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To me it is censorship.

If you are a small child it is indeed up to your parents to censor adult content and I am all for that. Kids will be upset but that is part of growing up. When the parents believe the kids are emotionally ready for adult content then I am sure they will get parental controls disabled. Even if that should not come to pass the kids once they are teens will bypass it anyway.

If you are an adult and your followers are adults then this does not really apply to you or your device. This would only hurt groomers, most of whom use video games for that purpose.





I don't think we're talking about whether it's appropriate for kids to see the stuff. I think we're talking about who gets to decide to *mandate* an RTA header on a website. (They can already add it voluntarily so we are talking about a hypothetical mandate.)

Let's say your website mentions the MLK assassination. Or maybe the 9/11 attacks. Just a mention; no disturbing details. Is some government entity now going to force the RTA label? Who gets to decide? An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.


who gets to decide

Each site operator would have to decide what level of legal risk is appropriate based on content rating and that would likely come from their legal team.

An RTA label would be a death sentence to educational sites.

Maybe but not likely. Adult content for the purposes of education used to be protected but that was a grey area and was abused heavily by some art sites such as Deviant art and then social media. CIPA was passed in 2000/2001 and updated in 2011 to provide guidance on content viewed by children. [1] This is of course up to the parents to decide as has been the case for sex education throughout the history of the USA. If a school was going to view content that would be in conflict with CIPA then I would expect they could get parents to sign a permission slip meaning they have adult consent from the parent of each child. Either way I would expect a school to curate content that is appropriate for children and cache/print it locally.

If RTA is not an option then the alternative will likely be to have parents log into a 3rd party site to prove their identiy for each student via some proxy auth site to give the child permission while also sharing personal details of the parent and child to said third party. More laws get involved when logging the child's personal details with a 3rd party but I am thankfully not a lawyer. Here [2] are some more laws specific to states. Laws will vary wildly by country and province or state.

[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...

[2] - https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/social-med...




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