2 ms·

> 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 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
  > Again, part of the trouble with these analogies is there's nothing comparable to the Internet. I'll agree that the internet comes with it's own set of challenges, however computers enable unique sets of solutions. There is parental control software you can install, logging you can put in place, you can even screen-record and keylog everything that takes place on a device. Access can be restricted with passwords and devices can be set up to automatically disconnect the internet at certain times. It takes some work to set those kinds of things up, but parenting has always required work. The internet has a ton of free resources to assist parents in that work. Nothing is perfect, but thankfully no kid ever died from seeing a boob either so mostly things tend to work out. My generation was online long before any parental control software or porn filers existed and we survived after all. Parents today have more tools at their disposal than ever.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Sure, and that approach may be the right one in this new world. I do reject the idea that policing kids' Internet usage is anything like what parents have always had to do, though—it's a totally new challenge on top of all the ones that already existed. Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing (very much, anyway—no system is fool-proof) porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing—if you didn't try to bring that stuff into contact with your kids, odds were they'd encounter very little of it, and likely none unless they were themselves trying to find it. The Internet's flipped that around, so the default is all kinds of horrible stuff being not just available, but possibly pushed at people in your household, including kids, unless you actively work to avoid it. The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids. Parents didn't need to spend much time or attention policing that kind of thing, previously.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Internet usage is anything like what parents have always had to do, though—it's a totally new challenge on top of all the ones that already existed. Not entirely all the ones that have already existed. Parents used to have to worry about what their kids would rent on their own from video rental stores, or who they were communicating with on teen party lines (look it up if that was long before your time) or the local BBS scene, or going back even farther if they were viewing lewd content in penny arcades or by sneaking into drive-in theaters or sideshows. > Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing...porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing I'm afraid that's never been true. Arguably, it was much harder in past decades to monitor what your kids were doing because children were far more autonomous than they are today where many are tracked by GPS 24/7. If I were a teenager I think it'd be much easier to hide compromising polaroids and skin mags than to try to hide sexting and visits to pornhub from tech savvy parents. Really though the challenge is simply constantly evolving as old media dies off and new forms pop-up. > The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids. I can say from experience that libraries don't care what you're reading and only occasionally care when you try checking the materials out. As a kid I was never told I couldn't purchase any book I brought to the counter in bookstores and many of them were not remotely appropriate for my age by most people's standards. When video rentals were a thing the clerks would also routinely rent R rated materials to us as small children (although not 100% of the time). Record stores had zero issues selling music with 'scandalous' lyrics to kids even after parental warning stickers became a thing. Actually getting into an R rated movie as a kid was hit and miss if you bought the ticket, but most people I knew would buy tickets for a kid show and just enter the R rated show once inside (now that theaters have assigned seating that might not work as well today). I do think video game stores have been more strict comparatively because of all the attention on them from parents and media, but they've also been the most tame in terms of sexual content for the same reason. Generally kids have never had much of an issue finding ways to get into trouble and there's nothing more appealing than the forbidden. I think every generation's parents had to stay on their toes and put in genuine effort to restrict what their kids were seeing and doing and usually with only very limited success.

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
> Again, part of the trouble with these analogies is there's nothing comparable to the Internet. I'll agree that the internet comes with it's own set of challenges, however computers enable unique sets of solutions. There is parental control software you can install, logging you can put in place, you can even screen-record and keylog everything that takes place on a device. Access can be restricted with passwords and devices can be set up to automatically disconnect the internet at certain times. It takes some work to set those kinds of things up, but parenting has always required work. The internet has a ton of free resources to assist parents in that work. Nothing is perfect, but thankfully no kid ever died from seeing a boob either so mostly things tend to work out. My generation was online long before any parental control software or porn filers existed and we survived after all. Parents today have more tools at their disposal than ever.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Sure, and that approach may be the right one in this new world. I do reject the idea that policing kids' Internet usage is anything like what parents have always had to do, though—it's a totally new challenge on top of all the ones that already existed. Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing (very much, anyway—no system is fool-proof) porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing—if you didn't try to bring that stuff into contact with your kids, odds were they'd encounter very little of it, and likely none unless they were themselves trying to find it. The Internet's flipped that around, so the default is all kinds of horrible stuff being not just available, but possibly pushed at people in your household, including kids, unless you actively work to avoid it. The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids. Parents didn't need to spend much time or attention policing that kind of thing, previously.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Internet usage is anything like what parents have always had to do, though—it's a totally new challenge on top of all the ones that already existed. Not entirely all the ones that have already existed. Parents used to have to worry about what their kids would rent on their own from video rental stores, or who they were communicating with on teen party lines (look it up if that was long before your time) or the local BBS scene, or going back even farther if they were viewing lewd content in penny arcades or by sneaking into drive-in theaters or sideshows. > Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing...porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing I'm afraid that's never been true. Arguably, it was much harder in past decades to monitor what your kids were doing because children were far more autonomous than they are today where many are tracked by GPS 24/7. If I were a teenager I think it'd be much easier to hide compromising polaroids and skin mags than to try to hide sexting and visits to pornhub from tech savvy parents. Really though the challenge is simply constantly evolving as old media dies off and new forms pop-up. > The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids. I can say from experience that libraries don't care what you're reading and only occasionally care when you try checking the materials out. As a kid I was never told I couldn't purchase any book I brought to the counter in bookstores and many of them were not remotely appropriate for my age by most people's standards. When video rentals were a thing the clerks would also routinely rent R rated materials to us as small children (although not 100% of the time). Record stores had zero issues selling music with 'scandalous' lyrics to kids even after parental warning stickers became a thing. Actually getting into an R rated movie as a kid was hit and miss if you bought the ticket, but most people I knew would buy tickets for a kid show and just enter the R rated show once inside (now that theaters have assigned seating that might not work as well today). I do think video game stores have been more strict comparatively because of all the attention on them from parents and media, but they've also been the most tame in terms of sexual content for the same reason. Generally kids have never had much of an issue finding ways to get into trouble and there's nothing more appealing than the forbidden. I think every generation's parents had to stay on their toes and put in genuine effort to restrict what their kids were seeing and doing and usually with only very limited success.