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> they've been working that way for every other medium. Some movies are good, some are full of sex and gore. Parents have the responsibility to keep their kids

> they've been working that way for every other medium. Some movies are good, some are full of sex and gore. Parents have the responsibility to keep their kids from watching movies with content they don't want their kids to see. Movie theaters and video rental places tend to refuse to serve minors for X or R material, and (if they look quite young) even PG-13 films. Stores may and often do refuse to sell R-rated films to minors. It may require active parental assistance for a minor to see those kinds of things (before the Internet, anyway—which is kinda the point of this whole discussion) and, even if enforcement is imperfect, surely serves to limit how much of that material even a very motivated kid can practically see (again, pre Internet, I mean). Also, kids have to get to those kinds of places, which can be pretty damn hard for them to do without a parent at least knowing they're out doing something, if not specifically what. Broadcast TV stations risk FCC action if they show anything too outrageous when kids may be around, and have further restrictions even in night-time hours. These behaviors are due to a combination of actual government regulation, and ongoing or historical credible threats of regulation if these industries didn't police themselves well-enough, which prompted the creation and enforcement of things like the MPAA's rating system (plus some now-defunct frameworks like the Comic Books Code or the Hays Code, both of which were much stricter than anything we'd likely accept these days—but for the "what's historically been within the Overton window of the freedom-loving United States?" perspective, those aren't that old and did co-exist with and apply to modern mass media, so still have some relevance). The closest analog we have that I can think of is cable TV, since it's in the home and offers a whole lot of content, and even that tends to self-censor to a substantial degree and doesn't offer many of the worst things the Internet does at all—even on premium channels, which are another thing an adult has to actively work to bring into their house, totally separable from the rest of what cable offers. Libraries are less-restricted and librarians seem to enjoy providing things a bit subversive (which is great) but I bet even lots of librarians would ask to talk to a parent before lending out certain books, let alone R-rated films, to young kids. Support from outside entities—including, and largely, due to government action or threat of same—for parents to control what their kids see and hear is, as far as I can tell, the norm since fairly early in the days of modern mass media. It's the Internet's model that's an aberration, requiring parents to take active steps to keep prevent kids from seeing hardcore porn or extreme violence or whatever on the same device they have to use to do homework, rather than having to take active steps to enable seeing those things, as they'd have to in most other contexts. Isn't it? Which doesn't necessarily mean these kinds of measures are a good idea, but I don't think "parents have always had to actively work to keep their kids from being exposed to awful stuff without substantial help from government and the private sector" really holds up, unless I'm missing something. The Internet's unprecedented in its reach and being something that's basically required in a modern household, and required to allow kids some access to (again, it's not really optional for school anymore), but even other far less necessary media have had effective, if not perfectly iron-clad and universal, age restrictions imposed by businesses and the government. Right?

autoexec 4y ago
> Movie theaters and video rental places tend to refuse to serve minors for X or R material, and (if they look quite young) even PG-13 films. that isn't a law, movie ratings are a voluntary system designed to help parents make smarter choices about what they will allow their kids to see. It is not intended to police the actions of adults so that parents don't have to do their job. That's the extent of "Support from outside entities" that exists in all other mediums (with the exception of FCC regulations on broadcast TV and radio which were themselves commonly seen as a mistake which is why we didn't see them applied to cable TV, satellite TV/radio, or the internet) > t's the Internet's model that's an aberration, requiring parents to take active steps to keep prevent kids from seeing hardcore porn or extreme violence or whatever on the same device they have to use to do homework, rather than having to take active steps to enable seeing those things, as they'd have to in most other contexts. Isn't it? Nope. The same TV that shows sesame street shows porn, HBO shows both kid's movies and Game of Thrones, the same theater that shows G rated movies shows R rated movies, the same car radio that plays disney songs plays howard stern. It has always been the job of parents to monitor how children consume media. Always. > I don't think "parents have always had to actively work to keep their kids from being exposed to awful stuff without substantial help from government and the private sector" really holds up, unless I'm missing something. Having "help from government and the private sector" isn't the problem. There are lots of things the government and the private sector can do to help parents which would be perfectly acceptable. The rating system on movies is a good example. Requiring adults to scan their faces every time they want to access a website isn't one of them. Requiring adults to scan their IDs to every website they visit isn't either.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > that isn't a law, movie ratings are a voluntary system designed to help parents make smarter choices about what they will allow their kids to see. As I covered, most (all?) "voluntary" mass media industry regulation schemes have been much more of an outcome of "sort your shit out to our satisfaction or we'll regulate you into the Earth's core" grumbling from government, than actually voluntary. Part of the trouble here is there's just nothing comparable to the Internet. The default before was "parents will have to work to enable their kids to access questionable material", not "parents will have to work (really, really hard) to keep their kids from accessing questionable material, including possibly by accident, and maybe stuff pushed on them by some god-awful 'algorithm' trying to radicalize them or push them into some other harmful rabbit-hole because it helps with 'engagement' or some other dumb-assed metric". Again, the closest thing I can think of is cable, and that had a much more limited set of content and kept the adult stuff mostly opt-in (so, again, active effort required to enable it), plus cable TV was never 1% as valuable for getting by in modern society as Internet access is—the easy answer of "just don't pay for cable" doesn't apply to the Internet, and hasn't for more than a decade. However, even with media that are far easier to keep out of the home, government pushes for regulation, and effective imposition of such regulation—de jure or, in fear of what de jure might look like, de facto—has been the norm. Much of this absolutely applied to what adults could access (see, again, the Hays or CCA regulatory regimes). As for "scanning their face every time they access a website"—in earlier situations in which a kid might access some piece of media a parent hadn't deliberately invited into their home, and in which some business was involved, everyone did get a face-scan, by the flesh-and-blood clerk, and since 1990 or so those situations almost certainly also involve being recorded on multiple CCTV cameras (and these days, having all that uploaded to god-knows-where and maybe even having face recognition applied to it—ugh, the Internet was such a bad idea) Again, part of the trouble with these analogies is there's nothing comparable to the Internet. How do you have a clerk judge whether a person's face looks old enough, at "web scale" and before your web server sends a 200 response? You can't, really, but that doesn't mean something of that sort isn't typical practically everywhere but the Internet. The closest thing you can realistically do is automate that process, instead, to bring it back into something resembling the past norms. This is, I repeat, not necessarily a defense of this kind of legislation as a good idea–I just don't think it actually is a deviation from what was the overwhelming norm for how society operated in most of the 20th century. The Internet free-for-all model is what's the odd-man-out.

autoexec 4y ago

> Movie theaters and video rental places tend to refuse to serve minors for X or R material, and (if they look quite young) even PG-13 films. that isn't a law, movie ratings are a voluntary system designed to help parents make smarter choices about what they will allow their kids to see. It is not intended to police the actions of adults so that parents don't have to do their job. That's the extent of "Support from outside entities" that exists in all other mediums (with the exception of FCC regulations on broadcast TV and radio which were themselves commonly seen as a mistake which is why we didn't see them applied to cable TV, satellite TV/radio, or the internet) > t's the Internet's model that's an aberration, requiring parents to take active steps to keep prevent kids from seeing hardcore porn or extreme violence or whatever on the same device they have to use to do homework, rather than having to take active steps to enable seeing those things, as they'd have to in most other contexts. Isn't it? Nope. The same TV that shows sesame street shows porn, HBO shows both kid's movies and Game of Thrones, the same theater that shows G rated movies shows R rated movies, the same car radio that plays disney songs plays howard stern. It has always been the job of parents to monitor how children consume media. Always. > I don't think "parents have always had to actively work to keep their kids from being exposed to awful stuff without substantial help from government and the private sector" really holds up, unless I'm missing something. Having "help from government and the private sector" isn't the problem. There are lots of things the government and the private sector can do to help parents which would be perfectly acceptable. The rating system on movies is a good example. Requiring adults to scan their faces every time they want to access a website isn't one of them. Requiring adults to scan their IDs to every website they visit isn't either.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> that isn't a law, movie ratings are a voluntary system designed to help parents make smarter choices about what they will allow their kids to see. As I covered, most (all?) "voluntary" mass media industry regulation schemes have been much more of an outcome of "sort your shit out to our satisfaction or we'll regulate you into the Earth's core" grumbling from government, than actually voluntary. Part of the trouble here is there's just nothing comparable to the Internet. The default before was "parents will have to work to enable their kids to access questionable material", not "parents will have to work (really, really hard) to keep their kids from accessing questionable material, including possibly by accident, and maybe stuff pushed on them by some god-awful 'algorithm' trying to radicalize them or push them into some other harmful rabbit-hole because it helps with 'engagement' or some other dumb-assed metric". Again, the closest thing I can think of is cable, and that had a much more limited set of content and kept the adult stuff mostly opt-in (so, again, active effort required to enable it), plus cable TV was never 1% as valuable for getting by in modern society as Internet access is—the easy answer of "just don't pay for cable" doesn't apply to the Internet, and hasn't for more than a decade. However, even with media that are far easier to keep out of the home, government pushes for regulation, and effective imposition of such regulation—de jure or, in fear of what de jure might look like, de facto—has been the norm. Much of this absolutely applied to what adults could access (see, again, the Hays or CCA regulatory regimes). As for "scanning their face every time they access a website"—in earlier situations in which a kid might access some piece of media a parent hadn't deliberately invited into their home, and in which some business was involved, everyone did get a face-scan, by the flesh-and-blood clerk, and since 1990 or so those situations almost certainly also involve being recorded on multiple CCTV cameras (and these days, having all that uploaded to god-knows-where and maybe even having face recognition applied to it—ugh, the Internet was such a bad idea) Again, part of the trouble with these analogies is there's nothing comparable to the Internet. How do you have a clerk judge whether a person's face looks old enough, at "web scale" and before your web server sends a 200 response? You can't, really, but that doesn't mean something of that sort isn't typical practically everywhere but the Internet. The closest thing you can realistically do is automate that process, instead, to bring it back into something resembling the past norms. This is, I repeat, not necessarily a defense of this kind of legislation as a good idea–I just don't think it actually is a deviation from what was the overwhelming norm for how society operated in most of the 20th century. The Internet free-for-all model is what's the odd-man-out.