Here are mine:
1. Funding to develop and deploy CS curriculum for K-12, learn about passwords, online safety etc.
2. A program to help schools set up their own social media with student-run moderation. (Student councils set the rules)
3. Funding to monitor, track down and investigate people who target young people online.
4. Update child labor laws to better cover "family channels"
5. Investigate the issue of online "influencers" and grooming. I don't know the best way to address this one.

@futurebird I don’t buy the safety thing, though. That’s what the office phone has always been for, every individual kid doesn’t need to keep their finger on the pulse of the world

Here are mine:
1. Funding to develop and deploy CS curriculum for K-12, learn about passwords, online safety etc.
2. A program to help schools set up their own social media with student-run moderation. (Student councils set the rules)
3. Funding to monitor, track down and investigate people who target young people online.
4. Update child labor laws to better cover "family channels"
5. Investigate the issue of online "influencers" and grooming. I don't know the best way to address this one.

@futurebird

Sounds sensible.

My first suggestion was some unified Infrastructure so sites can apply for a child-safe certificate. Matching filter-plugins for common browsers and search engines.

But this aleady seems to exist (KinderServer, Jusprog).

A wider, more international whitelist might still make sense.

@futurebird For point 2, I remember that my high school actually tried that at one point, it was basically a "private facebook instance" (this being back when facebook wasn't nearly as visibly awful as it is today). As pretty much everyone but the administration could foresee, nobody used it outside of the classes that occasionally did assignments through it...

@becomethewaifu @futurebird Yeah, I think the idea of social media that's obviously monitored by a school authority and connected to your school identity is pretty much a non-starter.

Bad in the same way I kept yelling at people during the grat Mastodon Migration that NO you you should not be telling employees (esp journalists!) to get their employers to setup instances and use those.

@futurebird one of the few things KY got right is formally banning phones in schools. Doesn’t change their online behavior *outside* of schools, but it does force them to have a period of no screen time and to have to cope with that.

Alternative pitch that actually addresses online content: begin formally controlling addictive design in social media and gaming. Any other addictive thing (gambling, substances) is legally controlled, but not digital concepts. Seems like a temporary loophole.

@futurebird Provide the tools to allow users or their parents to control access for particular devices. We have had the technology to remotely control access to devices for years, every company that provides devices has some security on them to monitor and control usage. If the government ensured that everyone had access to this technology in an easy to use form then it seems that would solve the problem.

I am not sure exactly what this would look like. My preferred solution would be a fork of a free OS like grapheneOS with a government curated allow list of sites, but pushing this problem to the network operators could be an easier solution, and allow the bill payer to choose the access levels of individual devices at the point of purchase.

@guitargabe @futurebird Um, no, that is absolutely wrong, abusive, and anti-child-safety.

@dalias @futurebird firmly disagree on all fronts. Don't throw out "abusive" so lightly, it wildly devalues the term.

@DavyJones @futurebird Fuck no, fuck off with this pro-child-abuse bs,

@guitargabe @futurebird If you want children not to have means to document abuse, not to have means to call for help, etc. that is a pro-abuse position.

@guitargabe

That camp that flooded had a "no phones" policy that played a role in their inability to evacuate. During several school shootings student phones were the *first* to get word to the police.

Phones have also helped students to expose abusive teachers.

But less dramatic: There aren't really pay-phones anymore. If a kid needs to text their parents I think they should be able to without someone hovering over their shoulder.

(As long as I don't see them during my lessons.)

@dalias @futurebird sounds like it's just a moral panic coming from the left rather than the right to me. I don't buy into moral panics, regardless of their origins. I do buy into classrooms where the teacher can manage a little teaching, which is a major problem with literally every middle and high school teacher I know here. If you wanna blow it up into a slippery slope of hypotheticals, go right ahead, but you're not going to convince me that in-class phone use is the solution to abusers.

@guitargabe @futurebird That word you're using. "Moral panic". I don't think it means what you think it means.

@futurebird Sorry but I have to disagree on that one. If you've ever seen a bunch of teenagers with phones you know that allowing that in a summer camp completely changes the entire social dynamics by, erm, taking away much of the "social" part

If you want to retain some way to text then maybe smart watches would be an option. But you have to eliminate access to social media if you want anything else to go on besides a couple of kids complaining every time you interrupt their Tiktok consumption

@futurebird Sorry but I have to disagree on that one. If you've ever seen a bunch of teenagers with phones you know that allowing that in a summer camp completely changes the entire social dynamics by, erm, taking away much of the "social" part

If you want to retain some way to text then maybe smart watches would be an option. But you have to eliminate access to social media if you want anything else to go on besides a couple of kids complaining every time you interrupt their Tiktok consumption

@archroadkill

I'm a teacher and I've taken kids on camping trips. They all had their phones. We told them that this was meant to be an offline time and their phones would need to stay in their bags.

I had to tell two students to put them away and threaten to take the phone of one who did it again. Some of them used their phones in their sleeping bags after lights out, but most didn't. I didn't bother to enforce that one since during the day they forget the phones even existed.

@archroadkill

I do think there can be something freeing and wonderful about "disconnecting" but I don't think one really feels it if someone else is forcing you to do it.

This trip was middle school. The seniors *decided* that they didn't want any phone use on their bus ride as we let them decide what rules they wanted for their class trip. (up to a point)

@dalias @futurebird I do understand the reluctance, there is at most a fine line between legitimate monitoring and control and spyware.

However there is a lot of stuff on the internet that is very very dark. I grew up being flamed and goatse'ed and I can see peoples desire to protect their children from that sort of experience. The only solution I can think of to control the sites children are allowed to access. One way to solve that problem is to not allow unsupervised access to the internet, like I used to not have unsupervised access to TV. That seems to be unacceptable to many, and the only other way I know how to do that is an allowlist, either on the device or on the network. I think I could set this up on a laptop, but most people could not and I do not know how I would do in on a google android phone so making this technology widely available and easy to use seems the obvious answer.