> You are purposefully bringing up an extremely rare use case to detract from the fact that 99% of users of this software are going to be abusive parents
What exactly is abusive about me wanting to know if my 6 year old is watching porn?
Are parents that signed up for Youtube Kids abusive, too? Is Google abusive for filtering the videos? And are all those who shared articles about how porn was showing up in YTKids abusive for letting parents know that their children might have been exposed to mature material?
> Dare I ask why you put your guards up against YouTube instead of either deciding that your kids are too young to use a tablet/smartphone/PC in general, or that sometimes contents is scary but it's OK to talk about?
My kids are too young to have unrestricted access to the internet. That's why they are limited to specific kids apps.
But YTKids is different than all the other kids apps. All the other apps have a human check all the content before it goes live.
So I can be reasonably certain that the content will be ok without watching it all first.
With YT, I can't have that certainty. So they just don't get to use that platform anymore.
Yeah, bad things happen, and when they do I talk to my kids about it.
But I don't want to purposely subject them to such things if I don't have to.
>The average parent has the capability to block porn because blocking porn can be simply done with controlling internet device access.
How are parents supposed to control devices their kid's friends have at school or at a friends house? By your reasoning the parents must homeschool and be present at any friend's house. Is that what you are advocating for?
>It's similar to how parents block porn when it is in books or Playboy magazines or VHS tapes or TV. Parents restrict access to their property that contains porn.
Kids frequently got access to porn magazines because their friends had one. How do you expect a parent to prevent their kids from viewing those porn magazines? Should a parent search their kid's backpack and strip search them every time they get home?
>If someone's kids are at an age where they don't want them possibly viewing porn then they can limit their kids to devices with parental controls that allow strict app/site whitelists (ex. Amazon Kindle Fire tablets and iPads) or only allow device access during a supervised time (what my parents did with TV).
You are assuming it is not possible for a kid to see porn outside their home or on another person's device.
>If parents are letting their children stay up all night on phones and tablets then I guess it's a problem but the same thing would be true if parents 30 years ago didn't lock up their Playboy magazines or VHS tapes or parental lock their TV.
I agree, but misses the point since kids view porn outside their home.
> Most millennials who have kids and had internet access previously in their life likely experienced the atmosphere of troll content like meatspin and goatse that was 90s/00s internet with AIM and IRC and filesharing and search engines before filters.
>I find it hard to believe parents today don't know the internet has far worse than porn sites.
The upper end of millennials and the lower end of gen x may not have had much experience just browsing on the internet and finding meatspin and goatse and whatever else. Also, you may not believe it, but many non-tech people have never used IRC or filesharing.
>Unfortunately this is inaccurate. There are billions of daily adolescent YouTube users, some of whom entering puberty that were exposed and continue to be exposed to the recommendation algorithm that created this mess in the first place, and for periods running into hours every evening.
You are talking about a different issue.
>At such an early stage in development, it is absolutely the company's duty of care to ensure that a 5 year old is not being sent up a gradient of a recommendation system that is encouraging them (with the help of the comments just removed) to view people of their own age in a sexual manner.
Why would it be the company's duty of care and not the parent's? The parent should be the one that controls what the child consumes, not some nameless company or the government.
>I agree with the idea of allowing children outside, but as per my reply to your previous comment, not if that means spending all day in the back yard of the village creepy old man.
Again, this should be done by the parent, not by a faceless corporation or the government. It is the parent's job to deal with this.
> Your kid will be corrupted by society anyway. What's this whole thing about protecting children from the reality of the real world anyway?
> A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.
Children are not little adults. They're still developing and learning things that you and I would consider basic. It makes sense to delay their exposure to certain things until they have the maturity and knowledge to process them properly.
> Don't give your children unsupervised access to the internet.
What phenomenally useless advice, and an utterly uninformed perspective.
Who and how do you propose offer this "supervised access" in a meaningful fashion?
How do you adapt for the fact that children, when supervised, specifically avoid play that might subject them to additional scrutiny (for example, not using youtube, etc).
How do you address the lack of supervision in environments that aren't specifically at home, or when one parent finds different content problematic than another parent?
How do you ensure that two parents who are at odds (e.g. divorced couples, etc) coordinate what is permitted or not in an environment where the child has different rules in different environments?
Far from children not having internet access at school, the school my children attends recognizes the need to teach children how to think critically about online content, and both my 8 year old and 10 year old have had assignments to use youtube and other media sites to learn more about specific topics.
Far better advice would be to periodically review content your children view, and then have meaningful discussions about the content they are consuming, what makes it "good" or "bad", and encourage children to make better choices, and to discuss what they are seeing and learning.
As awful as Youtube is, it's not possible to block it out of kids lives, any more than porn magazines and other objectionable content could be kept out of the hands of children 30 years ago.
> You are your child's parent. Not YouTube. If you want to control what you child watches, its on you to figure that out, not for YouTube to do it for you.
This is all well and good up to the point where YouTube starts to actively undermine the parent's efforts. Then it becomes "it's your fault for not defending yourself" bully logic. I believe this is what the author was complaining about.
> If you don't like the controls YouTube provides, don't use it. Or better yet be an actual functioning parent and don't just plop your kid down in front of screen and expect it to parent for you.
So you're implying kids shouldn't use YouTube at all? This seems both overly broad and impractical. Depending on the age of the child, it might not even be possible, e.g. if watching a video is required for school.
> Play with your kid. Do activities with them. There are near limitless other far more healthy ways a kid could be spending their time other than watching YouTube
So you're agreeing that YouTube Kids as a product shouldn't exist?
I don't, no matter how much they ask. The most I've acquiesced to is a small amount of YouTube time per day. It gets harder the older they get. My daughter can now just use her school laptop (while at school, at least) to watch as much YouTube as she can find time for. I'm not real happy about it, but part of raising kids is learning to accept the steady transfer of their autonomy over to them. I just keep gently harping on how low quality this kind of content is, what the motivations behind it are, etc.
> And after that I blocked YouTube, as there was just too much adult content for a nine year old.
Did the same for my 6 year old. Yes, there is a lot of stuff I dont want my kid watching.
He used to watch video game videos, mainly by other kids, so I didnt mind.
Then one day, I heard him swearing. Looks like some (a lot?) of these kids swear, even in games like minecraft. And they use sexist language; again, these are videos by kids, some just a few years older than my son.
And now Youtube is banned.
I dont understand where this "helicopter" parent thing comes from. Like another commenter says, will you let you kids eat anything they want? Watch TV till 11 in the night?
You have an interest in people getting a lot of screen time. You wonder, therefore, whether we should be limiting our kids' access to computers. I reply that the fact that you might have an interest in my kids spending a lot of time using computers, does not mean it is a good thing for my kids to do. Nor does it give me a reason to relax any restrictions I might place on them.
> Now that TV channels no longer exists and you just don’t catch inappropriate imagery by accident...
What? Hehe, on the internet today kids are way way WAY more likely to see inappropriate imagery than when we had TV channels. My kids seem to have turned out okay, but we had multiple accidents where they search for something and got back stuff that was so much worse than what they asked for. They get a firehose of inappropriate content on TikTok and YouTube. I would kill to have the internet be as moderated and tame as TV was.
Yeah you can't monitor 100% of the time but like.. moderating your child's experiences is kind of part of the job isn't it?
Edit:
I'm not saying the tech companies have no responsibility at all here, but surely the parent is the final responsibility in these matters?
When I was a kid if I went over to a kid's house and their parents let us watch R rated movies or whatever, if my parents didn't like that they would talk to the parents. If that didn't change, I wasn't allowed to go over there anymore
Why not the same with YouTube? If YouTube won't change, isn't it your responsibility to remove access?
> The problem is a parent might be signed into their Google account and allow their child to watch YouTube without signing out.
At what point do we force the parents to take responsibility here? It's not a good idea to outsource basic parental responsibilities to an entity that has different goals than you.
>Protect their children? Has there been any study that children need this "protection" you speak of?
I was able to get hold on porn videos when I was a teenager, despite not having internet at home or somewhere else.
At the end, the only way forward is to speak with your children, it has nothing to do with firewalls.
I was referring to this part of the article:
>The government said its new rules were based on studies that suggest viewing pornography at a young age can have detrimental effects on future adult relationships.
A survey from the NSPCC found that nearly half of 11-16-year-olds had accessed an adult site and one in five 11-17-year-olds said that they had seen images that had shocked or upset them.
The reality is that even younger children are now regularly accessing the internet and they are able to access pornographic content by accident. When it comes to young children, what exactly are you expecting parents to talk to them about? These are children who haven't reached the age where they have had any education regarding sexual activity, but they can still use an iPad or a laptop. Here is a classic example of inappropriate advertising in a children's iOS application: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/advertising/explicit...
As a parent of young children I do want to be able to restrict their access to the certain parts of the internet, in exactly the same way that I wouldn't let them watch an age-inappropriate movie. It's an entirely different scenario to you as a teenager seeking out pornographic videos.
The point is that young children can stumble into a "virtual sex shop" or a "virtual strip club", whilst in real life they can't - they are barred from entry.
> Four year old kids can surf the web proficiently these days and easily get to hardcore porn by accident.
Bullshit. I work at a kids' technology centre, teaching them computer and Internet stuff. This is in the Netherlands, ages 8-18. (no filters, but they are supervised and we can see what's on their monitors at all times)
The only stuff I have seen them accidentally stumble upon is the odd bikini image in Google Image Search.
I can't imagine any scenario how a four year old could accidentally stumble upon rape porn (which is the type that's supposedly psychologically damaging, right?). In particular because they can't type (they lack the motor skills).
(actually I'd question how four-year-olds "surf the web proficiently" at all, for any definition of "proficiently" and any reasonable definition of "the web". Public libraries are easier to use, they're not proficient at those either)
In a hypothetical thought experiment, give 1,000,000 four-year-olds a tablet with a browser opened on a child-friendly start page, and let them play for an hour. None of them will stumble upon rape porn. The "proficient" ones will find something fun and colourful to play with. Your biggest problem is the ones that don't, get stuck on something boring, and start crying. Good luck with that.
> Today, most kids today are more computer savvy than their parents. They easily get around these filters
Also not true. I put this to the test back when we still had these filters enabled. The two smartest kids (ages 11-12) couldn't do it, there's just too many hurdles, passwords, blocking, safeguards going on. It's horrible software, really cripples the machine (which is one of the reasons why we got rid of it, favouring simple supervision). It's quite hard to disable even if you are the administrator of these PCs. Super easy to set up, though. It's a real trapdoor.
I have to admit I believe that they might have had a better chance if they could read English natively. At age 11-12 Dutch kids can read English, but not fast enough to do proper research on the English language web (so the solution would be for English parents to install Chinese filters, they got the experience anyway :-P).
Kids ages 8 or lower couldn't do it no matter the language. There may be the odd (extremely) high-functioning exception, but we were talking about most kids.
And by the time they're 16 it doesn't matter if it's a parental filter or a government one, they can--and will--get around government-grade censorship too. But then, a 16-year-old mind can think of depravities with or without help of the Internet.
> I wish there were a better way besides censorship. Anyone have any ideas?
Sure! Education. Of the parents. Way before they're parents. It'll take a while before it pays off but when it does, oh boy, just look at all those bad statistics just evaporating!
If you really care about the children you'd put all the money spent on this and other bullshit into improving their education.
>As a parent of two teenagers and a twenty-something I could see myself wanting to turn on a web cam without them knowing it. I hate to say it but my kids get up to some crazy stuff on the web and have defeated a lot of my efforts to monitor/block that activity.
What the fuck. It's well past time to give real responsibility and freedom. This sort of behavior can and will cause long-term damage, pain, and resentment to your own children. And for what, to selfishly assuage your own anxiety?
IMO, riding roughshod over a basic fundamental need for privacy is child abuse, and it ought to be more widely considered as such.
> 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change.
Why? As a child who grew up either the free Internet of the early 2000s I can tell you it does far less harm than thing like going to school where a teacher dislikes you. If you're worried about kids getting an inaccurate impression from porn that take them aside and show them real sex tapes.
What exactly is abusive about me wanting to know if my 6 year old is watching porn?
Are parents that signed up for Youtube Kids abusive, too? Is Google abusive for filtering the videos? And are all those who shared articles about how porn was showing up in YTKids abusive for letting parents know that their children might have been exposed to mature material?
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