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Researchers Find That Filters Don't Prevent Porn (techcrunch.com)
According to a new paper from Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski, internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn. Basically, the filters are expensive and they don't work. "Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily 'underblock' due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations -- filtering can lead to 'overblocking', where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information." TechCrunch reports: The researchers "found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content." The study's most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households "would need to use Internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content" and even then a filter "showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects." The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed, subjects still saw approximately the same amount of porn.
Install an adblocker.
You can't. It was super easy to get porn before the internet. If the internet was around when I was a kid there would have been nothing my parents could have done to prevent me getting access to porn.
Best thing to do is explain to your kids what's out there so that they're not that curious about it. You don't have to get into heavy details, just as much as they can understand. If they don't learn it from you it'll be from friends at school or TV and both are probably worse then what you'll tell them.
It is up to you to explain how easy it is today to find yourself on some of those shady sites. Playing "Free" games or watching "free" movies on shady sites. Even watching an innocent YouTube videos can end up in crazy land that shocks us adults.
Honestly, that's all I think we as parents can do. I pull this from my experience not with my own parents but with my friends mother who was extremely blunt and was willing to explain to me anything I wanted to know. My parents, as much as I love them, were uncomfortable talking about things like that.