Child-safe internet

儿童安全网络

The kids aren’t alright

孩子们仍需帮助

NEW YORK

Politicians and regulators want to protect children on social media. About time

政客和监管机构希望保护社交媒体上的儿童。从时间方面

IN MARCH AND April Jim Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, badgered members of America’s Congress to regulate the apps children are using online. Their response on Capitol Hill shocked him. “We already regulated Nickelodeon, Disney channel and PBS Kids,” they replied, referring to rules for television enacted in the 1990s and 2000s (with his help). They had apparently missed a series of recent scandals: children exposed to violence and pornography, their data being collected, paedophiles lurking in comments sections of videos depicting youngsters. “We’re changing at warp speed,” Mr Steyer says, “and we’re still talking about ‘Sesame Street’.”

今年3月和4月，儿童权益倡导组织常识媒体(Common Sense Media)的创始人吉姆•斯泰尔(Jim Steyer)曾要求美国国会议员对儿童在网上使用的应用程序进行监管。国会的反应令他震惊。“我们已经对尼克国际儿童频道(Nickelodeon)、迪士尼频道(Disney channel)和PBS儿童频道(PBS Kids)进行了监管，”他们参考这90年代至20世纪初制定的电视媒体相关的法律条文回答道。他们显然错过了最近的一系列丑闻:儿童接触暴力和色情，他们的数据被收集，恋童癖者潜伏在描述青少年的视频评论区。“我们正在以惊人的速度改变，”斯蒂尔表示，“我们仍在谈论《芝麻街》(Sesame Street)——美国的一款面向儿童的具有教育性的节目。”

词汇

Advocacy/主张；拥护；辩护

Badger/纠缠不休；吵着要；烦扰

Enact/制定，颁布

Pornography/色情文学；色情描写

Paedophiles/恋童癖者

Lurk/潜伏；潜藏；埋伏

Not for much longer. Members of Congress are drafting multiple bills to regulate how internet platforms treat children. Britain has proposed child-safety rules, including prohibitions on features designed to keep users hooked. From July it is expected to require porn sites to bar users under 18; MindGeek, which owns many salacious sites, wants to use an age-verification registry in order to comply (and, in doing so, make it easier to charge adult visitors for content). In Delhi politicians are considering rules that could stop the data of anyone under 18 from being collected. The EU bars tech giants from garnering data and targeting ads at children. Last year California adopted similar privacy protections that also forbid tech companies from ignoring users’ actual age. Most of these provisions will be enforced with heavy penalties.

不会太久了。国会议员正在起草多项法案，以规范互联网平台如何对待儿童。英国提出了儿童安全规定，包括禁止使用旨在让用户上瘾的功能。预计从7月起，色情网站将禁止18岁以下的用户进入;拥有许多色情网站的MindGeek，想要使用年龄验证注册表来遵守(这样做，可以更容易地向成人访问者收取内容费用)。在德里，政客们正在考虑制定规则，禁止收集任何未满18岁的人的数据。欧盟禁止科技巨头收集数据和针对儿童的广告。去年，加州也采取了类似的隐私保护措施，禁止科技公司忽视用户的实际年龄。这些规定大部分将以重罚执行。

词汇

Salacious/  好色的；猥亵的；淫荡的

 

In the 1980s and 1990s public officials in America worried about what shows and advertisements children were being exposed to on TV. The Children’s Television Act of 1990 and subsequent regulations limited the number of commercials interrupting children’s shows and required that television stations provide educational programming for children.

在20世纪80年代和90年代，美国的政府官员担心孩子们在电视上看到的节目和广告。1990年的《儿童电视法》及其后的条例限制了打断儿童节目的广告的数量，并要求电视台为儿童提供教育节目。

Compared with that concern, politicians and regulators have treated online video services like YouTube (owned by Google) with insouciance verging on neglect. Today children and teenagers are exposed to much dodgier fare in cyberspace than they were in the 1990s on broadcast TV—at the touch of a fingertip on their (or their parents’) iPad or smartphone. Teens run into white nationalists. Ten-year-olds encounter flat-earthers. Toddlers stumble on violent, scary or pornographic content. In comments attached to YouTube videos featuring children, molesters identify the parts they liked most, with time stamps to alert others with similar inclinations.

与这种担忧相比，政客和监管机构对YouTube(谷歌所有)等在线视频服务漠不关心，近乎忽视。如今，儿童和青少年在网络上比上世纪90年代在广播电视上接触到的要危险得多——只需用指尖触碰他们(或他们父母的)iPad或智能手机。青少年遇到白人民族主义者。十多岁的孩子就会遇到各种顽固分子。蹒跚学步的孩子不经意瞥见暴力、恐怖或色情内容。在YouTube上有关儿童的视频的评论中，性骚扰者指出了他们最喜欢的部分，并附上了时间戳，以提醒其他有类似倾向的人。

词汇

Insouciance/无忧无虑；漫不经心；满不在乎

Verging/边缘

flat-earthers/字面解释为那些坚持“地球是平面的”之说的人，意指“顽固分子”。

Dodgy/狡猾的，逃避的；善于骗人的；

Toddler/学步的小孩

Molester/ 猥亵者；性骚扰者

Inclination/倾向，爱好；斜坡

In 2018 the Pew Research Centre found that 61% of American parents who let their offspring watch YouTube reported that the children come across unsuitable content. Youngsters are also easily manipulated, critics say, by “like” and “share” buttons, which may induce social anxiety and infringe on privacy.

2018年，皮尤研究中心(Pew Research center)发现，61%让子女观看YouTube视频的美国父母称，孩子们有看到不合适内容。批评人士称，年轻人也很容易被“喜欢”和“分享”按钮控制，这可能会引发社交焦虑，侵犯隐私。

词汇

Manipulate/操纵；操作

It would help matters if social-media companies worked out ways to divert children to stripped-down versions of their services without targeted ads and certain features—Instagram without a “like” button, YouTube without autoplay or comments. YouTube has a separate app, YouTube Kids—but most parents have not heard of it. On May 22nd SuperAwesome, a British company that provides software for children’s apps, announced that it had developed a tool, KidSwitch, which can recognise with a high degree of confidence when a child is using an app.

如果社交媒体公司能想出办法，让孩子们转向没有针对性广告和特定功能的精简版服务——instagram没有“喜欢”按钮，YouTube没有自动播放或评论，这将会有所帮助。YouTube有一个单独的应用程序YouTube kids，但大多数家长都没有听说过。5月22日，一家为儿童应用程序提供软件的英国公司SuperAwesome宣布，他们已经开发出一种名为KidSwitch的工具，当孩子在使用应用程序时，它可以以非常高的可信度地识别出。

 

The social-media giants, with their algorithms and rich stores of data, should be able to sniff out at least the very young. So far, most have merely repeated that children under 13 are not supposed to be using them without parental permission. That official posture is meant to shield them from liability for harvesting children’s data without parental consent, which is prohibited under existing law.

社交媒体巨头拥有自己的算法和丰富的数据存储，应该至少能够识别出那些非常年轻的人。到目前为止，大多数人只是反复强调，13岁以下的孩子不应该在没有父母许可的情况下使用这些设备。这一官方立场是为了使他们免于在未经父母同意的情况下收集儿童数据的责任，这是现行法律所禁止的。

The Federal Trade Commission, an American regulator, has received complaints against Facebook (which owns Instagram), YouTube and TikTok, a popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app, alleging that they collected data from children under 13. In February TikTok agreed to pay a fine of $5.7m, said it would take down any videos uploaded by children under 13, and pledged to limit the app’s functions for these young users.

美国监管机构联邦贸易委员会(Federal Trade Commission)已经收到了针对Facebook(拥有Instagram)、YouTube和TikTok（抖音）的投诉，后者是一款颇受欢迎的中国视频分享应用，声称他们收集了13岁以下儿童的数据。今年2月，TikTok同意支付570万美元的罚款，并表示将删除13岁以下儿童上传的任何视频，并承诺限制该应用对这些年轻用户的功能。

Data-privacy rules aside, it has mostly been up to social-media companies to regulate other aspects of their operations themselves. They can restrict content as they please, but have only done so in the glare of scrutiny, after journalists or activists shed light on problems. (In February YouTube largely banned comments on videos featuring children.) Without the threat of severe penalties, the platforms have had little financial incentive to change. MIDiA, a consultancy, estimates that in 2017 children’s channels accounted for 17% of YouTube views, and 15% of revenues, or $2.1bn.

撇开数据隐私规则不谈，社交媒体公司自己监管运营的其他方面基本上是他们的责任。他们可以按其所想地限制内容，但只有在记者或活动人士揭露问题后，他们才会在众目睽睽之下认真审核限制内容。(今年2月，YouTube基本上禁止对儿童视频发表评论。)由于没有受到严厉惩罚的威胁，这些平台几乎没有改变的经济动机。咨询公司MIDiA估计，2017年，儿童频道占YouTube访问量的17%，营收的15%(21亿美元)。

词汇

Scrutiny/详细审查；监视

The threat is now materialising. In June Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts, is expected to introduce a sweeping child-protection bill, the “KIDS Act”. It would ban continuous “autoplay” on video sites and certain social features, set standards for content and restrict advertising. It would, in other words, be the internet era’s equivalent of the Children’s Television Act, which Mr Markey helped pass as a young congressman. As Mr Steyer says: “To a child a screen is a screen is a screen.”

这种威胁（指对于网络媒体，尤其是视频网站的监管监控）现在正在成为现实。6月，马萨诸塞州参议员Ed Markey有望提出一项全面的儿童保护法案——“儿童法案”。它将禁止在视频网站和某些社交功能上持续“自动播放”，为内容设定标准，并限制广告。换句话说，它将成为互联网时代的“儿童电视法案”(Children’s Television Act)，由马基先生这位年起的议员批准通过。正如斯蒂尔所言:“对孩子来说，屏幕就是屏幕。”

词汇

Materialize/物质化，突然出现