"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.