FEW PARENTS, confronted with grumpy toddlers or bored ten-year-olds, are strong-minded enough to resist the peace that comes from sticking their darlings in front of a tablet or a smartphone. But the relief is tinged with guilt. One minute toddlers can be watching Peppa Pig, and the next learning that the Moon landings were faked or that Earth is flat.
The problem is not new. Rules have long governed children’s exposure to older forms of media—think of watersheds in television schedules, age-ratings in cinemas or restrictions on buying pornography. Yet for many years, both governments and tech firms have treated the web as a domain where those rules are so laxly enforced that they hardly apply at all. The industry hides behind the skimpiest of figleaves.
Broadly, this is welcome. Many liberals, like this newspaper, think that censorship laws are easily abused, and that too much mollycoddling is not just unnecessary but harmful. Yet it is hard to defend the idea that there should be one set of rules for old media and another—or none—for newer kinds. The argument that it is up to parents to control their children’s media consumption has much to recommend it.
The risk is that new rules cost a fortune to enforce and become obsolete as technology marches on. Hence governments should apply two principles. First, online rules should reflect the broad standards that are already in place for offline media. Obviously, these standards need to be adapted to suit a new generation of technology in which interaction is enabled, individual preferences can be catered for and viewing is on demand. But they apply to the same children and are a good foundation.
The second principle is that governments should not get bogged down trying to specify precisely how platforms should solve problems—setting out, for example, the details of what it means to identify when a child is using a site. That is a task for the tech firms, which can innovate and which understand their platforms better than anyone. Instead, regulators should demand results, and impose large sanctions for firms that fall short.
Protecting children has always been an excuse for censoring adults.