Parental controls designed for children’s games can be confusing. They also don’t take into account how families may — or may not — communicate.

The “protection of children” has been the cited reason for a lot of controversial laws and measures recently. A common response is that parents should use parental controls to manage that on their own instead of relying on the government to do it to everyone. I found this article interesting since it touched on how the existing tools aren’t that good, and addressing that problem might be a better thing to focus on

Authors:

  • Sara M. Grimes | Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and Professor, McGill University

  • Riley McNair | PhD Student in Information Studies, University of Toronto

  • Tower@lemmy.zip
    3·
    12 days ago

    My kid watches a ton of educational content, so I don’t even necessarily want to block all of YouTube. I just want to be able to block individual videos and channels.

      • harmbugler@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        A YouTube whitelist would go a long way, but I think Google don’t want you to do that. The ads are obviously another problem if you can’t block them.

        One option (if you are technical) is to use automation tools to subscribe to a whitelist of channels and pre-cache the videos locally.

        • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
          1·
          11 days ago

          Lol, easier to just get long form media and jellyfin it instead.

          I know some countries, ads on TV are not allowed for kids. Some outlaw certain types of ads, like junk food. We could quite easily regulate them so that it’s more profitable to not show ads and have proper parental controls.

          I’m in Australia which is banning social media for kids and many online we’re berating it as unworkable for things like YouTube. Well, they had plenty of time to get their house in order and chose short term profits instead.