Who gets to decide which messages teens get to expose themselves to? You? Why? We've had ten years of outrageous censorship. No nore, even for kids.

some types of content are indisputably disturbing for kids, like violence, war footage, sexualized content (esp. a sexualized female image targeting male kids & teens), etc

So outlaw Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit? Will dating before 21 without a religious chaperone be OK?

you can be agnostic while not objectifying the female image to a point of forming a generation of young man that are addicted to porn and can't talk and connect to a real women

Is this true that men aren't connecting to real women? What's the evidence? US STD rates are up 90% from 2004.

I guess STDs are up partly because it's fewer men sleeping with more women then.

We can recruit them to fight in a war, but it might be disturbing to show them what they signed up for.

We can recruit kids to fight in a war?

People who are too young to do all or some of vote, drink, drive a car, etc., can join the army in some countries such as the US.

I believe I was driving at 14 in the US. The current Michigan law is 14y9m to get a level 1 license.

The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds.

Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.

Recruiters operate in US high schools to reach minors.

The article was talking about year 8 students in the UK, which is 12-to-13-year-olds. The other commenters in this thread also seemed to be talking about younger kids, not 17-year-olds.

Yes, it's important to clarify what age group people are talking about. But we shouldn't automatically assume everyone it talking about military-aged students.

Is it censorship when school teaches you maths but not how to skibidi a toilet?

I had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I would have been much better off as a person without it.

i think about this a lot as someone who had unfiltered access to the internet since being a kid around 2010. on the one hand i learned to understand english as a young boy, on my own, without realizing. on the other hand i've seen videos of beheadings, terrorist acts, violent accidents, war crimes and many more, lovely things.

that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative. feels positive to me, just not without there being negative aspects.

I heard rumours of such content on the Internet as a teenager in the 1990's. I was never curious enough to seek it out, but there are plenty who were and plenty of those didn't understand how it would affect them. The latter group are the ones that we have to be concerned about. After all there is a world of difference between knowing of or seeing acts of violence and normalizing violence. Depending how far normalizing goes, it may end up being a net-negative for society as a whole.

Same. Im not sure if growing up watching liveleak and browsing 4chan made me a better or worse person.

I think the real effect on my life is that I was addicted to the internet and video games and didn’t socialize enough. My life turned out good, I’m married and have a decent life, but I think I missed out a lot in my university years because I was playing counter strike instead of going out and socializing and making friends. I look back now at how much time I squandered (tens of thousands of hours) but I guess many people feel this way about their younger self.

I'm probably a couple of years younger than you, or at least still in this phase you're describing. Love being home and gaming, just got back from a LAN where I played Counter Strike with three friends.

If your life turned out good, there's not much to gain from worrying about the past :)

Exactly. How many hours of WoW makes up for having to explain to a girl in her 20s that it's your first date? How much YouTube does it take to forget that you had to use your cousin as your best man? How many up-votes does it cost to make sure the person who picks your retirement home isn't a stranger?

I also lucked out and ended up married to someone I love, but thinking about the number of experiences I missed out on for lack of trying is enough to make my chest feel tight. You have so much time right up until you don't.

I agree with you that it isn't necessarily net-negative.

I cannot begin to tell you how much more respect and care I give to the road and cars after witnessing so many videos of how violently and suddenly car accidents can take a life. Many of the horrors of these videos are burnt into my mind and I am confident this is for the better.

We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is.

There are if course mental health limits to this. I never want to be desensitized. But in moderation I think it can be net-positive.

> We live in the real world. It is important to see the real world as it is.

yeah, agree. i guess there's a balance you gotta reach between 'seeing the real world as it is when you're adult' and 'watching a terrorist behead a captive in 4k as a kid'.

i mean there is some kind of bias at play in our societies, as i remember watching documentaries at school as a 13-14 year old, clearly displaying mass-graves at nazi concentration camps. i appreciate having been educated about this topic in such a direct way, yet is is very gruesome and haunting as well.

Frankly, as a parent, that's not the content I think my kids should be watching but it's also not the content that I'm interested in banning.

The content I'm interested in banning is the content that I know (because I've literally worked for the companies making it and seen the sausage made in real time) is intentionally geared to drive user engagement and foster addiction.

Loot boxes.

Online gambling.

Microtransactions.

Constant app notifications.

Updates from your "friends" that your friends didn't actually make.

Advertising.

Content designed to drive fear of missing out.

Content designed to drive sales.

Content to influence behavior through fear, jealousy, and anger.

Endlessly scrolling feeds of tiktok, facebook, instagram, reddit, etc.

----

Content like unfiltered violence exists, but it doesn't have the same reach and hold as content that is relentlessly pushed because it makes someone money.

But the content making people money is fucking insidious, because it's "palatable" to most people at first glance, but it reduces my children to walking wallets. It plays on their brains during formative years in ways that are very close to straight up abuse.

It is like religious indoctrination, but for all the negative aspects of humanity, amped up with a solid understanding of statistics, human behavior, and brain chemistry - All to make my children (and myself and my peers, family, parents, society at large) into money making drones for a corporation.

I think that content is where I find banning appropriate. It's not about the message in that content. Kids should be free to learn material that interests them even if it's dark, depressing, violent, or sexual (ideally with an adult they can discuss it with).

Kids should not be free to be robbed in broad daylight, hooked on addictive drugs, or trained like monkeys in a skinner box to give companies money for dopamine.

Thank you. We always hear from the geek who only learned to program solely due to unfiltered internet access growing up. But not folks like you.

I personally learned to program before widespread internet access, so know it’s not at all a requirement.

I'm not that old (got home internet in my teens). But got an old c64 from my uncle when I was in primary school. It came with a stack of magazines. In them was all this code you had to copy paste to get a basic game. I don't remember exactly but I don't recall I had anyway to save them either. I don't have anything to add, but you just made me think of a neat memory.

Yes, Commodore and cassette/floppy was one way. Books from the library on a PC is another.

The idea that parent control is censorship is very funny. Kid’s brains shouldn’t be exposed to addictive and exploitative content.

Where'd you get ten years from?

I agree, we need to regulate tech more thoughtfully, yet we also need to rebuild a culture that allows kids to connect

> stops all notifications after 20:00

Better to stop absolutely all notifications. When I need to know if someone of my friends is asking something I can open a chat app and check. If something is urgent then just a phone call. The amount of distractions is enormous, thus disabling it by law might be more effective solution, otherwise intellectual decline/underdevelopment of the future society is predetermined.

Whilst I understand your point, I don't think banning notifications is actually a good step.

They are a symptom of something else. For group chat, its missing out on socialising, Nobody wants that. How do you allow kids to socialise via mobile phone is that actual question there.

For video based stuff, _what_ are they being exposed to? how tightly does the selection algorithm push the viewer into certain categories? Who is making that media, and why?

Given that UK had the BBC to "inform and entertain", why are we outsourcing the entertain and leaving the "inform" to people sponsored by shady companies and malicious actors?

> there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise.

Could this have died due to tech?

I don't think so, it started much earlier than that. Unless tech includes having a television in the living room.

There was the Great Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 90s, and there were more and more places where you need a car to get anywhere. Urban crime, or at least the perception of it, also did its part. It started much earlier than the smartphone era in the US and the UK, but there's still parts of the Nordics and other places where kids go out to socialise and play in the forests or fields or whatever's around today.

Tech on the one hand has given kids a new way to socialise, even if you can't meet up in person for whatever reason, you can still video call and play minecraft together. The other side of that is all the advertising and tracking and addiction-fuelling. The particular combination of always with you, always notifying you, and turning the addiction-generators up to 11 that you get on a smartphone seems to be a whole other level though.

I wanted to make another point but I've got a ping because someone has posted on discord, sorry brb.

"Unless tech includes having a television in the living room."

I mean, technology as such wasn't born together with the internet.

Not really, no.

People have been talking about the "death of the third place" for a while, now.

Car-centric cities make allowing kids outside too dangerous.

Tech as in TV? See Roald Dhal views on TV and kids.

I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s, in a suburb with forest and playground in walking distance, there were less and less kids outside, or for shorter duration.

TV, cable TV and video games just killed everything.

It was less tech and more the worry about kidnapping and antisocial behaviour.

As people became "less local" as in, you didn't know the people in your street, it meant that unaccompanied kids could be more of a shit without their parent's finding out.

More old people getting or feeling threatened meant that something must be done. ASBOs were one thing, but also the feat that your kids might be mixed up in that sort of stuff, meant that free-range kids were the preserve of "seen to be failing" families

> We need to provide spaces for kids to be kids, and safe.

That sounds as though you believe spaces such as these no longer exist?

(Full disclosure: have three kids, don't track their location, don't believe they are "unsafe" going to play outside)

> because …, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise

Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That’s no reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society and youth.

> We can bring that back. I agree with all of your points. I am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have a low understanding of the impact social media is having on them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into messaging apps. I am terrified.

I was a freerange when I was a kid. from about the age of 6 I was left in the garden/scrubland out the back, to be feral with about 4-12 other kids that lived on houses that backed onto the same scrubland.

My wife is and was horrified by this. She was shuttled to other kids houses, and never allowed to go off on their own until deep into her teens.

Objectively kids are much much safer now, however they are not allowed freedom outside. Most of this is because of safety (where are they, are they being abused, have they been run over, are they in a gang, etc etc)

So _you_ as a parent need to entertain them

Giving your kid "the internet" shuts them up, and means you can do other things. However that comes with a bunch of risks that most parents aren't aware of.

I don't have kids yet but I would certainly want them to be free-range. I guess now we have tech like Find My, it should give parents more peace of mind?

Just need to ban (make it criminal) to advertise to and track kids. Eliminate the incentives and solve nearly all social media problems with kids overnight (along with most garbage mobile games).