The number of underage Internet users has exceeded 190 million, and “Internet protection” has become the focus——
Provide “big protection” for “small users” (“Rong” view of China)
Although you are young, your problems are not small
“I just uninstalled the software, and my child secretly installed it again! What should I do?” Wang Lihua, a resident of a community group in Xiamen City, Fujian Province, sent a message asking for help. These days, the first thing children do when they get home from school is to watch short videos, which not only delays their sleep, but also plummets in academic performance.
What makes Wang Lihua even more troublesome is that the short videos pushed by the platform are not suitable for primary school students to watch. After the mobile phone was confiscated, the child kept crying and had no intention of studying. She began to worry that her children would fall into “short video addiction”.
There are not many children like this. A survey of primary and secondary school students across the country conducted by the National Mental Health Assessment and Development Center of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that 33.4% of teenagers agreed with “I can’t stand not having a mobile phone.”
Being addicted to the Internet not only affects learning. It may seem like you are “swiping”, occasionally “taking a look”, and casually “taking photos” in your spare time, but there may be multiple risks involved. In order to make huge profits, some application software uses short videos, game equipment, emoticons, etc. Spread superstitious violence, pornographic and vulgar information to minors.
Some time ago, Wang Peng, a Beijing citizen, discovered that his son, who is in middle school, was browsing an online forum. There were several links on the screen that required registration and payment to log in. Out of concern, he paid a 60-yuan “membership fee” and found that the videos contained vulgar videos.
This bad information not only affects the physical and mental health of minors, but also leads them astray: a 10-year-old primary school student rewarded an online anchor and spent his mother 170,000 yuan; a 15-year-old boy was addicted to online gambling and stole 27,000 yuan from his parents; 14 A 20-year-old boy jumped off a building after being scolded for playing a game. He was left with a lifelong disability and still struggled to overcome his Internet addiction… These shocking cases have frequently aroused heated discussions in society.
Lin Jie, director of the Ninth Procuratorate of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, provided a set of data: From January 2020 to September this year, the procuratorate prosecuted 11,600 adults for allegedly using telecommunications networks to infringe on minors.
There are still loopholes in “anti-addiction”
In recent years, with the vigorous promotion of relevant national departments, various short video and game platforms have launched “youth mode” or “anti-addiction system”.
The reporter opened a short video platform and found that in the “Settings” menu, the “Youth Mode” can be turned on. The maximum usage time per day is 40 minutes, and operations such as tips, recharges, and cash withdrawals cannot be performed. Users need to enter a password to activate and deactivate youth mode.
Many parents said that the anti-addiction system has a certain effect and that their children’s time online has indeed been reduced. But for some unruly “naughty kids”, it is still difficult to guard against it.
“It is difficult to completely eliminate children’s dependence on the Internet with just one system setting.” Liu Yang, a citizen of Haidian District, Beijing, said, “Entering and exiting youth mode only requires a string of 4-digit passwords, and children can disable it with a sneak peek. It’s too It’s easy. Some platforms can be used without registration. Children can easily bypass restrictions by deleting the app and re-downloading it. Sometimes they will ask their grandparents for help and open a new account.”
The reporter found that some large online platforms have established active triggering mechanisms for anti-addiction systems – which can screen out underage users through geographical location determination, user behavior analysis and other technical means, and then automatically switch to youth mode. However, most platforms are still in Manually enabling the status cannot effectively identify whether the user is “underage”. Some applications even use the guise of bypassing the “Youth Mode” to induce minors to recharge, which reduces the protective effect of the “Youth Mode”.
In addition to the vulnerabilities of the network platform itself, the lack of Internet literacy on the part of some guardians is also one of the reasons why minors bypass the “anti-addiction” policy.
“Although we use technologies such as face recognition to help identify minor users who pretend to use adult identity information, it has become one of the biggest difficulties for adults to help minors bypass anti-addiction supervision.” Head of Tencent’s “Growth Guard” Zheng Zhong provided a set of data to reporters: among the consumer complaints she received from minors, 98% of the real-name information belonged to adults, and more than 70% of the accounts had triggered face recognition and passed verification, which shows that there are adults People help children bypass anti-addiction measures. At the same time, the black industry chain of fraudulently using and selling platform accounts still exists.
A report released by the China Rural Governance Research Center of Wuhan University also shows that among the survey samples, 90% of left-behind children in rural areas use exclusive mobile phones or mobile phones of their elders for a long time.
“The lack of Internet literacy among parents or other guardians will directly affect the effectiveness of managing their children’s Internet access, which will lead to simple and crude behaviors in educating children to use the Internet,” said Wang Zhenhui, a professor at China University of Political Science and Law.
Let the “protection net” work effectively
How to deal with these difficulties? Recently, the promulgation of the “Regulations on the Internet Protection of Minors” (hereinafter referred to as the “Regulations”) has gradually made the solution path clear. As China’s first comprehensive legislation on the protection of minors online, the Regulations will provide strong legal protection for the protection of minors online.
The Regulations make specific provisions on issues of social concern. For example, in response to the issue of irrational online consumption by minors, it is clearly stated that network service providers should reasonably limit the single consumption amount and single-day cumulative consumption amount of minors of different ages, etc. This means that network services need to establish valid user identities. Certification and age grading systems to implement differentiated service strategies. Another example is that it clearly stipulates that schools and guardians should strengthen the prevention and intervention of minors’ addiction to the Internet, requires online product and service providers to establish and improve anti-addiction systems, and refines the regulations on the real-name system for online games.
The increasingly complete institutional system has set up a “protective net” for minors. How to maximize the effectiveness of this protective net?
“On the one hand, Internet platforms should exercise self-discipline, proactively strengthen anti-addiction mechanisms, and strictly crack down on content and behavior that infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of minors.” Wang Zhenhui said, “On the other hand, Internet platforms should also give full play to the digital control of minors. The empowering role of growth allows digital technology to assist the healthy development of minors.”
Zheng Zhong said that “to establish and improve the anti-addiction system”, we should further leverage technology. Internet platforms and other platforms can use identity recognition, big data analysis, etc. to further consolidate the help of technical means in preventing addiction.
In addition to the technical aspect, Zheng Zhong believes that “combination of blockade and dredging” is the direction that needs to be worked towards in the future online protection of minors. “At present, the Internet industry as a whole is still focused on limiting the usage time and consumption amount of minors, and its positive guidance measures are relatively limited. We should start from the aspects of Internet literacy education and offline science popularization resources to enrich the knowledge of minors. After-school life, improve the Internet literacy of guardians, and provide truly effective positive guidance for the healthy growth of minors.”
“The online protection of minors cannot rely solely on any one of the government, enterprises, families, and schools.” Tong Lihua, director of the Beijing Juvenile Legal Aid and Research Center, said that only by cooperating with multiple parties and working together for a long time can we create a clean atmosphere. A good network environment. (Reporter Lu Zehua)
【Error correction】
[Editor in charge: Qiu Lifang]
2023-11-12 23:48:31
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