The Internet was never meant to be exposed to children. No one would let their child go to an effectively unmoderated random place to converse with anonymous strangers that are knowingly grooming children.<p>Country wide ban on Internet access to minors is necessary to significantly mitigate the negative impact the internet is causing youth today, and the destruction of legitimate adult spaces on the net.<p>The solution is simple - any user interfaceable computing device expected to be sold to a minor must be child locked by default. This lock identifies the device as a minor, blocking most ads, "social media" apps, in app purchases, other maliciously sold apps, and filters the available domains in browser to a simple whitelist.<p>Remove any kind of parental "monitoring" and control nonsense that are so often abused. Don't make it necessary in the first place! It's only a scapegoat so they don't have to do the right thing.<p>The whitelist is simple, buy it off of one of a dozen existing commercial solutions.<p>Unlocking a phone is also simple and non invasive by showing ID during purchase. Same way you have to do any other kind of business with malicious business practices.
Life in prison? What do we lose by giving these people lethal injections? They would die relatively painlessly and nothing of value would be lost. Taxpayer money wouldn’t have to support them. Unless we’re studying their brains or something, I say get ‘em out of here. Not every criminal serving life deserves the death penalty, but these guys sure do.
Considering there are now articles about them online, I doubt their little "enterprise" will remain active for much longer. If they are not stupid, they will cease everything before Feds knock at their door.
I am genuinely curious what a run-of-the-mill SWE or data scientist can do to help fight this (and human trafficking, etc.). Are there any volunteering opportunities?
There is an interesting question here why major platforms have such a hard time stopping violent groups of people from joining together and committing violent acts. Our current, corporately-decided approach to online moderation is clearly not up to the task. It does make you wonder if government intervention would be more effective.