…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
…so why are people so up in arms against bans and restrictions on children having access to social media, where they have even less oversight and can do so themselves?
Yes, I am.
“Children” being people of what age?
The Internet is a communication system originally intended for military communication; the WWW for exchange of articles and data among scientists and academics. It has evolved, from those roots, to being a collection of nearly all human knowledge, all human endeavors and thoughts. But its intent was never that it would conform to any cultural (or even legal) ideas of what is appropriate for young people to see…
If parents (who are supposed to be experts on their children) believe that their child isn’t yet developmentally ready to be exposed to nearly all human knowledge, endeavors, and thoughts, then they shouldn’t give that child (unsupervised) access to a communication system that contains exactly that. But I personally believe it’s generally good for children, certainly older ones and definitely teenagers, to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas, exactly as can be found on the Internet…
That’s up to the parents, not me, you, or the government, or any corporation.
Completely agree that parents, not governments or corporations, should be responsible for policing their kids’ online activity. But that shouldn’t mean Roblox should be able to ignore reports of groomers on their platform just because they buy a shit load of V Bucks (yes, this happens).
Agreed that everything on the internet should be there and is 99% fine. But I think we can also agree that no ten-year-old needs to see Funky Town or One Guy One Jar. Does that mean Motherless or the government needs to involved to make sure that doesn’t happen? I don’t think so.
As for groomers on Roblox, this just sounds like https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/
I got my first own computer at age 10 and from then on usually browsed the Internet unsupervised.
I remember that for the first few years of doing so, I took age checks very seriously. A website says “this is an adult website, you must be over 18”? I would click cancel. A forum has a checkbox “I agree to the terms and conditions and am at least 13 years old”? Not registering there (a few years later: wait, I can now honestly say yes to this!).
This of course changed when I became a teenager, but I knew what I was getting into at that point. I don’t think this is that atypical…
You’re not caught up with the Schlep-Roblox controversy, are you?
No, I don’t recall hearing about it before (maybe because I find Roblox an utterly uninteresting topic); reading up on it now.
The question still remains, as parents, do you want your child to have access to information that might influence them to do things that they otherwise weren’t even exposed to. This means that it’s not 99 percent harmless. Information itself is dangerous. One has to expand their mind to the true source of stupid shit kids do. And that includes the fact that if parents can shield their kids from it, out of sight out of mind and your kid grows up responsible. This will ultimately be the parents decision regardless because if a parent is permitting enough they could just let their child use their account if an ID registration was implemented.