And improve parental controls for children’s accounts. I’m sure there’s nothing currently giving a “parent” account high level control over a “child” account, but I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
Parental controls already exist in every major OS, they suffice to restrict & monitor social media, and they go unused.
A better solution might be for laws to provide parents resources & incentives to parent children’s online activity (including training to use resources they already have) & to provide children education in online safety & literacy.
Decades ago, federal courts citing commission findings & studies recommended these alternatives as superior in effectiveness, meeting government duties to minimize impact on civil liberties, allocation of law enforcement resources, etc.
For the permanent injunction to COPA, the judge wrote
Moreover, defendant contends that: (1) filters currently exist and, thus, cannot be considered a less restrictive alternative to COPA; and that (2) the private use of filters cannot be deemed a less restrictive alternative to COPA because it is not an alternative which the government can implement. These contentions have been squarely rejected by the Supreme Court in ruling upon the efficacy of the 1999 preliminary injunction by this court. The Supreme Court wrote:
Congress undoubtedly may act to encourage the use of filters. We have held that Congress can give strong incentives to schools and libraries to use them. It could also take steps to promote their development by industry, and their use by parents. It is incorrect, for that reason, to say that filters are part of the current regulatory status quo. The need for parental cooperation does not automatically disqualify a proposed less restrictive alternative. In enacting COPA, Congress said its goal was to prevent the “widespread availability of the Internet” from providing “opportunities for minors to access materials through the World Wide Web in a manner that can frustrate parental supervision or control.” COPA presumes that parents lack the ability, not the will, to monitor what their children see. By enacting programs to promote use of filtering software, Congress could give parents that ability without subjecting protected speech to severe penalties.
I also agree and conclude that in conjunction with the private use of filters, the government may promote and support their use by, for example, providing further education and training programs to parents and caregivers, giving incentives or mandates to ISP’s to provide filters to their subscribers, directing the developers of computer operating systems to provide filters and parental controls as a part of their products (Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, now provides such features, see Finding of Fact 91), subsidizing the purchase of filters for those who cannot afford them, and by performing further studies and recommendations regarding filters.
Adult supervision, child education on online safety & literacy, parental controls & filters are more effective at less expense to fundamental rights.
Governments know this & conveniently forget it.
OS level parental controls do not give a parent control over a child’s use of a social media platform, to the best of my knowledge. For example, how do you prevent a child from friending someone you don’t know on facebook, while still letting your child join a Facebook group for their soccer team? That kind of fine grain control needs to happen on the level of the platform. Universally blocking DMs to your child’s account from accounts they are not friended to needs to happen on the level of the platform. Etc.
Universally preventing children from joining social media is also an option, or giving parents the tools to block their children individually from accessing known social media sites from hardware under the parent’s control is also an option, but neither of these are sufficient or without negative consequences. Blocking children from social media by law requires age verification to have any effect. Blocking access to certain websites on a hardware level encourages the child to use hardware outside their parents control, or else excludes them from a part of social life.
Platforms need parental control tools as well, not just operating systems, and those tools need to be sufficient to allow a parent to have real control over what their child can access. I don’t think that will exist without legislation, because it is contrary to the platform’s financial interest.
Parental controls already exist in every major OS, they suffice to restrict & monitor social media, and they go unused.
A better solution might be for laws to provide parents resources & incentives to parent children’s online activity (including training to use resources they already have) & to provide children education in online safety & literacy. Decades ago, federal courts citing commission findings & studies recommended these alternatives as superior in effectiveness, meeting government duties to minimize impact on civil liberties, allocation of law enforcement resources, etc. For the permanent injunction to COPA, the judge wrote
Adult supervision, child education on online safety & literacy, parental controls & filters are more effective at less expense to fundamental rights. Governments know this & conveniently forget it.
OS level parental controls do not give a parent control over a child’s use of a social media platform, to the best of my knowledge. For example, how do you prevent a child from friending someone you don’t know on facebook, while still letting your child join a Facebook group for their soccer team? That kind of fine grain control needs to happen on the level of the platform. Universally blocking DMs to your child’s account from accounts they are not friended to needs to happen on the level of the platform. Etc.
Universally preventing children from joining social media is also an option, or giving parents the tools to block their children individually from accessing known social media sites from hardware under the parent’s control is also an option, but neither of these are sufficient or without negative consequences. Blocking children from social media by law requires age verification to have any effect. Blocking access to certain websites on a hardware level encourages the child to use hardware outside their parents control, or else excludes them from a part of social life.
Platforms need parental control tools as well, not just operating systems, and those tools need to be sufficient to allow a parent to have real control over what their child can access. I don’t think that will exist without legislation, because it is contrary to the platform’s financial interest.