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*the following is not an attempt to single out this forum or indulge in any monday night quarterbacking regarding recent events.

i think we all learned the hard way that no social media site is close-knit enough to screen out online predators. not only that but it doesnt take a particulary clever one to trick young and naive people into compromising their privacy.

it just seems to me that private message systems are the main hub for online predators on all social media...sort of a virtual 'free candy' van...and that it is actually reckless to claim any site 'acceptable for minors' while providing any stranger with the means to contact minors privately.

i know it's not a cure-all and it might be nanny-ish, but i've thought about this a lot following recent events here, and im not sure if it would be so bad if PM's were outright eliminated in environments which accommodate both adults and minors.

relevance to this forum? well i would rather just see the pg-13 pretense officially dropped and pin up the 'no minors' sign. but perhaps that is for another thread.

what are your thoughts? what can social media do to better protect minors from online predators?

Nothing. Short of majority of the parents restricting internet access to their kids until they become 18, there is nothing anyone can do to protect underage people from online predators.

And it's not as if pinning up the "no minors" sign would do any good either. That's the disclaimer which adult sites use to prevent minors from viewing their content, which doesn't actually work at all.

Tell minors to not put images of themselves on the internet that they wouldn't mind potentially seeing on TMZ a couple years later. I stress the internet over online predators specifically to note that there is no such thing as privacy online, as the Fappening shows us. Even if you're giving pictures of yourself to someone you absolutely trust, that doesn't mean those images are safe, at all.

As far as dealing specifically with internet predators, I'm not fond of the idea of removing the private message system because A) it is nanny-ish and that's a bad thing, especially for a system that is objectively very useful to have on a message board, and B) I don't see it really achieving anything. If you can get someone to trust you enough for them to engage you in a private discussion and send you lewd photos, how much easier would it be to chat them up in a public thread and get them to send you their Skype/E-Mail/Gamertag under friendly pretenses, then resume your pedo ways in private?

Originally posted by Tzeentch
Tell minors to not
Yeah, good luck with that.

Blax is pretty dumb yeah.

Implying parents have no influence on their kids.

Dunno. When my parents told me to not stick my dick in the toaster or send pictures of my buttcheeks to Nemebro, I just said "k". Maybe I was just smarter than other minors.

That said, I didn't assert that teaching minors to not be dumb would have a 100% success rate, merely that it's the closest thing to a "solution" that's really viable.

And then you sent a picture of your buttcheeks to the toaster and stuck your dick in NemeBro. Missing the point of your parents' words entirely.

Yeah but I was 18 when I did that.

Originally posted by Epicurus
Nothing. Short of majority of the parents restricting internet access to their kids until they become 18, there is nothing anyone can do to protect underage people from online predators.

And it's not as if pinning up the "no minors" sign would do any good either. That's the disclaimer which adult sites use to prevent minors from viewing their content, which doesn't actually work at all.

I don't agree that there can be nothing done to make it better. A cure-all may be impossible, but there's lots of things that would make it harder for predators to get to their victims, and easier/more accepted for the victims to get help.

I do think Bashar has a point about private messaging on a PG-13 board being an extremely easy and convenient way for predators to get to underage members. I also think there could be ways that, without eradicating the whole PM system, it could be made harder for these people to solicit minors. One idea I had was that perhaps one could only PM people that have accepted that a person can PM them. In that case the person would have to ask publicly, at least once, to talk to a minor. Which could, after a while become suspicious.

Another thing could be to advertise that inappropriate behaviour can and should be reported.

IMO the most obvious solution is to abolish age of consent laws, or maybe make them incredibly high. When everyone's a minor, no one is.

Originally posted by Bardock42
I don't agree that there can be nothing done to make it better. A cure-all may be impossible, but there's lots of things that would make it harder for predators to get to their victims, and easier/more accepted for the victims to get help.

I do think Bashar has a point about private messaging on a PG-13 board being an extremely easy and convenient way for predators to get to underage members. I also think there could be ways that, without eradicating the whole PM system, it could be made harder for these people to solicit minors. One idea I had was that perhaps one could only PM people that have accepted that a person can PM them. In that case the person would have to ask publicly, at least once, to talk to a minor. Which could, after a while become suspicious.

Another thing could be to advertise that inappropriate behaviour can and should be reported.
Actually nothing can be done. Unless you're unwilling to give your kids some extra freedom to do as they please with a personal computer in their hands. That would result in fewer and fewer kids being exposed to the Internet. Either that or put up DNS service which blocks access to certain types of sites(troll boards, adult sites, proxy anonymizers etc).

Abolishing or modifying the PM feature would be a waste of time and effort not to mention an unnecessary hassle.

What exactly does one mean by "inappropriate behavior"? Is it a generic definition which includes everyday trolling that goes on around these forums? Or is it the specific sort of behavior which that weird freak from your thread displayed?

Just make private messages viewable to all. Problem solved.

Originally posted by BackFire
Just make private messages viewable to all. Problem solved. Good solution.

Originally posted by Bardock42
Another thing could be to advertise that inappropriate behaviour can and should be reported.

Yeah, it does seem to be a bit 'lax. There's no real indication or reminders, which isn't an extremely powerful solution but a fair deterrent.

RE:"do nothing/blame the parents"

Originally posted by Alpha Centauri
The parents did much worse than a guy simply thinking with his dick. You should know that as a parent, protection of your kid comes before anything else. You don't point the finger at everyone but yourself.

-AC

Goddamn.