Should children be allowed to be exposed to adult content?

Poll - Total Votes: 16

Freedom for all ages to use one feed.

Separate feeds for adult/child ages.

You can only vote on one answer.

Why do we suddenly seem to have a whole bunch of 13 -15 year olds on this site?
I thought they had their own section of SW, and us adults had ours .
Why doesnt admin automatically division users by age? Seems potentially dangerous to me .
What do you think ? Freedom for all, or division of adult and child sections of this site?
I suppose the upside is, paedophillic behaviour is more visible to other users if the site isn't divided.

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TinyViolins · 31-35, M

No way. Not to trivialize children or their intelligence, but there have been clear links between the rise of internet usage among teens and their declining mental health, particularly with depression and anxiety.

It's not fully clear exactly which kinds of content create which kinds of problems, since that would be a highly unethical experiment to conduct, but the results are hard to dispute. The best solution right now would be to moderate the kind of content that they're exposed to in order to see if health outcomes improve, and then we can move on to deciding whether or not it solved the problem.

We definitely can't afford to continue doing business as usual with the way mental health rates have been trending

Nunatak

@TinyViolins mental health is a problem, i agree.
But its cause is MASSIVELY spread across bigger parameters than internet use. Although i agree it is a factor .

I believe in learning the ability to self regulate - but this doesnt seem to be being taught these days .
Children are warned of online predators , yet seem to pay little attention.

Ive even seen now older users complain and justify emotional damage from knowinly self exposing themselves to adults online in their yourh. Who ended up being predators. Which , in honest truth, they were warned NOT to do .

But , ive also seen older users mention how much they were helped by adults online when they were young.

So its a two edged sword .

TinyViolins · 31-35, M

@Nunatak People who are trusting by nature tend to be taken advantage of most often. Children have to be trusting by nature in order to survive in a world where they have no real autonomy. We're setting them up to fail if we don't try to protect them and instead let them fend for themselves.

There are lots of ways we teach children to self-regulate, from time-outs and detention, to the teaching of abstinence, to anti-bullying, anti-drug, or anti-distracted driving campaigns, and even to stranger danger exercises. And many of them end up running into these problems we're trying to prevent anyway because they don't have the experience to really understand the consequences of their actions. Not until it's too late for a few of them.

That said, there are already mental health sites established by professionals that are better at addressing many common problems facing young people. Asking children to gamble their future well-being on the intentions of online strangers is incredibly negligent. Many predators know how to exploit vulnerabilities, which makes them more than capable of outwitting a child that may feel lost and desperate.

I agree that we can't protect our children from everything, but this issue is a no-brainer for me. Anonymity is a criminal's best friend, and websites like these are designed around anonymity

Nunatak

@TinyViolins i see your points, i truly do.
Kids are not as stupid as we think , but they are rebellious.
I fear sometimes they ignore warnings just because they have been told they shouldnt .