iPhone's New Parental Controls Block Sex Ed, Allow Violence and Racism (vice.com)

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: The parental controls in the iPhone's new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter. The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for "explicit" content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to "limit adult websites." As tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform.

The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.

Comments

And this is why we don't need to fear "AI"

[BeaverCleaver]

Simple things like this are the reason I don't fear AI taking over any time soon. After 25+ years of trying, internet filters still don't work. After 20 years of trying, predictive text is no better than it was in 1999.

Re:Steve Jobs Was a Prude - And Apple Still Is

[Etcetera]

This has always puzzled me. Violence and murder, on film or in TV programming, is generally allowed, with a "PG" or "R" rating or equivalent. Sex is rated "X" or "XXX" depending on the explicitness. And yet, in real life, most people (outside Chicago, at least) will probably never witness a murder or experience a shooting.

Are you an American? If so, the answer should be obvious. The US culturally has a certain outlook on the profane and the sacred, steming partially from its Puritan roots and partly from the ethics of the time as the US spread west. Explicit sexuality is protected more, while the more violent aspects are seen as... well, just part of life.

It's pretty much the exact opposite of the European/Old World view on these matters, where sex is presented far more openly in real life, but guns are harder to come by. And in entertainment, sex and nudity gets a pass while violence will lead to more restrictive movie and video game ratings (or be censored out).

When people (like the GP, honestly) complain about US views on sex and violence, they're usually just whining about it without addressing the underlying principle: the US is simply different about these things. It's a different cultural choice. It doesn't mean you're oppressed, and it doesn't mean that parental-management tools (such as this) are wrong for having different default choices than you'd prefer.