do they have a smart phone? or tablet?

Facebook is one site of billions. I don’t know what the answer is, but restricting access to one is not the solution. It was even a different site that was linked to the suicide.

Or a friend with access to the internet?

No they don’t have a smartphone. I consider myself very tech savvy, infact I run a tech business, there is no need for a child to have Any sort of phone in my opinion. All my generation survived without them, my son plays angry birds on my phone that’s as close as he will come.

It is a lack of responsible parenting if children are allowed full freedom on the web. There is a huge amount of software you can obtain to limit a users accessibility.
Many parents are just too complaisant, PC illiterate or plain lazy.

Thats all well and good but it doesnt solve anything David. We all know a lot of parents are not fit to be parents. And a hell of a lot more are not perfect parents. Talk all you want about parental responsibilities but its just that, talk and it does absolutely nothing for the kids who are impacted negatively from this. The vast majority of kids use social media and it would be impossible to hold parents to account for not monitoring their kids usage of it. So the state does have a responsibility to those kids to make sure the environment in which they interact is safe for them. I’m all for better parenting but realistically its avoiding the issue to claim its all thats needed because we are never going to have a world of perfect parents.

I don’t know exactly what age we are classifying a “child” as. But, this is an issue that most commonly affects teenagers. Let me ask you this, who honestly thinks a parent would be able to completely monitor their teenagers Internet usage..? As a teenager myself, I know this is a completely ridiculous idea with phones, iPods, tablets and laptops offering access to the Internet. Parents may believe they are supervising their kids, but they can never do so completely. It will be while parents aren’t looking that bullying or anything else you shouldn’t be doing on the Internet happens. Cyber bullying is an issue that needs monitoring of some sort, but the idea of parents being responsible to monitor their teenagers is simply a ridiculous and unrealistic solution.

Parents have limited control, Take the video of the Drunk girl from Dublin that went viral yesterday, she had to shut down her facebook page because of the abuse she recieved. She is 17 and just like every 17 year old she made a mistake and now she has so many comments on youtube, twitter and other video sharing sites. I imagine she has take these insult very personal as would any young person who is concerned about how they are percieved by yhe peers.

So Kevin, how would censorship on children prevent a drunken mistake which is captured on a phone, from being shared?

It’s the parents responsibility to teach their children about alcohol and how not to abuse it. It would have gone up regardless of whether she had a Facebook page or not. Even then it’s the parents job while their children are still living at home to monitor what content their children and uploading to social media sites. There are far worse things on the internet than bullies.

Kevin, perhaps this public shaming will make her rethink her attitude towards alcohol and “plebs”.
She is getting all this negative feedback because she gave the middle finger to everybody worse off than her. She had it coming.
Besides, shutting off her social networking for a while will solve the problem of web harrasment so now she will only get it in person. Internet regulatory problem solved.
Her parents should have taught her to respect alcohol and others. The failing is theirs and hers and they should be the ones to pay for it. Nobody else.

Is facebook a website for children? Is 4chan? These are all products – just like alcohol is a product not for children. Just like that drunk girl – is anyone trying to track down where a 17 year old got served alcohol all night?

If people want to make money from children then they owe a responsibility to them and should be regulating their own sites. Just like bars and nightclubs should have done a better job of checking ID for that girl.

For any kid, bullying is the problem, not the medium.

Today it’s “save the children” tomorrow it’s Chinese style Internet censorship. Parents should be responsible for their children’s online access and activities.

Sadly I think there’s a chunk of parents who’ve already decided they were absolved of that responsibility – although I would like to stress, not all (there are some fantastic parents out there too!)

Exactly Education is the answer. Parents need to help there, they are the first teachers. Also Parents have a responsibility too.

Exactly.. Those in government seem to have missed a very important point.
Kids have grown up with the Internet as just something that was there since they were young. Hell – some people in their 30s and possibly 40s could say the same.
By contrast, to the guys in government, the Internet is relatively new. Their knowledge of it pales in comparison to the youth of today.
So they try and regulate a bunch of sites, the sites are deemed uncool and boring by kids who move on somewhere else. The government tries regulating those, they move on again – before twitter and Facebook there was Bebo and MySpace, the ie lists.. The Internet moves way faster than our government, and while the kids can keep up, the government and many adults can’t. It’s futile for them to even try legislation, unless they do actually want Chinese style regulation – and even that can be bypassed..

The problem is and always has been bullying. It’s THAT we need to focus on.

Being devils advocate, who decides what’s obvious? Are sites where children are bullied to the point of suicide obvious?

Well apart from you as you have a fake account, one rule for one…..

“And what your proposing is whole family censorship”

No, it isn’t. You’ve misunderstood entirely.

Liam, you place way too much trust in a government with an agenda

the people on spunout.ie do great work in promoting responsible social media use. Check them out

That’s about one of the most sensible ideas I’ve seen so far. Verified accounts that are attached to an actual person or someone responsible for them if they’re a kid.

Giving credit card details to 3rd parties doesn’t sound very good to me. How much would these people charge for this?
Does every one that logs onto the internet have to have credit card details? Are only rich people allowed to have an account? ie those with credit cards?
So now people like yourself are not allowed on the internet as you use fake profiles……

that’s what I’ve always liked about ebay and they brought in verified accounts years ago.
i do think parents have a huge responsibility in educating children, if your going to let them use the internet then at least educate yourself on the dangers etc and then educate your child. if your not willing to do that then don’t grant your child access to something you know nothing about.
you have to also understand that no child is an angel and will gain access to the internet some way or another esp if their friends have access so don’t think that because you haven’t bought them a smart phone or laptop that they won’t be going online. educate them.

Maybe a credit card is not the ideal but if an account is verified and attached to a person then it really doesn’t matter what name we see on the screen.

Any system that would accept a credit card would also accept Visa Debit, Laser, whatever you use at an ATM. That’s a rubbish criticism.

“Does every one that logs onto the internet have to have credit card details?” No, clearly not, but anyone who wanted to have their account verified in such a fashion would have to have access to someone with a card by which such a transaction could be processed.

I thought a nominative fee of 5 euro would be sufficient. 5 Euro to set up verification of the accounts of an entire family isn’t much.

Should be avoiding giving banking details of any sort on line and trusting a 3rd party to validate and keep it secure.
There is little privacy on-line anyway as every email can be tracked to source all your web pages requests are stored by your ISP. so is your location you access the web from. Every web server has the capability to store the ip adress accessing it’s pages. Only a foolish person would give out personal details to any 3rd party as identity theift is not only common but growing.

I really wonder sometimes …

When you make a payment online the transaction itself is generally carried out by a company like Realex that processes untold billions of such transactions safely and securely every time. Every single time. If they didn’t they wouldn’t exist. If they messed up once they’d lose so much credibility and business that they’d fold.

The TRUSTED authority would only receive the funds (less fee) and your address, just like when you buy something on eBay or Amazon. And you’d be giving the TRUSTED authority that address together with an email. All this proves is that this email address is associated with this snail address. You can then associate any user ids with that email address. Your twitter, your facebook, your kids accounts, whatever. The TRUSTED authority would then undertake to inform on request from other sites whether or not a user id is so verified. Simply this site might send a query, is DamoclesBDA on Twitter a verified account? The TRUSTED authority then replies with a simple boolean yes/no. It’s really that simple. They’d probably also be able to log any requests for your perusal.

Obviously if you don’t trust the authority it’s not a TRUSTED authority, is it?

In the event of an account being used to hound someone to death the rozzers can contact the TRUSTED authority. On presentation of the correct legal paperwork they can inform you that they are handing over your name and address and do so.

Such a verification wouldn’t exist to protect the user. It exists to assure other people that the user id has someone behind it who can be called to account.

Now some of you are thinking, “I don’t need this. This is my facebook account.” Unfortunately anyone can set up a convincing looking facebook account in any name in less than 10 minutes. I’d set up one myself to prove my point but I can’t be bothered, really though do it. So you’re currently as pseudonymous as I am. And yes this would allow me to maintain my pseudonym that I’ve been using for about 20 years. But it would also allow some other people to maintain their pseudonyms, some of whom keep them for good reason.