A Fond Faredo (from desiran.gay) - Addendum
A Fond Faredo: Addendum
I had some more thoughts relating to furry sex porn on the internet.
Athetos
In the previous blog post, I discussed fragmentation of the internet... again. I do think the fragmentation and subsequent centralization of the internet is the reason why parents are upset with the state of online safety.
When I was younger, computers were much more expensive than they are now. And when I say computers, I mean "computing devices" - I remember when the first iPhone came out, and mass smartphone adoption wasn't for about another decade. Thus existed the concept of the "family computer"; everyone in the household shared it, usually on the same user account, etc. Many people my age have at least one story where they installed a virus, or wiped the hard drive, or something else of the sort. In these times, two constructs existed to deter kids looking up what they shouldn't: everyone can see what you were doing on Google, and there existed places for kids to be online.
Games
Even if you never experienced it (because you were born in 2007), you probably at least know about Club Penguin. It was a heavily-moderated online game made specifically for kids. It had minigames, a severly cut-down chat feature (on purpose), a premium subscription that made the game more enjoyable (or enjoyable at all, you could argue), the works. But most importantly, it was made for kids, and that was enforced. Swearing was an automatic ban. Griefing was punishable (as hard as that was to do in the first place).
In the mid-2000s, there were a ton of these sorts of sites. Fantage, KidZui, Neopets - some people my age fawn over memories of these online spaces. But most importantly, they were places for children to exist as children. All but Neopets have been erased. There are few, if any, places where children can play online in a moderated space. These sites typically also required an email address, but was designed to be the parent's email address.
These sites existed because of the fragmented internet; you can allow your child to go on Club Penguin and nothing else, and know that your child will not be exposed to something harmful. The limited chat features meant that even potential predators could do little more than say Nice Penguin, and even then, the moderators would usually smite them if they were acting fishy.
Now, what do we have? Roblox is the only kid-friendly online game that I know about. Roblox is nominally for children, but in my experience, I've talked to more adults that play it than kids. The kids that do play Roblox are usually exposed to these adults, who aren't filtering themselves for kids - they're not expected to. Roblox is lightly moderated; its own self-moderated instances are impossible to fully kill. Roblox is not a safe place for children, but it's the only place they have.
Fornite is technically kid-friendly as well, but I'm not big into the "shoot each other with real weapons" and voice chat thing. Call me a prude, but I think fantasy violence, if any violence at all, is the acceptable form to exist in a game for kids. Fortnite is no Mortal Kombat, sure, but the realistic weapons and sounds still give me a bad feeling. It should be for teenagers and above, as the ESRB agrees.
An appreciation for the classics goes a long way, and Crash Bandicoot will never call your son a slur or talk about big booty women. But children will not like this solution. The culture of our time is interconnectedness, and a kid being unable to play Fortnite with his friends will be shunned. I would operate on a "tough shit" policy, but this would create an unbelievable amount of resentment in the short-term. So think of my solution as more of a suggestion. And if you are listening to my suggestion, a Nintendo DS is cheap nowadays, and there's about a million good games for it.
Video
Streaming video is now the standard way for people to watch shows, movies, and whatever else. Physical media is antiquated, and for good reason. However, a DVD copy of The Lion King never suddenly turned into Finger Family Count to Five or any other heinous fetish shit masquerading as "kids' content".
YouTube is not and never was intended for children. I strongly discourage any parents from allowing their children even restricted access to YouTube. The "YouTube Kids" sub-category is impossible for YouTube itself to fully curate, and some creators set traps in what appear to be normal clips to avoid COPPA designation. I don't disagree with this practice. Do not give your children access to YouTube.
Other streaming services have much, much, much stronger protections for kids. Netflix Kids is a significantly better maintained library of video, and other services have similar mechanisms. If you want to give your little shit an iPad and leave them alone for five hours, this is the way to do it.
Devices
VPNs went from specialist knowledge for IT people to secure networks to the most advertised way to pirate safely or avoid IP blocks. Parents must use device-level locks at this point. Go do it.
This is also where the "family computer" I mentioned earlier helped. Back then, smartphones were for businesspeople, not kids, so there was only one point of computing in a house, most times. This meant that it was physically monitored by its usually-central location, and computationally monitored by clearing the browsing history being ULTRA suspicious. You knew who was using the computer and when. If something came up that shouldn't, there were few candidates, especially if the searches themselves were juvenile. This doesn't exist anymore, as everyone has their own internet-enabled device in their pocket. Parents must whitelist/allowlist websites, rather than blocking offensive ones; you will never ever filter out all the undesirable stuff.
Tonal Whiplash: Furry Porn
The laws that are causing this site and others to lock themselves down or shutter entirely are primarily created because of the issues I laid out here. With no place for kids to exist on their own, separated from the adult world, with video streaming services usually being inadequate for self-filtering, and with multiple device ownership making deviousness easier than ever, parents who don't know about all these things are panicking. One one hand, parenting is difficult, and having to micromanage everything about your child's online presence usually leads to a disgruntled child; on the other hand, this blog post takes an estimated 5 minutes of time to read, and the controls I mentioned take at most an hour to set up.
The internet is not a safe place for children. It never truly was, to be fair, but especially in our centralized present, you can't let a kid loose on Twitter and expect them to be fine. Letting kids loose in general is a problem on the internet. But, this is a reflection of our current behavior as a whole, isn't it? Suburbs are split off from the city, a sometimes-walled garden for people of certain classes to intermingle. Keeping up with the Joneses is supercharged in the age of Facebook, Instagram, and the like. Parents don't feel safe letting their children play outside unsupervised, especially in city environments. Even European countries, which are generally safe enough for kids to use public transit, are closing up.
Perhaps the concept of the childhood itself is being dissipated. Media has replaced a lot of what kids used to do and be; anecdotally, children typically talk about what shows and games they've experienced, and not the cool rocks they found, characters they drew, fun with their friends, or whatever. Children and adults both are living on the internet instead of in the world.
Oh, and keep your kids away from Wrangler for a while. This is something I've ruminated on privately; my existence on the internet as a creator of pornographic content makes me "part of the problem". I am perpetuating the unsafe place for children. Though I don't typically interact with "large" sites - I stick to FA, itaku, and itch - my presence is still exactly what I am preaching. I have no control over some kid finding Wrangler on itch.io. I put all the necessary locks in place, sure, and I will never ever release an all-ages game under the desiran name, but the potential damage is still there. I'm still not comfortable with this reality, and I don't have a concrete solution. Porn and nudity are fun and expressive; but my porn isn't in a guaranteed-to-be-safe place. No kid can sneak into a sex shop, but they can easily fool a website, and that's just the nature of the internet. The price of privacy in an infinitely unenforceable space. The law enforcing that we submit to indentification before accessing these sites comes from a reasoning rooted in the real world, and the internet is not the real world. Nothing stops little Jimmy from just using his dad's ID card, minus a fear of retribution. Where do we draw the line there? Require selfie verification? Fingerprint readings? Biometrics? No. The internet must remain an anonymous place. It is foolish at best and dangerous at most to keep personal information in the hands of other human beings.
I believe the internet is like the real world in one respect: it's not made for kids, but it is one in which children can co-habitate in their designated zones. Stop destroying the McDonald's PlayPlaces of the internet, and the children will stop throwing fries on the floor.