It's fairly obvious that giving children a safe zone is still better than throwing them in the 18+ internet right?
Are there any arguments as to why a platform for under 13 y/o would be worse than these demographics using the normal platform?
Kids reading stuff or watching videos or playing games, none of that amounts to a constant numerical score of whether or not their peers "like" them.
Without knowing anything about Instagram Kids, more parents might let their children use it if it appears safe for children. If it's not actually safe(r?), then that's more exposure.
For example, YouTube Kids is almost the same garbage as YouTube, but the name implies otherwise. Neither flavor should be left unsupervised with children.
Except that everything on there is going to keep kids "engaged." Even the weird toxic clickbait sort of stuff. On regular YouTube, they might at least wander off into something less interesting and put it down, but in the "Kids" sphere, you can safely bet they won't put it down of their own "This has gotten boring..." accord.
I entirely agree that unsupervised YouTube of any form for kids is a terrible idea.
Google's general concept that "algorithms and machine learning" can do anything useful against unlimited attacks from motivated adversaries (some of the bizarre Elsegate videos made quite a bit of money) hasn't worked out very well in practice, and that's before you get the 4chan trolling style attacks. And YouTube's volume is far, far too great for humans to actually watch everything coming in. I can't solve that problem, but I sure can solve the problem of not giving my kids an unsupervised pipeline into that world.
There are ads, of course, but tolerable ones. Certainly not any worse than what I watched on commercial television back in the day.
Videos from channels like Cody's Lab, King of Random, Smarter Everyday and similar are not available on Youtube Kids. This wouldn't really be a problem if Youtube allowed parents to mark a channel or videos as OK for their children. But, it is an outright block for children under 13 with no capacity for discretion.
I tried to create a youtube account with whatever checkbox they have that is "please only show safe content". I subscribed to kid's science channels. The garbage that came though was astonishing.
>It's fairly obvious that giving children a safe zone is still better than throwing them in the 18+ internet right?
Yes, but this shouldn't be done by a company that's only looking for profit. There's only so much that can be done legally to keep them away from these sorts of things and the rest of it HAS to be done by the parents. Children shouldn't have free reign of the internet and need guidance on what's appropriate and discussion on what they're seeing. I'm probably in the minority but I don't agree with just giving them smart phones/devices that just allow them to be connected to whatever they want 24/7 either.
To my knowledge there is no "gambling" aspect of the game. Did you just randomly pick fortnite because other games have loot box mechanics and you assumed fortnite did too?
Additionally, the actual game-play is made to be addictive and young children don't have the ability to keep this in check.
This is preferable to sheltering them until they go to college where it is all on display for obvious reasons.
One of my fondest childhood memories was figuring out how to get past the high school’s filtering software so we could get hotornot/MySpace/deviant art available.
Just remembered hotornot, kinda crowd sourced child/teen body-image shaming but it did help everyone develop a thick skin unlike today when parents try and micromanage their kids lives.
In the normal platform at least they can be disguised as average users that seldom post anything, and there is less pressure to post anything since it's a hostile place to children in the first place.
Also the option of potentially putting up content that mocks other kids. It's somewhat possible with messenger kids but the only information shared is between the few kids on a chat. If 3 kids chatting together make fun of a 4th, that sucks but that 4th kid is never going to see it. If kids Instagram mean everyone in a contact list is going to see the same content, that could be really damaging.
I don't know how many people watched "American Vandal", season 2. I don't necessarily recommend it in a vacuum, but it does an amazing job showing how much kids can be devastated by social media. When I was a kid, the popular kids could make fun of me ( and probably did ) but at least it wasn't in my face - or the face of the rest of the school so they could easily join it.
Certainly not reddit which one of the worse places on the internet for developing minds. It doesn't get mentioned much in discussions of "damaging social media" because it's anonymous and can't target people personally, but I'd wager that a lot more people have absorbed a lot more damaging content than just about any site I can think of.
I am sure there are hundreds of (likely paid) walled gardens for kids out there where a bunch of them even comes with proper moderation.
I'd prefer kids didn't use Instagram at all though.
You realize that by sharing those ad topics you are probably sharing too much of your interests. I get baby products.. it depends on what you've searched for lately.