Desperate for social media ban, but parents say it’s 'impossible'

we also had cars for many decades but still have people that think a sudden left turn from the right lane 5 lanes across a road is a reasonable action to take. basically we have a lot of straight up dumb people

Agreed. A parent of a young person today, let's say someone 40 years old, absolutely grew up with all of this stuff from a young age. It's not like they were born in 1950 and it never existed for most of their life. They grew up with the internet and computers. And technology is really in a lot of ways more user friendly than ever. Setting up something like parental controls is not complicated.

That's a silly take. I guarantee you the smart kids can outsmart you when it comes to tech. It was always the case. You think you're different but you're not

And we still have no regulation, that's insane.

I was blessed to be a kid when we transitioned from analog to digital so I'm quite tech savvy. I've also been the one who gets to train everyone else at home, work, everywhere. Yes there are a lot of lazy people who can learn and dont. But... To lots of folk these motions with a mouse are difficult, they just don't have the finger dexterity we have. They double click wrong because it's difficult to hold their fingers correctly. Their brains aren't wired for digital instruction. They can put model cars together from thousands of tiny pieces but ask them to go 5 levels deep in an options menu and their brains just can't process the virtual file cabinet necessary to do so. Some are lazy, but we cant ignore that we were raised with skills to make this easy. They weren't. 

It’s easy for kids to circumvent some of the control mechanisms. It’s easy for a parent to think he/she has setup parental controls in a meaningful way, without realizing that their kid has access to apps/services they explicitly blocked. The shit can be hacked by a 9 year old.

Ok, let's keep doing the exact same thing that doesn't work then. I'm sure the system will magically correct itself by next Friday.

There are issues with it though. I set up a whitelist for URLs on a tablet and included one specific YouTube video. But after going to that page you could still click through to any of the suggested videos afterwards indefinitely as YouTube doesn't actually load any new URLs after the first one. There are lots of design issues like this, where websites break the expected behaviour by auto-playing new content, which breaks parental controls.

Parent here and I’m not trying to make excuses at all and I’d like to say I’m tech savy but shit is hard. Speaking specifically from an Apple family the type of parental locks needed for my family in particular isn’t available on Apple products. I can set up some many things, I can set up shortcuts, I can set up screen time locks, I can set up passcodes, and I can even download 3rd party apps that promise to lock down what I need.  They all never work fully and when they do work my daughter (who is autistic/adhd) will brute force the f*** out of it and by pass everything! She always will find a way into the settings of an app then click on links in the help section or the faq section then it’ll take her online.  With Apple products she eventually learned that if you cut off the tablet/phone and turn it back on it will at one point turn back on without the restrictions. Apple also won’t let you block access to settings which I get but still annoying.  We ended up getting her an Amazon Fire which has tons of restrictions that Apple doesn’t have. BUT if you input the wrong pin to the adult account enough it’ll ask you if you want to reset pin. She can click yes and now she has access to parent profile. She also knows that just like with iPads if she restarts the tablet once it dies it’ll boot back up in parent mode.  In case you are reading this like “well take the tablet away” it’s not that simple and also she has a van pick her up from school as the first stop and the last stop. Her school is 1 hour away and she gets bored enough she will be destructive.  The point is it’s not 100% the parents fault and we are trying our best but we were all kids at one point and we know that we always figured out ways around things. 

You don’t even have to follow a YouTube video. ScreenTime literally walks you through it step by step.

I mean, it’s not really that hard to get around most blocks and restrictions. “Just ban it” always makes me laugh. It works in literally nothing else but you think it would work here?

I'm tired of these people and their laziness/uselessness making it harder for the rest of us. If enough parents like this one whine, they'll make controls even stricter for all the people that don't need them and don't want them. We need to stop catering to the lowest common denominator and let them flail.

And these parents will blame their children and government and service provider and next door neighbor before they own up and take responsibility for their child's Social anxiety, attention deficiency and other much more dangerous consequences that started because they took the easy route of keeping kids distracted with unsupervised access to the internet.

Woo!

lol I think you mean woe but the next time I get excited I’m definitely going to say woo is me

Easily done from the iPhone directly. No 3rd party app required.

I also have never owned an iPhone. I have nothing to add to the conversation, just like to tell people randomly.

I use both platform and tested both sets of parental controls. They are both simple to set up super strict or super lax and both get a 6/10 score with different deficiencies from my rounds evaluating them since setting up a balanced path that grows with your child sucks in both. I settled on Google family link and a Lenovo Y700 Gen 2 for my daughter since it's easier to get close to the usage pattern I want to allow/encourage without micromanaging everything with how my kid behaves and their personality. I also test out every single app that gets installed before it gets installed. She has access to the play store and can wishlist apps that she would like to try out.

Easy online 24/7 is way more harmfull.

I'd guess he means that it is hard to enforce things other parents aren't. It's only easy unless you actually raise a teenager...

kids get around blocks so easy. it does nothing

Everything about this verification is designed so dumb and backwards and just calls for identity theft and abuse all while not protecting kids at all. It'll just give corporations even more of our biometric data.

I prefer my mass surveillance feeding my future AI replacement thx. Much more ethical than the government finding out... check notes... my age! The horror.

Another app... under Google/Apple's control. You kinda prove my point. You can't even consider any other way to watch YouTube, except via an app. It's a completely foreign concept to you.

Side loading isnt going away.

my point was that kids are actually very smart. actually any people that are poor, restricted, or bored are capable of great feats of ingenuity. they will endure a lot to make a thing they want to happen happen. sure kids today dont know how to operate a rotary phone or a swiss army can opener, but me now in my 40s doesnt know how to make a minecraft mod