Your problem is not that the kids can't be protected with encryption, but rather that you want way too much control over these kids' lives. I know you think you are protecting them, but it is much better for a child's development to simply be told and explained how the world works. Also porn. Anyone who believes that they can hide everything from a child until they are of age and that they will always act in a wise manner after they are of age is naive.
Childen watching gore on liveleak, girls looking at anorexia inspiration and boys getting into extremist ideals are not really good for their development, and these resources don't "simply tell" how the world works. In fact, it's the opposite: they construct a desirable narrative that supplants interacting with the real world, they enclose someone instead of opening them up. It's a parent's job to ward off bad influence from their children, whom are not equipped with dealing with such stimuli. Maybe not even the parent is equipped. It's not a matter of hiding and controlling children, it's about not letting other abusive people raise your children instead of you.
You have misunderstood me. It is up to the parents to explain to the children that there are such things and that one day they might see them by chance. Just as children can come into contact with drugs by chance through friends. It is up to the parents to prepare the children psychologically for these situations and to act wisely in this moment. For example, children could stop watching such videos early instead of continuing to watch them or simply say no to drugs because they are already prepared.
The idea of protecting children from all this through control is naive for two reasons:
1. you can't monitor children 100%. This leads to the fact that I can never prevent all things. Both in reality and on the net.
2. as adults, these children must have already thought about all this in order to act wisely. A child who moves out at 18 and has not yet dealt with it is completely on their own, although the adults would have had time to explain everything to the children.
And one more thing from pedagogy that contradicts what you said: children process only what they understand and is relevant to them. For example, if you explain to a 4-year-old child what rape is, the child will absorb almost nothing of it. For the child, sex and the sexual need is foreign. Thus, they cannot derive much information from the explanation.
I have seen a lot of sick stuff on the net as a teenager. For example, a beheading of a white journalist in the Middle East by Islamists. No one could have prevented me from clicking on the link friends sent me. However, it could have been explained to me that there are such things on the net and how that should be classified. In the end, it was up to me to classify it. And of course, such experiences could have led to anything. For example, racism.
I agree that control is not the solution for this problem, communication is. Still, I think there are things that are not simply facts of life, like having unlimited access to certain things, let's say porn, gore, hate speech, and other abusive material. At the end of the day, I don't claim to know how to solve this issue, certainly not with outlawing or backdooring encryption, but I acknowledge this problem.
Facebook seems to be doing all the heavy lifting on the extremism front. Overweight/underweight problems are just stupid and it takes like 1 hour to explain how to eat properly and then you never have to deal with that again. Videos of people dying at least serve as a counterpoint to movies where nothing ever happens to people doing dangerous stuff.
> Overweight/underweight problems are just stupid and it takes like 1 hour to explain how to eat properly and then you never have to deal with that again.
I do not think you have a firm grasp of how peer pressure works and how powerful it is. That's like saying "we told people that drugs are bad, so clearly nobody will do drugs anymore".
Facebook's and other providers' moderation policies could differ a lot from yours. But these are the platforms where you can usually enable a form of parental control at least. Videos of people dying, like in an accident or war, might be at least real, but potentially still very damaging because of the lack of narrative. Another issue comes when the video also contains narrative: for example when they distance you from what you just saw, by saying how the people deserved death, were a lesser kind of people, and so on.
Regarding the overweight / underweight problems, do you think that all the over and underweight people, and proper weight people who still battle some eating disorder, just missed a good hour of talking to? I wonder what you'd say to them.
When that 1 hour of food education is pitted against 10s of hours of immersion in an online dysfunctional-eating subculture, what prevails?
Perhaps children need 1 hour, or more, "don't fall in with the wrong internet crowd and let weirdos claim possession of your identity" education. I am not sure what form that would take.
