Comment on Australia says platforms like Steam and Roblox have 'significant' child safety gaps

• Chozo@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It's easy to look back at history and say "what a bunch of idiots", but it's important to remember that there was once a time when having plastic bags all around your home wasn't such a ubiquitous thing like it is today. The things that seem obvious to us now were still new and untested at one time. The rise in plastic film suffocation started around the rise of dry-cleaning; until that point, there wasn't much disposable plastic film in people's lives, at all. Society had no prior experience to learn from, in this sense.

  What we're seeing here isn't too dissimilar in this regard. Up until fairly recently, the concept of a globally-connected, unmoderated network that was accessible by children and predators alike just didn't exist. That network existing in literally everybody's pockets 24 hours a day is an even newer idea. And it's not even just one network, it's in almost every facet of kids' lives these days.

  We can all sit around and say "wow what a bunch of bad parents for allowing this to happen", but many of those parents didn't grow up in a world where this was a reality. While many of them grew up in a time where online predators existed, they didn't grow up in a time when those predators could interact with children directly at any time and any location. They grew up in a time when you had a PC in your room, which you didn't take with you, and that your parents could physically access; kids these days take their phone everywhere at all times, parental controls today are more useless than when we were kids, and it's trivially easy for kids to hide their online presence from their parents now. Today's parents, by and large, just simply do not have the experience needed to address this on a large scale.

  The morbid reality is that the only reason it seems obvious not to let children play with plastic bags is because nearly every single plastic bag you've ever seen in your entire life says "this bag is not a toy". You grew up in a world where that problem had already been solved, and at the cost of dozens of dead children.
  This is not yet a solved problem.

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