China turns on ‘minors mode’ that ensures kids only see wholesome socialist content online China has flicked the switch on ‘minors mode’, a subset of its internet in which under-18s will only see wholesome content. Regulator the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) delivered a spec for minors mode last year, and called for device manufacturers, developers and content providers to work together on a system that …
Meanwhile the left here - I am looking at you in particular, UCU - wants to control what adults can see or read based on inchoate and constantly changing theories from Tiktok and Twitter. Authoritarians of all sorts hate free access to information or opinion. I suppose it goes with the word "authoritarian".
If you removed the political angle then I have to admit this is impressive. I've always been an advocate of it being the parents responsibility though. I mean you wouldn't let your 4 year old go out and not know where they are so why would you let them use the internet completely unsupervised. That's goes for any age up to adulthood. That doesn't mean sitting with them all the time. You block the shit you can and create an understanding that they discuss any shit they come across as they get older.
But what you have to remember is you are in the subset of educated, technically literate and responsible parents. This doesn't cover the majority of parents - some of whom want to supervise their children but don't know how, or are outsmarted by them, or feel their children are being impoverished by missing out on what their peers are doing so want collective action.
Also, from the age of about 12, I would be out and about without my parents having a clue where I was. (But our tolerance to risk, has certainly shifted.)
It's a learned behaviour.
My lad is 3 years old and we've never put a phone on in front of him to watch anything. We'll put something on the TV for him when we're with him, and we're talking through it.
We'll be in a resturant and a kid the same age as my boy will be just sat their watching some shite on the tablet while the parents are either on their phone or doing something else entirely. No thought or process to what the child is doing or any engagement.
My boy will kick off if he's bored. But there are plenty of things around. Give him a toy car, sheet of paper, or even walk around and it occupies them. Or you could put a digital nanny in front of them and be done with it.
Parenting is fucking hard, especially as we're in a world now both parents have to work to stand still. If you've had a hard week, and a child who's particularly crap today, I don't blame them for opting for the digital nanny.
But I don't believe the restrictions are genuine in intent. I think this is a continuation of indoctrination. I complained a couple of weeks ago to the school, not that I expect a change, about teaching politics and censoring opposing views. If the kids stand up and disagree they are punished. That's not right although why are they teaching their political views, just teach them the bloody subject. My son was placed in isolation for disagreeing with the woke agenda. Ok he did it in a crass and stupid way but he is just a pre-pubescent kid unable to understand the need to properly articulate and explain. Although some of the teachers aren't too bright either.
When one of my children was in primary school, they did a project about queen Victoria. Being a curious sort, my child did a search for Queen Victoria's husband, and I didn't quite twig what the child was typing in quite quickly enough..... Thank goodness for safesearch blurring. (and having the computer on the kitchen table whilst I cooked tea.)
You must get different results in your parts but in AU I only get fairly boring images of Albert Saxe-Cobourg handsome chap that he was but hardly likely to inflict psychic harm on a child.
The idea of restricting access for the very young and gradually relaxing those restrictions as they grow until they reach majority isn't without merit especially if at each level specially prepared material readying the child for the next level is presented. ( = Education? :)
Unfortunately in excluding everything except "wholesome socialist content†" the residue will inevitably be monocular, monochrome and in a word bland.
Until the leaders of the PRC stop fearing their people and start trusting them their nation will always be catching up. Not that the rest of the world isn't heading in their direction, unfortunately.
† whatever that possibly could mean especially in the confused ideology and realpolitik of the contemporary PRC.
Do you not think google page ranks socialist content lower? or twitter or facebook? When was the last time you came across a news website that offered an alternative opinion to the accepted one?
We may not block but we have plenty of tools in place to make it very difficult to find. Which means we are pretty much doing the same thing.
It's not called socialist content perhaps. But I'm not sure socialism is the right name for what is being pushed. It's more fascist, the union of state institutions with commercial interest and authoritarianism. But socialism leads to communism which is the same outcome for the people as fascism. There is at the same time internal battles for control between commerce and government which makes it look like they are not working together but ... they both need each other and both want the same things.
100% All we need is better and simpler systems to limit their access. It's amazing how those determined young minds can be turned to breaking out of their firewalls! You can do it if you don't mind spending all your spare time monitoring and adjusting routers and their conputers. Mine don't get phones but sit with their mates who do looking at dodgy crap. I think the doom scrolling is worst of all. But I want them to have access to search and all the interesting sites. Although maybe I should give up because if they have a genuinely sensible question they seem to just ask Mum or Dad at dinner rather than lose 1 second of moronic rap or games.
Remember that in China, they try very hard to keep people using their own search engines and internal social media systems.
I can see something like a non-erasable cookie or other token containing something that identifies the kid's age, stored on a device that can and is queried by the search engine and social media sites, or even possibly by the CGNAT endpoints that the mobile devices use, to put additional controls on how searches work, and provide age-appropriate per-site IP block filtering on a device. Make the same controls also feed into the network layer in the phone to ensure that the device prevents the use of IP stack based VPNs.
You would possibly have a problem with browsers and other software which have their own VPN built in, but if you make it so that when in this mode, apps are either vetted before installation, only come from 'safe' app stores or maybe are completely blocked to prevent them even being installed. Stop side-loading as well (by forcing it to use certificate based verification, maybe).
Going one stage further, you could put the user's ID information including birth date into all phones sold in these regions (not just kids), and prevent any phones without this information connecting to the national infrastructure. Make strong biometric authentication (linked to a national ID system maybe) mandatory on the phone. This allows even adult phones to be put under some control, maybe just not so much (and may also allow peoples ID and movement to be tracked more easily by making this token remotely readable using mandatory Bluetooth or NFC).
I'm sure that there could be ways around this, but like many things, it will evolve over time.
The real secret would be to allow users enough content to keep them happy without them even really realizing that they're being restricted. If you make it pervasive across all devices, they won't learn through peer contact what they're missing out on. When you're an authoritative regime, and can make policies such as this law, many things are possible, and you can then just define people who try to get around the controls 'dissidents', and 're-educate' them.
Mobile phones (and IT in general) are very dangerous technologies for people's freedom, while all the time pretending they're facilitating it. We're all frogs, slowly being boiled.
It's coming here too! Make no mistake it will not just be minors that are restricted and not just restricted from salacious content. It will include any critisicm of government or government's narratives. They fully intend a full on China control grid and the only news will be propaganda. Look what's happening and extrapolate. People are already being jailed for hurty words. May take a few years but's on the way.
I do not want to argue whether this is right or wrong. I just want to say something realistic after reading this ideologically biased article.
1. with the development of the Internet, minors have become more and more precocious, but their worldview, outlook on life and values are not mature, which has led to a lot of social problems, including more and more juvenile delinquency as well as premature entry into the society leading to the failure of family education.
2. The underage model for the Internet is not new in recent years, but started as early as ten years ago.
3. The underage mode is not mandatory, but a switch in the software that needs to be turned on and managed by their guardians.
4. in fact, most underage crimes are related to family education, some minors can know their parents' cell phone passwords, payment passwords and even bank passwords, some minors do not have the ability to distinguish when they see some dark side of things on the Internet and thus go to the road of no return, and so on 5. most countries have Internet content censorship mechanism, which is not surprising.
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