To think the internet should be made cleaner, safer and more family friendly...

[bluewedge]

It shouldn't be so easy to access pornography...
Messageboards should be properly moderated before things go live...

The internet is not your baby sitter.

Or you could take responsibility for your own households interent usage and allow other adults to access what they wish. Parental controls exist for a reason. Websites are run by different people in different countries how would you police it unless you want the govt to limit what websites we can see. So they control our access to information. If that is what you want I hear china is the place for you.

You use parental blocks in your home and you educate your DC about what is out there in the big wide world and you don't sit around expecting everything to be sanitised for you so you don't have to make the effort.

Do you know that 90 % of the internet is on the darknet? There isn't a cat's chance in hell that you could control that!

The only way to control what you see, is exactly that. Control what you see. So, as several people have said, use parental controls and other safe filters.

Just to add the darknet isn't all contract killers for hire etc, the majority of it is mundane websites and forums that just haven't been indexed by any search engine.

The internet should not be controlled, it is for the user to be aware to use it, if the OP wants that much control over the internet maybe everyone should log in to all forums with their actual name, no more name changing on forums such as this one.

I agree op, there are some sick fucks out there and it's almost impossible to completely protect kids from them and the content they produce, parental controls or no parental controls

I totally agree!

( and we DO have the strictest of strict controls here, set at router).

Isn't that your job as a parent?

Given that the internet is an international commodity, who would you put in charge? Chinese, Saudis, American Evangelists, a Danish commune?

Or were you just assuming that British cultural values are the only Real Values and the Brits are in charge of policing the world?

The one thing you can control to some extent is your children. I would start there.

Given that my kids now access all their education online at home, I would say its almost impossible to be policing what your kids are up to on their screens all the time, parental controls or no parental controls, so yes in an ideal world the internet wouldn't be so full of sick fucks

I don't know why the plan to have to opt in for pornography or other adult content was abandoned. It I am sure would have made a difference, and perhaps made some content uneconomic to post.

If you ask websites to classify their own content, there would be an awful lot of 'Biology Education' sites suddenly springing up. If you use bots, they'll let a lot of dodgy stuff through and then block pictures of breastfeeding mums and the like.

If you ask the general public to work together to report sites that show 'inappropriate' material, you'll get a huge amount of keyboard warriors and woke people with a grudge making malicious and/or self-centred accusations (i.e. "I don't like it, so it must be banned"). Look at all of the JKR lynch mob - nobody seems able any more to just thoroughly disagree with somebody or even to try to start an active debate - much easier to just cry 'hate speech' and get them 'cancelled'.

The other problem is that a great many sites host all manner of content. You might have filthyperv.com at one end and fwuffybunnygoestonursery.com at the other, but there's an awful lot of crossover in the middle. MN is full of a shedload of useful, harmless content, but if somebody wanted to pick up on one thread that they personally found objectionable and demand the whole site be classified on the basis of that, where would that leave us?

On the flip side, if a site was classified based on the majority of its output, the porn sites would just start to carry a whole load of old, public-domain, inoffensive material to outweigh the dirty stuff. They might 'discover' that 99.99% of users happen to favour the 'adult' categories over the wildlife, historic buildings, Middle-Ages madrigals categories etc, but as far as they are concerned, they offer a wide range of general interest content, to appeal to the full spectrum of human experience.

I remember reading in the past that some groups tried to campaign against Amazon, because it sold a lot of pornographic/erotic/violent/anti-whatever books. It's everybody's personal choice to use/not use/boycott them for any reason, but I don't think these people could grasp that Amazon just sells every published book that's available. There isn't some sweet little old lady going through lists of millions of titles and deciding what might be nice to sell and what it's probably best to leave out.

There is evil on the internet, as there is in the world at large. You can avoid most of it online with filters and by being careful where you go.

Who would be the one deciding what's allowed? Policing it? It's impossible to do without restricting the good parts, too.

I don't know why the plan to have to opt in for pornography or other adult content was abandoned.

It wasn't for mobile internet providers (like GiffGaff). You have to prove you are over 18 before you are allowed to access "restricted content" through it.

The plan to force it onto every internet connection fell apart when it required competence from the government. It was doomed from then.

@SephrinaX

Ah yes. The internet which is run by one server and one computer where someone can sit there and moderate what is shown everyday.

If it was that easy, police would be able to lock down the dark web. But they can’t

Because it’s impossible

Why does this scene keep popping into my head?

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns

There is a server running the Internet Soub. A nice man telephoned me to tell me there was a problem with it. Other than it being in Switzerland he was curiously reticent to tell me any further details about it's capabilites.

Why has everything got to be family friendly

^^ this! Not everything has to be adapted for bloody kids!

YABVU. The internet is for everyone. Why should it be harder to access sites you don’t “approve” of?

The idea actually freaks me out massively. It's like we're all sleepwalking into dystopia.

Why does everything have to be state controlled?

safeyoutube.net/

To generate safe, family friendly links to watch YouTube vids on. But you do have to generate a new link for every....single....video. You can start here to make YouTube safer for everyone and let us know when you're done! Thanks!
Or there's youtube.com/kids/ if you don't want to use parental controls.

The Chinese equivalent to youtube is youku.com if you fancy a little Chinese gov censored use. Might need a vpn though. And reading a handful of Hanzi might help too.

But yeah when you've cleaned up the Web let us all know 👍

How do we agree what’s family friendly?

I like the Harry Potter films and think they’re child friendly (at an appropriate age).

Some Christians in America would disagree with me as they are evil, and do not promote Christianity (in their interpretation).

Who is right here?

Guessing OP won't be returning