And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down internet.
If we give up the ability to negotiate, then we would not be able to have this conversation in the future. As we have seen many times, all over the world, authoritarian regimes will absolutely suppress dissent and chill speech if they have the tools. Today maybe it's adult content. They're already attacking the press and anyone critical about the administration: they keep trying to get the corporations to fire their comedians and rein in their reporters. So this isn't slippery slope. We're there and nearing the bottom.
We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people.
Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating access to something, adults obtaining that product legally and bringing it into their home.
The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.
But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.
Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people.
The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.
> Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere.
Then these places should make sure kids are not doing wrong things on the web on their machines. Just like a shop should make sure to not sell alcohol to kids. A library should have some kind of web filter anyway to at least block porn.
How does a parent check that a friend isn’t passing pills to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking that they don’t shoplift when out on their own? This is not an argument.
Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.
If only it were that simple. To fix the analogy, imagine that every other kids' dad left the liquor cabinet unlocked and allowed them to carry liquor around anytime they liked.
The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing alcohol to the point of it turning into a national healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control of alcohol will certainly be put in place.
We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.
The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers?
It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.
> The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year
That's not quite correct. They count both deaths where the decedent had a high blood alcohol level and deaths where someone else who was responsible for the death had a high blood alcohol level. Because of this many of those in the count were underage but were not drinkers.
For example if I'm driving drunk and you are my sober passenger and I drive us off a tall cliff killing you your death will be included in their count because I was drunk and responsible for it. It also works the other way. If I'm sober and you are drunk, and I drive us off the cliff and you die it counts because you died drunk.
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein
If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
Where are those former peers now? You reference this like their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently emotionally crippled? Or what?
A little tangential since this is more about gating white supremacist content than violence or sex, but I was on 4chan when it was being infiltrated by genuine white supremacist organizations and Russians that talked about how manly Assad was to influence teenagers interested in anime. I had people in real life to talk to about these things so I narrowly escaped the influence. Looking at the current state of the US, not everyone did. That being said, despite my hope that older people would be less prone to such influence, it doesn't always seem to be the case.
When grandpa was young, if there was a wolf in the forest, they went and killed the wolf. They would not break the children legs to keep them home.
Killing the wolf saved both the children of busy parents that couldn't be bothered to break their legs, and the children that grew old enough to have their leg fixed but weren't yet adult.
Today instead of chasing predators away from children spaces, we just box the children so at one magic birthday they'd be out in the world untouched by evil. The world will be still evil however, and the not children for a day unprepared for it.
What if, here's a radical idea, we terminate corporation with toxic ads or that let predators use their system to target children.
I was driving in a rural area, and almost hit deer several times. I finally made it to my destination, and island, with no deer, but a healthy wolf population.
The state would breed wolves on the island then release them on the mainland to keep the deer in check.
Sorry to ruin your metaphor, but we really need more wolves.
If you could offer the proponents of these laws a deal where all the bills die in committee and in exchange Pornhub gets shut down, I suspect they'd take it. But you can't. The First Amendment doesn't permit such targeting, and almost nobody who opposes age gating would concede the premise that porn is inherently bad.
But again, the problem isn't this or that content-exchange site; the problem is people doing illegal activities within, or facilitated by, such sites, or people within the site that are sourcing willingly illegal material or distributing material that is illegal to some recipients. And lawmakers are targeting the middlemen and the recipient instead of going to the root cause, and the cynic in me thinks, "Of course they'd do that, why would they go after themselves?" But it's a bit of a reduction, and not all wolves are rich and powerful (though those who are uncaught or get away scot-free mostly are).
I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.