Stop children accessing porn - and violence

[Cecilia1963]

There?s been much talk about porn and how to protect our children from accidentally stumbling across the most vicious, violent stuff online (not the sort of stuff we would have found when we were giggling, curious adolscents). And it?s not just porn that children can too easily access. My thirteen year old son was sent a link by a Facebook school friend to a video depicting a man wielding a knife to cut off a woman?s head. This clip was taken down by YouTube, but only after thousands of young teenagers had seen it. No one, not even our Big Internet Players, seem to have any bright ideas.

So, how about this? The Big Internet Players should automatically block a range of certain words if they?re attached to photos or images, and access only gained through a credit. So, access to porn and violence ? anything that would be X-rated (or even removed) from films/DVDs, is blocked for under 18s.

I?m not sure how feasible this is, and I?m sure it would need loads of fine-tuning, but it can?t be completely impossible, if the will is there. And I don?t think it?s an infringement of people?s rights ? it?s no different than being asked for your ID if you were buying X-rated films, or alcohol, in a shop.

I know it won?t stop everything. Lots of dreadful content is not hosted by Google, YouTube or Facebook. But it would be a start. And take some of the workload off Internet Watch Foundation, leaving them free to concentrate on other, trickier avenues.

So I wanted to run this past Mumsnet Community (and I?m going to ask Gransnet people, too). See what you all think.

Thank you! (and sorry if this message is a bit long ....)

Really sorry - I typed this in word first, then copied across. All the apostrophes seem to have been turned into question marks!

Your beheading video that Google took down as soon as they were alerted that there's a problem - what happens if someone uploads it and instead of calling it 'beheading video' they label it 'my lovely socks'. How does your word filter deal with that?

The internet doesn't work the way you think it does. Any system of word restriction that was even remotely efficient would be draconian in the extreme.

It would never work. The first and most obvious flaw, Flatpack has already said.

And what if people just embed the words into a picture? How does the filter cope with that?

Or what about there's a thread in MN someone doesn't like so they type lots of naughty words in like "beheading" or "kiddy porn". Bingo, MN gets blocked by the filter which is unable to distinguish between malice & real danger.

Most people think of the Internet as your browser and web pages. In actual fact there is much more to it than that. Years ago on newsgroups they had the brainwave of deleting the groups like alt.binaries.childporn The response was that the evil gits started posting in alt.binaries.disney instead.

With current blocking technology, any large nationwide system is easily circumvented. Personal tools are available already free of charge which would be more than enough to stop your kids from accidentally stumbling onto illicit material.

I simply don't understand the obsession with a statewide filter which will be full of holes and affect millions of innocent users whilst not bothering to install freely available software which does the job today.

Fair points. I guess we all need to continually educate ourselves with filtering, etc. And remain vigilant.

Thanks for your comments!

Fair points. I guess we all need to continually educate ourselves with filtering, etc. And remain vigilant.

Thanks for your comments!

The best way to stop children accessing porn and violence is for their parents to stop them accessing it. This is far easier to achieve than for a government agency to do.