At the same time, offering Youtube Shorts in the same service under the same domain is like "cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills" as a sibling comment aptly put it.

- https://letsblock.it/ and Ublock Origin

- The Unhook plugin for Firefox

- Blocking channels on my YouTube account when I see something inappropriate

- Adguard Home also blocks certain channels

to try to moderate the YouTube content for my kids. It's not perfect, but it does get rid of a lot of garbage (like YouTube Shorts).

It's like no one in the loop: teachers, IT providers, local / government procurement, big tech companies, etc thought to ask themselves if it was a good idea for kids to roam unrestricted on a site where anyone can post anything.

Not to mention the constant barrage of video advertising in the classroom.

Bonkers.

It blows my mind that they’re willing to pollute their brand and value for such a clearly awful, addictive feature. So short sighted. If anyone here is still a Google employee, I implore you: leave. Your talents could be used so much better when directed by people who are a little less greedy

You already make a ton of money and have a ton of status, why not enjoy it and find work that is actually fulfilling to you and/or useful to the user and/or failing that at least useful to the shareholders if nothing else. But no, they were conditioned to seek achievement blindly and without any moral or other introspection.

I could not stand it. I spent years regretting not holding my nose longer for the sake of being able to buy a house and so forth.... but I've made my peace with it. Since then I've had the opportunity to see how harmful Google's attempts to make money are to children (they are the new Joe Camel) and now I no longer have regrets at all. It's one thing to manipulate and exploit adults who should know better, but to target children is just the worst kind of low.

I recently quit Google, thus the preachy tone above lol - it’s an emotional topic. Ultimately I wanted to prove to myself that I could cut it as a “big tech” software engineer, but the whole corporate structure and purpose was unbelievably anxiety and shame inducing. Probably an overreaction but hey, us engineers are a fragile bunch…

I was in ads, so it was the front line of the insanity: thousands of truly kind, smart people were pampered in brand new Science-Fiction buildings on NASA Ames land (kagi “Google Bayview Campus”) with the finest food, gyms, tech, transportation, everything. They talked all day about modernizing ads and pleasing customers and powering the Free and Open Internet, and never about politics. And promotions, as you said. Meanwhile:

- we were surrounded by an army of underpaid contract workers because the engineers refuse to collectively organize with them,

- desperate pleas from organizations I trust to stop [LATEST_GOOGLE_3PC_REPLACEMENT_PROPOSAL] because it would destroy the internet were hitting the top of hacker news every few weeks,

- lawsuits are landing from the DoJ for illegal business practices with quite shocking screenshots of internal slides, and

- The legal manipulation culture runs so deep that employees get regular training on why they need to tag everything as “attorney client communications” even if there’s no attorneys involved (something tells me that “”loophole”” isn’t gonna last long).

Such a weird, jarring experience. I’m still living off Google savings so haven’t quite hit the “miss the paycheck” stage for real, not looking forward to that! Hopefully someone finds this emotional rant illuminative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism 2.0

Here's a Survey of WorldWide Censorship, specifically the chapter on internet[0] to get you up-to-date. There's also the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) [1] which deals more with infrastructure blocks.

There's also the more subtle kind, called "fact-checking" which on the surface does a very good job shielding us from the conspiracy theorists[2]. Don't misunderstand, on the surface this is a noble task, but it is still a filter of information that you did not employ yourself, and one that you have no means of controlling or influencing. You will only see what they left out: If you are not accepted by these gate-keepers you are silently excluded by most big media outlets. Here are eg. the organizations that Facebook trust to fact-check[3]

There's a really large machinery operating worldwide these days. Or, specifically, a whole lot of different machines. I'm not saying this to spead FUD, just FYI.

[0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-...

[1] https://explorer.ooni.org/findings

[2] The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (just one example): https://efcsn.com/

[3] https://www.facebook.com/formedia/mjp/programs/third-party-f...

I'm not sure that this is true. It doesn't sound true.

I'm a very tech savvy individual, and as a parent who has spent hours and hours navigating the murk of disparate parental control systems, it is clear to me that what you say is only true if you commit to preventing your child from having access to anything at all.

Worst of all, children have friends!

In other words, you must lock them in a closet and deprive them of access to sunlight itself to accomplish what you say.

Most of the time, unless you yourself don't eat snickers bars non-stop while chain-smoking, your children won't, too. Children do what their parents do, not what their parents tell them to do.

Then there's the enforcement model to consider. Maybe it's just an option consumers have available for purchase at their own discretion. Or maybe vendors would be banned from knowingly selling non-kid-friendly devices to minors, and/or parents would be banned from allowing their kids to own non-kid-friendly devices.

If this is the direction society wants to go in, it shouldn't impose on anyone other than parents and children. Current legislation and proposals narrowly target one specific use case (porn), and do so in a kludgy way that's effectively just banning its use without a VPN. Instead, this approach would provide a general framework for filtering kids' interaction with technology.

For example, some states might use it to ban social media and AI chatbots for children, at least in their current forms. I could imagine an alternative AI chatbot service being allowed which shared the history with parents and teachers, so as to deter cheating, and to provide an opportunity for human adults to add context or corrections to any misinformation. I could also imagine allowing more limited social networks that segregated schools or classes into their own private bubbles, wiped content at the end of each school year, blocked posting images/videos without parental approval, used uncomplicated news feed algorithms, and gave teachers and staff reddit-style moderation power.

Personally, I'm not sure how much I like this, vs simply leaving the parenting to parents. Maybe it would be less bad than alternatives, but it's also dangerously close to a ban on general-purpose computing[1]. We'd have to remain vigilant to ensure that governments didn't use it as a foothold to start cracking down on adults' use of computers and the Internet in the future.

1: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

This leaves them totally exposed if school gives them a chromebook or anytime they're in range of another open network.

Besides, the effects of this content are society wide. You can be the one parent who keeps your kids away from dangerous content, but if all their friends don't, they will be influenced by them.

> Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to,

Oh, that said, the specific technical way they want to implement this is awful. Making or even allowing individual porn sites to administer the ID system is horrible. Have they never heard of Oauth? There should be a "adultidcheck.gov" type central government service that handles this.

Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides. It is not any kind of natural right. If you wanted to send or receive information it had to be done in some physical way, so your identity could not really be hidden. Privacy, yes, anonymity, no.

What? You could buy books/magazines with cash. There were literally laws preventing porn rental shops from keeping records on their customers. No one had any idea what you watched on your television or listened to on the radio. There were (are) ham radios. You could record your own tapes, print your own magazines/pamphlets/books, put up your own flyers/posters. There are analytics on every single one of the modern equivalents of these things now, in fact I think you probably have to admit the point of the web has become to add analytics to stuff for advertising.

The era we're living in now is the least private, least anonymous era ever, it just doesn't feel that way because there's a huge inequality in who we're exposed to. In other words, some people argue that in village or tenement life there wasn't a lot of privacy, but that was maybe 40 people knowing when you had sex. Anyone with your smartwatch data has that info now, which a lot more than 40 people; they just don't live anywhere near you (well, probably not anyway).

As a mid-thirties millennial, I saw the transition. Kids shared paper pornography in the 90s, and had access to the most extreme and anonymous version of the early internet. I don't think either inflicted the kind of widespread harm mass surveillance proponents would suggest.

> Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides.

It also wasn't possible for every action and thought a person had to be monitored by governments and corporations. We've gone way too far in our assault on privacy and desperately need to claw rights back.

I find it horrifying how many people seem to default assume that censoring is a good thing.

The internet may be harmful but it's not just a few explicit sites that you need to worry about. It's the whole thing. Either teach your kids to make good decisions or block them from the internet in full. There isn't a middle ground that works really. We are absolutely rocketing towards the worst kind of dystopia and it seems like a lot of people are on board with it.

I for one welcome our new overlords. /s

  Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to

Re:”naked people”, I think that’s doing disservice to the proponents of these controls (who I vehemently disagree with, ofc); the modern porn landscape has problems with non-consensual videos (see: Pornhub & GDP), extreme content (violence, CNC), and really harmful stereotypes about gender roles. It’s much more than just “healthy human sexuality” as many people on here seem to assume.

I think the only workable solution is a) better parental controls by default on the client level, and b) better educated and supported children. Children are smart, they know sex exists, and they know it’s something they don’t care at all about - they can be our allies in this fight.

If this move is to prevent teenagers with a motive from accessing porn, then: HA

I suppose children should have access to a better quality of porn. The stuff we have now is probably harmful to watchers of all ages in varying degrees. That said, I don't think society will ever be liberal enough to have a kids section on porn sites.

> better parental controls by default on the client level

Having parental controls on by default would be a reasonable solution to this issue.

> they know it’s something they don’t care at all about

Is this a typo? Children go on porn sites because they want to watch porn. That's why I did it. If children didn't want to watch porn, they wouldn't. I don't think the sex itself is something they need protecting from. Just the addictive qualities that are present in both porn sites and the wider internet.

> better educated and supported children

Better educated and supported parents would also help.

Scary times in Europe! Of course American conservatives could easily pick up this issue at random any midterm cycle now, assuming we continue having midterm elections.

Children used to go out, do things, come home. Now children have zero privacy. Into the teen years, they can't get into trouble, learn, socialize, etc. They just sit at home because their parents are constantly watching their GPS location and reading their texts.

Is porn worse than the damage done by the mistrust?

My daughter came home from the playground where 10 year old guys showed her hardcore anal porn from mobile because it's funny.

It’s actually pretty hard to do lockdowns because there’s been so much consolidation. Many parents can turn on the built in controls, but then they face problems like “do you block YouTube entirely, even though their homework will include links to things like videos from NIH hosted there?”

The big problem isn’t that kids could innocently find sexual content but also that grownups will try to trick them into engaging with things for a variety of reasons. This is different from letting your kid have free rein of the public library because the library didn’t have some guy recruiting for a political movement putting books in the children’s section and the librarians wouldn’t let that creepy dude hang out there.

This came up at a school party recently where multiple parents of first graders were talking about how quickly YouTube will go from auto playing LEGO and Minecraft videos to some pretty unhinged stuff.

Tell kids to create list of URLs. Download the videos. They've just learned copy/paste, about existence of URLs, and concept of remote and local. Now they're hackers!

At the time I couldn't even find abuse/webmaster contact info to report it to get it fixed. They were serving porn for months.

You’d be surprised.