I feel like kids just aren’t learning online safety anymore. When I was a kid everyone was always drilling into my head how I shouldn’t be talking to strangers online or giving out even the slightest bit of personal information. Even my friends clowned on me for having my first name in my Minecraft IGN to the point where I changed it.
Now it’s like every 9 year old is running around on Roblox voice chat with a bunch of random guys and weird e-daters. I recently played a game of Roblox, for the first time in maybe 10 years, with my little cousin. She:
- had her first name in her IGN
- was somehow verified as 18+ for voice chat despite being 9
- spoke in chat frequently
- and threw her phone when she lost
What are we doing here? Are kids learning nothing? Where did the online safety classes go? The same people that wouldn’t let me talk in Minecraft chat were all of a sudden okay with letting this literal child rage at video games and talk to whoever the hell she wanted to.
To my knowledge, I’ve only willingly shared 2 pieces of personal information about myself online, my state and my name. After the Minecraft IGN blunder, it took me roughly 3 years of knowing someone online before they got my first name. No one’s even heard my voice! And now kids are walking around with their names on display, telling anyone who will listen about where they live, their friend’s names, their parents jobs, and anything else they ask.
People keep trying to pass regulation to enforce ID verification for grown adults because they can’t be bothered to monitor their kids. I don’t know why people think parenting has to take place outside the home, by groups of people who don’t even know your kid exists. That level of entitlement genuinely baffles me. Every OS has about a hundred working parental control apps, with pretty decent controls built in. If you don’t want your kid watching porn, you should stop them from watching porn instead of stopping everyone else. No one should be sending their IDs over the internet to a company operating in the most historically shady business there’s ever been.
Either way, you should be trusting your kids. Parental controls are a decent option when they’re young (so is not giving them a device in the first place), but by the time they reach their teenage years they WILL find a way around whatever blocks you implement. There’s always going to be a friend at school that knows a method around the blocks or can at the very least show them the content you’ve been blocking. The single best thing you can do is teach your kids how to have a healthy relationship with things like social media and porn.
The new regulations are particularly insane. Per the EFF, the UK wants to restrict access to:
- Content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for serious violence against a person;
- Bullying content;
- Content which depicts serious violence against or graphicly depicts serious injury to a person or animal (whether real or fictional);
- Content that encourages, promotes or provides instructions for stunts and challenges that are highly likely to result in serious injury;
- Content that encourages the self-administration of harmful substances.
Source: No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online
Effectively, this would ban:
- Damn near every good hip-hop album
- Anyone being mean to a politician
- PG-13 movies that depict violence
- Romeo and Juliet
- Skateboarding
- Wrestling
It’s not like these bans even work! Right now, the second most popular app on the UK app store is ProtonVPN. Number 5 is some sketchy “Super Unlimited Proxy™”. The UK is actively driving users to these solutions, one of which is most likely actively exfiltrating their data and selling it.
We should not be outsourcing parenting to PornHub.
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