Innappropriatness, social media and kids don't mix

[Arkhangel]

How has nobody posted this yet?

Frankly, you're not going to stop kids from seeing porn and I think making it an issue might be counter-productive. I think Brook is right that the best way to handle it is to be frank and open, let them know that sex is not something to be ashamed of and that they can come to you with questions any time. I think it might also be good to get them to understand that what they see in porn is not real in the same way that the hero flipping his motorbike over eighteen cars and duelling on the top of a freight truck on the highway in an action movie is not real.

[Happy Ent]

Childhood disease is beyond our control.

Accidents are beyond our control.

The friggen' internet is not.

Ah, the problem with analogies is that they’re so hard to control. Check out this great argument:

Childhood diseases harm.

Accidents kill.

The friggen’ internet does not.

Childhood diseases and accidents should be controlled. We are losing relatively little from the remedies. The friggen’ internet should not. We are losing a lot from the remedies.

Yes, there is stuff you don’t want your children to see or hear. The most terrible and scarring of which is when their parents fight. It’s going to happen. Everything will be all right anyway. Relax.

[baxus]

The get your husband to block his feed. Simple. It's not your business to tell other people what they can post on their own profiles.

I agree with this.

Few groups of people annoy me more than those who think the whole world should adapt to and watch out for their kids.

@north of the wall:

You may feel social networks are not places for sexual content, but keep in mind that "social networks" extends further than Facebook and Twitter and"sexual content" may (and often does) mean different things to different people

Third, and most important one - you have a CHOICE what you get to see on social networks (apart from adds, of course).

If you don't like certain content, you can block it or hide it.

[Lyanna Stark]

Ah, the problem with analogies is that they’re so hard to control. Check out this great argument:

Childhood diseases harm.

Accidents kill.

The friggen’ internet does not.

Childhood diseases and accidents should be controlled. We are losing relatively little from the remedies. The friggen’ internet should not. We are losing a lot from the remedies.

Yes, there is stuff you don’t want your children to see or hear. The most terrible and scarring of which is when their parents fight. It’s going to happen. Everything will be all right anyway. Relax.

Actually, there was an article in the local news fairly recently about a young teenage girl who had tried to commit suicide due to harassment mostly from social media and text messages.

I do believe that suicide is one of the most common, if not the most common, cause of death among young people (not children).

(This is a tangent btw that has nothing to do with censoring/not censoring.)

[Happy Ent]

Actually, there was an article in the local news fairly recently about a young teenage girl who had tried to commit suicide due to harassment mostly from social media and text messages.

Again: the internet did not do this, unlike accidents and diseases. It may have caused it, just like doing sports caused the accident or kissing caused the disease. But there is a very real and very important difference between these things.

You can read the internet and decide to not kill yourself. I manage this every day.

By contrast, you can’t have a piano fall on your head, or get cancer, and decide to not get killed by these things. I understand the political temptation to muddle these conceptualisations of “causing” and “doing” in order to leverage a censorial desire to remove filth or smut or politically offensive viewpoints from the public sphere.

But the internet does not harm you or your children.

[Castel]

The get your husband to block his feed. Simple. It's not your business to tell other people what they can post on their own profiles.

The OP's situation is a horrible example to use. Your adult account that your kids didn't have access to contained adult material that your kids were exposed to because a bunch of adults made a mistake? Yeah, there's a simple solution here.

Again, don't really see a greater point about the internet here beyond "prune your social networking acquaintances to match your situation".

[Ormond]

You can read the internet and decide to not kill yourself. I manage this every day.

.......

But the internet does not harm you or your children.

I get the concept that one shouldn't blame the media for the message.

But the first sentence above seems rather self-centered. You don't just "decide" to "read the internet and not kill yourself." You aren't negatively affected by certain things because you have the capacity not to be. Some of that comes from biologically based personality factors. Some of it comes from things you have specifically learned through experience. Some of it comes from factors that normally go along with human maturation.

The last two are correlated with age, so there are going to be a higher percentage of children and adolescents who don't have the capacity to deal with certain things they come across on the Internet than is the case for adults.

Swimming pools don't deliberately drown children. But when a child wanders into a neighbor's yard because there is no fencing around a pool and drowns, the pool owner as well as the parent bears some legal and moral responsibility for creating an "attractive nuisance" that was liable to harm children when there were no safeguards in place.

In the same way, I think that those who create and own websites with content (or a high probablity that users will post content) that would be harmful to children or others bear some responsibility for harm that could reasonably be anticipated to result from viewing that content. Though parents and guardians bear the greatest responsibility, those behind the websites shouldn't be allowed a completely free pass here to ignore the reasonable possibility of harm a completely unmonitored site could cause.

[MercenaryChef]

in 5th grade or so i got a hold of my first pornography. another kid from my class stole a bunch of hustler magazines from his dad for us all to leer at. we were caught.

it all culminated with our teacher providing a class wide well-meaning but completely baseless lecture of some thirty minutes or more on how pornography was bad and it was but the first step to something so much worse. she let us know that ted bundy who had raped and murdered dozens of women in our neighboring state of washington and was awaiting execution got his start in pornography.

to this day i cannot forgive this teacher for this lecture. being a kid is hard enough. becoming sexually aware is already kind of a confusing road. to have it even further filled with uncertainty and guilt is just unnecessary. i shrugged off her bullshit lecture with my natural cynicism. but, how many of my classmates got their adolescence off to a even more difficult start because of her lack of understanding?

[north of the wall]

My 6 yr old already knows how babies are made and how babies are born. He also knows people have sex whether to make a baby or not. But I had never explained the mechanics of it and was suprised he know that was sex. I am certainly not going to tell him sex or porn is bad or shameful.

However I do think that the type of porn that is shared on social media is not good porn. Its shared as a joke or to shock and offend. Even if we take kids stumbling across it out of the equation it is demeaning to the fat chick in that sex video. Or slut shaming the girl filmed having sex in her backyard with some random dude. (Which I have also seen on fb)

Porn/sex videos on fb annoys me not just because my kids accidently saw it (which started my OP) but has been annoying me for a while because I feel its disrespectful. People can share what they want ultimately and I will never say we should censor it, but do you actual think it has a place on social media?

EDIT: took out my snarkiness. (I hope)

also ETA: I guess if I were to prune everyone who posted/shared things that annoy me I'd have very few people left on fb. But fair point, obviously so much of a non issue that I am the only person thinking its worthy of discussion. And probably does nothing for me other than highlight the bogan-ness of a lot of people I know. :(

[Castel]

Porn/sex videos on fb annoys me not just because my kids accidently saw it (which started my OP) but has been annoying me for a while because I feel its disrespectful. People can share what they want ultimately and I will never say we should censor it, but do you actual think it has a place on social media? Or are you just sticking to your guns that I'm teying to censor people?

The thing is, the whole point of social media is to be social. Being social involves picking your social group.and pruning it to suit you. Why should I bother to make or accept some blanket statement about what's "disrespectful" when you are totally free to cut away the people who are being "disrespectful" in your eyes"?

In this situation there's essentially no difference between someone sharing a piece of shock porn and the guy who keeps making vulgar jokes.From a purely neutral perspective I see no reason to care or condemn immediately. What matters is who exactly is around him. You find it unpleasant, well, there are ways of resolving this and I fully respect your right to do so if you feel that the behavior of that person isn't fitting

It's just...not a thing y'know?

[Happy Ent]

Swimming pools don't deliberately drown children. But when a child wanders into a neighbor's yard […]

In the same way, I think that those who create and own websites […]

Then I was not clear.

To stay in your framework, the analogy is between drowning and looking at dirty pictures. That is not valid, in my opinion.

I’m not arguing about media or ease of prevention. I’m arguing entirely about severity of outcome.

Drowning in a pool because the neighbour neglected to put up a fence is bad. Not because putting up a fence would have been easy. But because drowning is a real thing that you can’t just decide to not suffer from.

Looking at smut because somebody failed to exercises a sufficiently censorial attitude is not very bad. Not because the censorial attitude is questionable (which it is) but because looking at smut doesn’t harm you in the same way that a falling piano or asphyxiation does.

Can “looking at smut” be harmful for certain individuals? Probably. (It’s also very, very pleasant for many others.) By contrast, drowning or crushed-by-piano is a million times worse. The reason to prevent drowning accidents is not that a small part of the population may become psychologically scarred from it (while others seek it out for entertainment or stimulation.)

That is the false analogy. You can’t just equate “accidentally looking at smut” with “getting killed”. This comparison is completely and utterly without perspective. Really.

[Crazydog7]

Look if you are concerned about what your kids could be getting into do what my mother should have done but didn't know how to do. Be involved I know the younger the kid the more icky you find it but sometimes questions need to be asked.

Desktop at home only. I know its more difficult these days when everyone has a mobile device but it can still be done.

When I think of what I did online when I was shockingly young I cringe. If it is out there your kids will find it.

[PlainJeyne]

My kids are still really young and this hasn't been an issue for us yet, but honestly thinking about all the violent and disturbing things that my babies may one day see makes me want to go live in a cave.

But I know that isn't the answer so we have to be as vigilant as possible and also be open and honest with our kids so that they can come to us with questions and understand what is and isn't normal/acceptable. We can teach them that bodies are just bodies and that sex isn't shameful, but also that objectification of the human body isn't nice and we want to respect other people and their bodies. Also there is a whole other conversation to be had about the violent (sexual or not) things they may see.

But on a completely different note: even if I wasn't a parent and didn't know any children I would think it was sketchy as hell to share porn on Facebook. What kind of person does that? That isn't what Facebook is for. Even if the person was really into porn, there are places where they can talk freely about that and share without sharing it with everyone and their grandma. Like... Literally my grandma is on Facebook. She has no interest in people's porn preferences. Take that stuff to a different forum please and thank you!

[juanml82]

I agree. All my kids interent time is usually monitered. This was honestly a case of hubby leaving fb open and 2 yr old pressing spacebar until he conviently stopped and the fb video autoplaying.

I guess I will just have to log him out if he forgets but even if he had been scrolling down on fb himself and he had seen it chances are our kids would have been in the same room since they follow us everywhere. My point simply being that I feel social media is not a place for sexual content. (I couldn't care less about nudity, or swearing but drug use and sex on such an easily accessible forum will continue to annoy me)

For the record this is not my friend on fb to block or hide. Its my hubby's friend who also has kids and most of his fb friends also have kids so I'm surprised I'm the only one who gets annoyed by his shares on fb.

Simple solution: whenever you or your husband leave their computer, get used to press the windows key + L. The computer gets locked and will require a password to log in. So you and your husband have their user, with no restrictions whatsoever. For your kids, you create another user, with another password and set up parental controls to it. Also use an ad block, as ads can often show content inappropriate for children.

I'd guess there are parental control applications for cellphones, but I don't know that for sure. With that done, they won't accidentally stumble across porn at your house. Their friends will show them porn, though.

Actually, there was an article in the local news fairly recently about a young teenage girl who had tried to commit suicide due to harassment mostly from social media and text messages.

I do believe that suicide is one of the most common, if not the most common, cause of death among young people (not children).

(This is a tangent btw that has nothing to do with censoring/not censoring.)

Bullying always existed. I don't know if taking it to facebook had actually increased its incidence or it makes it more visible and, because it's "new" and happens on the Internet, it makes for the news (while nasty stuff happening in the classroom doesn't)

[Arkhangel]

I don't think the internet changed bullying quantitatively (amount of bullying) as much as it changed it qualitatively (the nature of bullying). Before the bullies were at school. Now the bullying is in their homes, in their bedrooms, they carry it around with them in their backpacks. Wherever a phone can go, the bullies can too - and that is a major difference. Bullying isn't restricted to school hours, it's 24/7 now.

[Happy Ent]

If anybody knows a study about bullying across generations or countries, I’d be eager to have a look. I only have my own memory – bullying was routine, often physically violent, and largely tolerated by the environment. Today, incidents of bullying seem to be considered abnormal and are a major course for concern, including the parents of the involved parties.

So, from that perspective, there may be far less bullying today than when I was a child. It’s less of a problem than ever before, and gets made into more of a problem than ever before. (Both of these things correlate and are a Good Thing.) The potential proliferation of verbal bullying, and its ease of access, may counterbalance this; I have no idea how to reason about this.

I could be completely wrong. Does anybody know more?

[Crazydog7]

Dude get with it we were talking about the easy access children have to pornography.....you know what on second thought maybe someone should derail the thread.

[Rorshach]

It's really hard to quantify bullying. I could try to look up numbers, but I suspect they'll be scarce for earlier years, when, as HE puts it, bullying was routine. It just wasn't considered as much of a problem as it is today.

The big problem (or problems) today, speaking as a teacher, is 1) the fact that bullying exists online 24/7 and it is, as a consequence, much harder to get a reprieve. Basically, if you're the victim, there's no safe haven (unless you go offline, and very few children/teenagers consider that acceptable). Tied into that is 2), that, at least in Norway, there's no surefire way to deal with bullying. So often the problem persists for years if it's spotted, or it may go on for years if no-one spots it (that's the problem with being online, you need the victim to speak up. Some don't).

At the moment bullying is very much in the media here, and we are daily told stories about bullying that has gone on for years, with different consequences (from moving schools, which may or may not help) to suicide.

Bit rambling, this post - point is, I don't know if the problem has become worse, but I do believe it has become different. Less physical, more verbal.

[Lyanna Stark]

Again: the internet did not do this, unlike accidents and diseases. It may have caused it, just like doing sports caused the accident or kissing caused the disease. But there is a very real and very important difference between these things.

Oh, I agree with the technical differences.

You can read the internet and decide to not kill yourself. I manage this every day.

I'd say there is a marked difference between someone like yourself, an educated adult with a secure social position, and a vulnerable 14-year old who are exploring the internet for the first time. Obviously, this is not about "banning the internet", as that would equal "social media for teenagers" with "the internet".

Bullying in social media vs normal bullying also takes different expressions, as social media bullying can go viral very quickly, it is easy to screenshot and/or save in other forms, meaning you don't get rid of it.

[MisterOJ]

Why the hell did I click on this thread?

:sadface: