Why do we need a policy? Why aren't parents doing basic things like setting up content filters?
Not a comment on the policy; I'm a parent and AFAICT none of my cohorts in town know how to do this.
> If your son keeps braking the rules you've set....surely there comes a point where he loses his phone/PC or whatever?
The efficacy of this depends wildly on how the rules are explained and enforced, I think. This is a topic that comes up often between my aunt and I. She has two kids about 10 and 13 years younger than I am, and often asks my father and I, the tech people of the family, how to enforce content filtering and screen time limits for both kids. I've effectively refused to help on the basis that it'll only offer her a false sense of security, given that I was able to circumvent every control I faced with relative ease at the same age as her son. I felt that anything she tried to do on the "blind enforcement" angle would just encourage conflict with her oldest, who like me was rather technically inclined and often frustrated by parental oversight.
Note, I'm not a parent, just an adult with some frustrations over how this stuff was handled when I was a kid, so I'm sure there's blindspots and misconceptions here. Take all this with a grain of salt.
My mom embodied the philosophy of "these are the rules, and you lose privileges if you don't follow them." This most often came up in conflicts over technology. She would set rules over what kinds of games I could play (non violent only), when I could use the computer (not after like 7pm), and broadly how much time in a week I could spend on it (maybe 5 hours before I'd start getting pressure to hop off), in addition to the standard no-admin-rights and interent-content-filtering.
I'd often circumvent this stuff through a combination of linux boot disks and just messing with the BIOS clock.
Mom never really explained why the rules were what they were. Some I could extrapolate: the content filtering seemed to largely stem from her Puritan view of sex. Thou Shall Not, and no further discussion. The time-spent I was less clear on, but I think it was broadly just that "screen bad" and there were more interesting things to do in the world, in her opinion. For my part, games and computers were my only social connection to others, as an only child who lived across town from all his school friends. This means whenever I "lost privileges" for my phone/computer/etc, I was now socially isolated as well, which just made me more upset.
There certainly were times she took everything away, as a "loss of privileges" for breaking the rules, but then I just got more miserable because the root problems for me still weren't being addressed. Moreover, that meant she was constantly framed as an adversary: enforcing the rules as a single parent takes significant effort, because there's no outlet. I had nobody to vent to, she had no other adults for backup or to bounce ideas off of. Plus, I needed the thing for school often: writing papers for class, or looking up how to do my math problems. There came a point where, philosophically, it was difficult to physically take things away because I'd bought them with my own money or they were gifts from other family members.
Compare this to my dad's strategy: He knew there were plenty of things in the world he didn't want me having my life ruined by, so he went for education over prohibition: "You're too young for porn, because it gives you unrealistic expectations of both sex and relationships. Also it forms addictive habits. You can ask me questions, and I'll keep an eye on your internet usage in case I see anything we need to have a conversation about, but you should stay away from that." Infinitely more effective to a developing-me: now I understood his concerns, the goals, and had a method of recourse if I disagreed.
As an adult, I 100% understand that there's good damn reason to prevent kids from having unfettered access to the internet. Especially preteens and younger: holy crap, youtube is a brain-melting attention-hacking cesspool. Simultaneously, I think it's insanely unreasonable to "walled garden" everything off and call it a day. That's not how the world works, and if that's the chosen method of "safety" then you're just making it so your kids will never come to you with questions during their own exploring while also leaving them unprepared once they're outside of your bubble. I was always insanely frustrated that my mom didn't just talk to me, or when she did, that her beliefs and concerns were always more important than mine. Again, I get it: kids are not always rational, it is the job of the parent to watch out for forms of harm that kids aren't paying attention to, etc--but I still hold a lot of those frustrations as an adult, especially because I never felt like I got to voice them as a kid. So, I just went around them. Constantly.
I figure the best strategy (again, as a non-parent) is kind of defense-in-depth: implement some general screening to keep the ambient level of attention-bombardment somewhere sane, help your kids develop sane habits around their tech use and getting what they want out of it, and educate the kids on why those controls are in place for the stuff that leaks through.
Again, my main concern is how much people crutch off of "just block everything," along with the knock-on effects that can lead to. E.g., there's a growing pile of people in the US who class any form of LGBT media as "pornography", which is patently ridiculous, but if that's the criteria used by your chosen filter mechanism or if that's the criteria people try to apply to society....
I can't speak for all children, but I have five of them and this works pretty damned well in most circumstances.
Why is punishing misbehavior such a universal practice across all human cultures? Because it works. It never works perfectly but it does work generally.
This isn't to say the systems that exist are really good enough yet, many of them need to be more detailed. For example, most apps are an on or off toggle, rather than a "let my kid play minecraft but chat is disabled and they can only join designated family friendly realms". So what often ends up happening even for parents who do know about the filters, is they wind up relaxing them to the point of being useless.
I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed.
A better first step than this bill could also be to require any site that hosts a significant percentage of pornographic content (which I'd place at much lower than the 33% of this bill) to put it on a separate subdomain from any child-oriented content (e.g. forums for a children's game) so that DNS based filtering can work.
https://www.cisdem.com/resource/block-reddit.html
It's called being a parent
It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software. The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work. In reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
I'm not missing the point at all. Reddit is a product. Your job as parent is to evaluate whether or not a product is appropriate for your child.
You know that Reddit doesn't have parental controls. If you can't trust your child to not go onto the NSFW subreddits, you should block Reddit so they can't access it. Sometimes you have to tell your child 'no' and they don't get the thing they want. The other thing you could do is write Reddit and advocate for parental controls.
It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them. I personally think Robolox is terrible for kids. Should Reddit install a parental consent form to make sure that parents who don't want their kids to consume Robolox content can't access it? Where does it end?
>It's reasonable to demand that a company that's in the business of hosting forums dedicated to children's topics (e.g. /r/teenagers or /r/roblox) and also hosting forums dedicated to porn needs to do it in a way where the two can be effectively separated or understood by filtering software.
It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn. If a product doesn't meet your needs in terms of parental controls, be a parent and say 'no'.
>The solution to Cartoon Network airing programs for children and adults isn't to block the channel entirely; they just need to correctly label their adult programming so filters will work.
Again, you should write Reddit and ask for these parental controls. I'm fine with that. It's when you pass laws making me jump through hoops that a problem exists.
>n reddit's case, they already mark threads and subreddits as nsfw so it'd be trivial for them to put that onto a separate domain. Even 4chan puts their hobby boards on a different domain from porn and /pol/, and they're not even trying to appeal to children, banning anyone that mentions they're under 18/in high school/etc.
And those are the companies choices. I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
> It's absurd and entitled to believe that I should have to jump through hoops because you want your child to have access to a website that it sounds like is inappropriate for them.
Where did I suggest you should have to jump through hoops? I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected. Similar to how that little "TV-MA" pops up at the beginning of a TV show; every TV in the US market can be configured to block content above a desired rating level, and broadcasters are required to include the rating in their signal. I don't see how this would be so onerous to require a similar standard for businesses providing content online, particularly when that's information they already categorize out of politeness to their customers anyway.
> It's not reasonable to expect a company to filter content based on your personal understanding of porn.
I didn't suggest they should filter anything; I suggested they should label content and that the industry should be regulated to use standard way to do this that parental control software can understand. There's already precedent for how to solve this problem in TVs. It can be done in a way that completely preserves privacy and only requires action from people who want to configure their client to have filtering. Note that I also suggested they should label content categories. The person configuring the client can decide which categories are appropriate.
Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
> I'm not opposed to parental controls, but if parental controls don't exist, don't pass laws to force them to.
The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist. With something like TLS with Encrypted Client Hello and DNS-over-HTTPS, and with most sites being hosted on large CDNs, the choice becomes "block all of cloudflare etc." or "block nothing". It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Is Reddit targeted to children? My assumption has always been that due to the nature of having intermingled NSFW content, lack of content filters, or literally any other control that Reddit was squarely aimed at older users.
>Grocery stores are free to sell cigarettes and alcohol along with candy, but they're required to not sell the former products to children. We don't just say "don't let your child go to the store alone".
Tobacco is a lot less subjective of a thing than 'inappropriate content' or 'porn' and its bad health effects are actually substantiated. Is fine art porn? Is a naked person porn? It might be to you, it isn't to me. Who gets to decide what is porn? The government? Religious activists?
>I said companies like reddit should design things such that filters work. If you don't need filtering, you'd be unaffected.
I would be affected because there is now a whole system that dictates what content is. How does one do that? How much does it cost? Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts? What if one host has a different labeling system? It's not simple. It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
>Similarly, if they move their nsfw images that they've already categorized from i.redd.it to e.g. p.redd.it, DNS filtering could easily block them all while still allowing roblox memes, and users who don't care wouldn't have to do anything.
If reddit wants to implement that, that's fine with me. What OP said and what I responded to was this
"I think this is a poor solution; a more empowering one would be *to develop a standard for content categorization and require commercial websites and commercially developed browsers (so all of them that are in common use) to implement content blocking via e.g. header exchange*, with criminal penalties for negligently providing pornography without the correct headers (have some provision for vandalism when good-faith moderation is in place). Then parents actually could just configure their OS or browser for what kinds of content should be allowed."
>The problem is that parental controls increasingly cannot reasonably exist.
You can black list the reddit domain right now. How do they not exist? It might not exist in the form that you want, but that's life. I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
> It's not that much to ask that if a company wants to provide both adult-only and child-oriented content, they should at least provide usable metadata for which is which to make sure filters can work.
Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Among other child-oriented boards, they have a teenagers board with 3 million subscribers, so evidently, yes.
> Is it my responsibility to determine that? The site hosts?
The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
> What if one host has a different labeling system?
I proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV. Browsers from commercial entities (i.e. Chrome and its variants, Safari, and Firefox) would be required to implement the filter settings, just as TVs must contain a v-chip.
> It's regulatory bloat that would exist solely because people who popped kids out don't want to actually parent.
It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
> I can't have the government force movie theaters to show edited versions of movies so they are kid appropriate. Some stuff just isn't for kids.
But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show. Currently companies self-enforce with ratings, but that's because if they didn't, they were going to have it forced upon them. The problem here is that we don't have any kind of rating system for web content, and clearly tech companies aren't going to develop one on their own, so it's reasonable to make them develop one.
> Reddit, for the most part, does not provide content.
Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so.
Any user can make a subreddit about whatever they want. I'd wager the large majority of those users are not teenagers. Regardless, 'used by teens' != 'targeted for teens'.
>The site host, given that they're the ones providing adult material in a commercial context.
Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
> proposed we should create a standard system for labeling and mandate its use for commercial sites that offer adult material, just like we did with TV.
Yes! We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
Of course that's the end game. We start with forcing companies to 'categorize' their content. Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
>It's requiring site operators to provide the metadata needed for parents to be able to effectively parent without the solution being "lol just don't let your kid use any website at all".
It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it. What's to stop a host from just refusing to label stuff porn? You full well know that what you are advocating for is the governmental review of all content on the internet.
>But we can force movie theaters to provide ratings of movies and require them to bar children from watching any pornographic films they show
The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
>Of course they do. They don't make it, but they're the ones providing it, and they make plenty of money doing so. hey If that's you're understanding, you don't really understand Reddit in the first place.
Look, just be a parent and stop forcing draconian policies on everyone else because you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
You think a significant number of those people are adults who have nothing better to do than larp as teenagers? And yes if you have millions of children in your audience, it's fair to say you are targeting them. Reddit is a company with a 10 figure market cap and 60 million daily users. They're capable of targeting multiple segments at once.
> Which site host? Reddit is primarily a link aggregator.
Reddit has hosted their own media for years. If you go to e.g. /r/nsfw right now, you'll see plenty of content hosted on reddit domains (along with thumbnails for the other links).
> We need to make sure adults in no way be aware of or responsible for what media their children consume!
I'm literally advocating that we make that awareness easier by requiring sites with adult content to appropriately label themselves. The point is to empower parents to do their jobs without needing to helicopter parent.
> Then we make it harder and harder to access the content that people like you have determined is undesirable.
The entire point of my scheme is to put the end user in charge of what they want to see. You're arguing with a straw man here.
> It's requiring businesses to implement a massively expensive and arbitrary censorship system because parents are unable to tell their kids no. Metata wont be magically created and you know it.
It's already there. They already label posts. Most people don't want random porn mixed in with their hobby discussions, so sites already do that categorization and have some tools for users to control what they see. We just need a standard for http headers to expose it, and have browsers consume those headers.
But yes, business models that include adult material need to account for the cost of not distributing it to children, which is already illegal to do. I'm proposing labeling as an alternative. The current situation is that they should be prosecuted for negligently distributing porn to minors.
> The MPA is a voluntary rating scheme. You should look into it because it highlights all the obvious problems with what you are presenting. Misogyny, christian norms dictating what content can be shown, it's a disaster.
Yes I mentioned that it's "voluntary". The deficiencies are why I proposed labeling categories, not ratings. The parent can configure what categories they deem appropriate. If categories are too much work for a site, they can just label it generically as "adult", and use that to comply with existing relevant laws about distributing things like pornography to minors.
> you can't tell your kid no or monitor what they do online. Reddit is inappropriate for children, be responsible, don't let your children use it.
Reddit has plenty of content that is appropriate for children, which is the whole point. If they want to be all things and include both content for children and content that's illegal to distribute to children, then they should provide parents with tools to segment those things. Or they can choose to exit one of those markets and e.g. ban all users on /r/teenagers, and start putting their over 18 splash page on all pages like every other porn site.
There's also an age range where it's better to set guard rails and then let the kids do their own thing, and you trust that you don't need to spy on them/monitor everything they do. It's helpful if the guard rails are reasonable and actually work. It's absurd to have to block major video game forums because they're also porn sites.