Let’s not pretend like this is a brand new problem. Even pre-Internet, there have always (well, let’s just say definitely the whole lifetime of anyone GenX or younger) been tons of first-amendment-protected content falling under all 3 of these categories: “obviously fine for children” (e.g. Sesame Street, Paw Patrol), “obviously not appropriate for children” (Hustler magazine, Pornhub), and “Controversial / maybe ok for teens / still probably not okay for 6-year-olds” (e.g. sex ed, depictions of rape, graphic violence). This last category is obviously one where Opinions May Vary, but the way we have handled it in the past has been laws. Nearly every state has statutes prohibiting sale, display, rental, or distribution to minors of material deemed “harmful to minors” -
the distinction between the second and third categories is determined by a court if it really has to be. This has worked fine in the offline sphere, and it’s why I couldn’t walk into a video store when I was 8 and rent a stack of porn tapes.
At minimum, it would be a reasonable legislation topic to at minimum mandate that websites publishing obviously “Harmful to minors” content tag it as such[1]. And also it would be ideal to create some kind of campaign to tag the first category as safe (honestly Apple and Google ought to be working together on that one). If you in good faith operate a site in the controversial category, that would be no different than selling books on sex ed in a Barnes & Noble - protected.
Parents could then choose, with simple device controls:
- Allow only “tagged safe” pages (parents with very young kids, or who have a hard time monitoring use)
- Allow safe + no-tag (open-minded parents who choose to err on the side of allow, and monitor the controversial stuff themselves)
- Allow all (parents who want to be solely responsible to regulate it)
I find it frustrating that people are talking like we have to either have a completely “no rules” Internet where obviously any kindergartener is going to stumble upon super disgusting stuff, or this gross surveillance state Internet, where people have to show ID to use any site. Neither of those are how things were before the Internet and it doesn’t have to be how things are now.
[1] you might ask, what do we do when say, a Russian porn site doesn’t want to comply with this tagging. In my opinion, it seems reasonable that someone could put obviously bad faith sites like that into a block list database. In a place like the UK I would expect that to be a government regulator, but there’s no reason why that couldn’t just be something private companies do in the US. As a parent, I would pay two bucks a month to subscribe to a service like that if it were integrated into the operating systems my kids use.