I understand what you are getting at, but to inject some nuance:
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.
25 years ago us kids were watching viral content on the internet that wasn’t even acceptable to go on youtube then or now. Still today, we are now your young doctors and lawyers and young business executives, despite all the quite disturbing viral content that characterized the early 2000s internet. I think we did fine and I think the kids will be alright too.
There’s some survivorship bias here. Not everyone who was exposed to disturbing content is unaffected or can move past it so easily. And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
It’s worth thinking about the social climate right now as the long tail of the last 25-30 years of technology advancement. Mass shootings are so common now they often don’t even register on people’s radar.
These effects are so complex that we’re still trying to figure out how to measure them, but we should take seriously the power and danger of the instant wide distribution of the worst elements of humanity.
I grew up on the old Internet, and made some of my most important friendships using it. It shaped who I am today, mostly for the better. But I don’t think we can let nostalgia or even the many benefits blind us to what the Internet has become or the real harms that come along with those benefits.
> And in 2024, it’s far more likely to encounter something you had no intention of seeing.
Strongly disagree. I haven't stumbled on "goatse" level shock imagery in years. Sure you might encounter stuff you had no intention of seeing, but that's only because you're being funnelled into link farms or other for-profit crapware flooding the internet. It's very rare to stumble on something disturbing.
In the last year I have seen (on facebook no less):
various levels of war crime
the killing of people at close quarters (with the last sound that they made, which still haunts me)
A sniper killing someone taking a poo.
These were nestled in amongst memes, which were fun and engaging. None of them had content warnings.
goatse wasn't all that shocking to me, because he is very much alive. 2 girls one cup is at least a ramp into skat, rather than straight in.
Now, if a 16 year old saw that, I'd probably not worry too much, I wouldn't be happy. But if my 10 year old, or 6 year old saw that, I'd have a whole load of emotional clean up to do.
25 years ago most people didn't even have a broadband connection in their home much less any kind of mobile data plan.
25 years ago kids didn't walk around with challenging to audit handheld computers. The computer, if your family had one, was that one big thing shared with the whole family that an adult could pop their head in and see what the child was up to.
That some kids (an incredibly tiny fraction) did have unrestricted access to the internet and turned out fine isn't indicative of the general population of kids having this kind of exposure and being fine. If in 1999 you had internet fast enough to really download many many hours of videos without being audited by a parent you were probably the 1% of 1% of 1% of child populations. A high percentage of households didn't even have internet at all. In 2000 only 1% of US households even had broadband internet.
I did too, but I would gently point out that you had to actively look for it. something rotten was a known site for that kinda stuff. You only went there if you were doing "illicit browsing" shall we say.
It was pretty difficult to stumble over a video of something visceral. Moreover, the internet wasn't real when we grew up.
The internet is real and omnipresent, filled with the mountains of clickbated bullshit, and only ever three videos away from some sort of porn(if you're lucky).
While a lot of this can definitely sound like an old man yelling at the sky, tv compared to scrolling tiktok, is like caffeine compared to crack cocaine.
And 40 years ago kids were watching bootleg copies of Faces of Death. Yes, kids get to that stuff. The problem is FoD doesn't even hold a candle to the manipulative shit that social media does to kids.
It was not all that easy to get a copy of Faces of Death back then, so it was something you might have saw once maybe twice but that violent real death before your eyes was not something that you ever became de-sensitized to because those visuals were exceedingly rare by the scarcity of the content at the time(at least in the US). So that morbid curiosity itch was scratched and then you moved on. Short of the few weird kids that watched that shit over and over, you probably never watched the whole thing. I know I think I watched 10 mins back in the day before it was turned off and we went out to find some beer instead. Now, real violence and death is a search term away and available every minute, hour, and day.
But agree…even that exposure to violence now pales in comparison to the amplification of the negative peer pressures that kids today experience due to social media. At least back in the day when you were away from your peers you could escape it and gain respite. Now its constant.
imo there's a difference between goatse type momentary shock sites that we grew up with and social media that pervades every waking minute of a kid's life. Yea, the former is gross, but the latter seems like it has real lasting psychological ramifications with regard to popularity contests, body image, etc. all the things that kids already struggle with, social media turns up to 11.
You really can't speak for everyone. You can maybe say this particular cohort is fine despite seeing some of this content while young, but certainly not because of it.
I've seen the First Amendment used as an argument against the US government determining what should and shouldn't be moderated by private companies operating on private infrastructure serving private citizens. Unless we're talking about unprotected speech?
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was your argument. That's not how I meant for you to interpret it.
I meant to get your opinion on whether the First Amendment would create a barrier for what you're proposing: government mandated moderation of protected speech on private platforms. You're talking about legislation and where to place barriers, so I thought you'd be interested in discussion. Sorry.
I think that private companies shouldn't own the public square. So long as we allow corporations to encapsulate social interaction, we will continue to fail at moderation.
I don't think that law is a really meaningful avenue to fix this problem. I do think that aggressive anti-trust action could help a lot, though. If we do want to use law, then I think the focus should be on punishment for facilitation of harm. We should be able to prosecute Facebook for hosting fraudsters and failing to moderate harmful content.
As it is, a tiny number of companies hosting the social activity of billions of people, and those companies have utterly failed to accommodate that reality with proportional moderation. The failure of Facebook to adequately moderate has already lead to genocide.
My greater dream is to replace centralized social networks and content moderation with a decentralized network of curated attestations.
TV, print, radio, music and to a lesser extent games are all subject to some level of industry or statutory content regulation.
For example, in America, you're very unlikely to have a kids TV channel suddenly switch to videos of people being killed in industrial accidents. new media, not so much.
Watershed, age constraints and company ending fines existed (and in some cases still do) for violating those rules.
Large new media companies, such as facebook, youtube and tiktok can literally serve porn to kids and not have any legal ramifications. If a cable broadcaster knowingly broadcast frontal nudity before watershed, it would be fined. (yes, cable TV has less restrictions) but thats the point, regulation has not kept up with the pace of change. that has been a deliberate decision.
My kids are >5 < 12. They aren't allowed on insta/tiktok. They can have youtube, but its only when supervised. even then its 1/3 chance that they land on something toxic as shit.
The world has changed, and the guard rails that we had as kids have been removed. There is an argument about freedom of expression, I get that. But we need to think about whether its right to allow large corporations to profit from showing horrific content to minors. (adults, I don't give a shit, do what you want) The problem is, I'm not sure of the best mechanism, with the least bad outcome.