The French government’s drive to prevent children from accessing pornographic content online is well-documented. Few disagree that widely available and openly accessible ‘tube’ sites are unsuitable for minors, but in a world where parental responsibility is considered old-fashioned, not to mention ineffective, France believes that legislation is the only way to protect the country’s children.

Don't know how to feel about this. On one hand, it's for a good cause, exposure to porn at a young age can have some pretty devastating consequences later on. The way they're going about it though, that doesn't sound too good.

[–] peter 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's the wrong solution to the problem. The problem isn't children going on the Internet and looking at porn, it's parents allowing their kids unsupervised access to anything they want from a young age and not giving them any actual guidance. I'd argue it's just as damaging sitting your child in front of an iPad with unrestricted YouTube/TikTok for hours on end.

[–] maard@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree that it can be a bit of both sides here, however what are the practical ways to prevent that? If you give your kid an hour of iPad time a day or whatever, are you going to stand over their shoulder the whole time? Maybe you have the technical expertise to block certain websites on a case by case basis on your router, but that's not most people. Even then, as soon as they're not on your home network anymore, it's free game. Again, I'm not saying the proposed french way is perfect, or even good, i'm conflicted.

[–] peter 1 points 1 year ago

Change in culture, it used to be socially acceptable for people to drink and drive and not wear their seatbelt. Nowadays, it still happens but not so much. Of course, those two things are very clearly easy to show how they are dangerous and we still haven't managed to get rid of it completely so something similar for kids use of the Internet would be harder to pull off. I think combined with some actual studies into the effects, tighter regulation of social media it might actually work though. In the parenting world there's always something new that you get shunned for doing with your child, maybe one day it could be sticking them in front of an iPad.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)