Spending money on giving kids school meals, hell no way. Spending millions on data collection under the pretext of protecting kids. hell yeah!
These shithouses do not give a damn about the people of the country. How long do you think it is going to be before someone gets blackmailed for voting for the wrong party and being a porn watcher.
That’s your worst-case scenario, right? Minors with ready access to vanilla photographs of naked people, on above-board commercial websites? So what. Tell me this abusive horseshit is the only way to stop that and I’ll still reject this abusive horseshit.
The pearl-clutching horrors imagined by conservative dullards are a mundane experience for millions of people, and relatively few of them become dog-fuckers or axe-murderers. Almost like a healthy libido is normal and 18 isn’t the day you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals.
Teenagers masturbating is a non-event. It’s as unremarkable and unpreventable as atomic decay. It will happen. Do you want it to happen to whatever quasi-erotica passes through the filter? Bugs Bunny in drag, beach volleyball, that one episode of their favorite show where everybody shrinks? Shoddy AOL filters probably made more furries than Disney ever did. AI’s gonna twist kids right up. Tell me with a straight face that’s better than real photos of fake tits.
By all means, keep actual smut off broadcast TV. Expect websites to put the weird stuff behind warnings. Don’t sell porn to minors. But if your website doesn’t take a credit card to visit, hey guess what, anyone can see it, and anyone will. Oh well. People who think that’s the end of the world are lunatics who mean it literally.
The first "porn" I saw was in middle school. It was a single bootable floppy disk with a pitiful menu of crude -- almost repulsive -- animations on an Apple II, basically no better than stick figures. The lesson I took away from it? How to program animations on an Apple II. And also that using one-voice beeps and honks over a bitbang speaker to suggest the buildup to an orgasm is hilarious.
Y’see, back in the day parents were not technically literate because the world was mid-societal shift. “Protect the children” (because parents are unable to) had some justification.
Today, basic computer literacy is a survival skill in the UK. The level of literacy needed to track your own kid is not that high (or expensive to rent).
If you are letting kids use tech you don’t understand, and are not willing to invest the time/money to track yourself, that’s a you problem. It shouldn’t become a me problem.
As for “yeah but what about smart kids”, I’ve got some bad news for you. They will always find a way around ANYTHING you set up.
Exactly. I was 17 teaching my parents about internet shit. I wasn’t smart, I still aren’t, but I also wasn’t. Anyway, the amount ov viruses I had to fix because of them downloading kenny_chesney.exe is… baffling.
I really feel very uncomfortable with the notion of tracking the kids anyway. Arming them with knowledge as best as possible, and as usual showing interest in their behaviour to try and look as best as possible for signs of problems but ultimately kids are still people with their own lives even if people in development. Yes you need to protect them, to a certain extent, but ultimately some of this is no business but their own. You can try to educate and forewarn and hope some of it sticks but the tendency from my memory of being a kid is that that tends to be met with an eye-roll, this is probably where the temptation comes from to track children or drastically restrict the choices they’re able to make so they can’t ignore you but this is hardly a great way for that person in development to ultimately… develop.
This is dicey though, not least because as yet another random person on the internet offering their unsolicited opinion, I don’t even have kids, and if you follow my logic to extremis, you basically have, “let the kids just figure it out on their own they’ll be fine” which definitely won’t apply to everything and can have disastrous consequences in some contexts. But nevertheless I think this concept of tracking, either covertly, or overtly with the intention of making a kind of panopticon effect for the kids, is likely ineffective but even if effective, is indicative of something going wrong with the intent of the surveillance.
It’s a tricky one because of the nature of the net. Let’s say we have three kids: Timmy, Jimmy and Harry.
Timmy starts looking up “tits”, because Timmy loves titties. He’s curious, and you probably want to have a talk about acting and how porn isn’t reality.
Jimmy, well, Jimmy saw a videogame character tied up and it made him feel good, so he starts looking for that online. He’s about to explore the BDSM scene. He’s going to need the “safe sane consensual” talk, otherwise his explorations might get him, or someone else, hurt. He’ll need more of a talk than Timmy!
Harry loves hentai; he found some when looking for pictures of his favourite cartoon character. Harry is going to need a long talk about fantasy Vs reality, otherwise he’s going to disappoint a lot of women! Wait a moment, most of the things he’s looking at involve animals and women… Might be time to get some therapy!
In all three of these cases a different style and level of parental intervention was required. You watch your kids because they’re kids, and kids are experts at getting themselves (and others) hurt. Parents need to watch their kids because it’s their job to intervene, and to decide the method of intervention.
However, we’ve not gone over the case of Lizzy, a girl cursed with religious fundamentalist parents. When they find out she’s more interested in girls than boys, she’ll be subjected to inhumane treatment to “fix” her. So there is a grey area here - not all parents should be parents.
They would just exempt themselves from it as they did with both reporting on people accessing porn using the HoP network and with the investigatory powers bill.
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