTube entirely, even though their homework will include links to things like videos from NIH hosted there?”

The big problem isn’t that kids could innocently find sexual content but also that grownups will try to trick them into engaging with things for a variety of reasons. This is different from letting your kid have free rein of the public library because the library didn’t have some guy recruiting for a political movement putting books in the children’s section and the librarians wouldn’t let that creepy dude hang out there.

This came up at a school party recently where multiple parents of first graders were talking about how quickly YouTube will go from auto playing LEGO and Minecraft videos to some pretty unhinged stuff.

[lifestyleguru]

> but then they face problems like “do you block YouTube entirely, even though their homework will include links to things like videos from NIH hosted there?”

Tell kids to create list of URLs. Download the videos. They've just learned copy/paste, about existence of URLs, and concept of remote and local. Now they're hackers!

[acdha]

Sure, but then you’re in the business of having to add many exceptions on an ongoing basis. That’s why I wish we had more decentralization - it’d be trivial for parents to, say, whitelist *.gov with the knowledge that they’re not going to find porn there. Doing the same on YouTube is a much harder problem.

[Brybry]

One time I ran into a subdomain of cjcc.ga.gov, via google results, that was hosting porn (it's on the internet archive too - vicspublic).

At the time I couldn't even find abuse/webmaster contact info to report it to get it fixed. They were serving porn for months.

[philwelch]

> The big problem isn’t that kids could innocently find sexual content but also that grownups will try to trick them into engaging with things for a variety of reasons. This is different from letting your kid have free rein of the public library because the library didn’t have some guy recruiting for a political movement putting books in the children’s section and the librarians wouldn’t let that creepy dude hang out there.

You’d be surprised.

[acdha]

I would in the library field so, no. I know public librarians have to deal with weirdos but they’re a LOT more willing to do so than YouTube. It probably has something to do with how much better funded they are than Google…