For the past year the topic of a safe and suitable internet for children has been on my mind. Recent laws in various places, combined with parental outcry and action groups have made this matter more pressing. In this period, I connected with others and we have slowly started to work on a solution. The idea boils down to a general scheme that can be adopted by the Nostr ecosystem to provide an interoperable solution. Our group will lead the charge, but we are very open to dialogue and we encourage everyone to think and develop alongside us. The purpose of this article is above all a call to action for anyone interested and with opinions or ideas on the matter, to get involved.
I identify the situation as follows. Essentially it is a matter of risk management through trust. The risks are varied, from unwanted content to unwanted interactions. You want to avoid bad content like gore, you want to avoid bullies or worse and you want content that aligns with the norms and values of the upbringing you have in mind for your child. Given that the internet is a vast space, we need a method that is practical in achieving this. The complicating factor in all of this is that, especially when children get older, your ability as a parent to enact control over what your child is exposed to wanes. Their social circles grow and they become more crafty in escaping whatever blockades you have set up. Becoming more independent is a crucial part of growing up, but the internet itself contains so many harmful elements that the risks quickly become too large.
It is for this reason the resolute urge to ban, block, limit and clamp down on the internet and the hardware and software to access it, for the sake of the children, is at the very least understandable. Unfortunately it is a road that certain jurisdictions are already going down to varying degrees. Banning smartphones, mandatory government ID uploads; they are all exponents of a method that can only move in the direction of being more totalitarian. That is to say, the logic is that the entirety of the internet has to adjust to the risk tolerance we have in relation to children, forcing adults to give up their free and open internet.
The best way to counter this dynamic is to come up with an alternative, simply because the demand for a safe and suitable internet for children won’t go away and is reasonable to begin with. It is a hard problem, not just because it is a matter of moderation, but perhaps more importantly one of incentives. Creating separate locked-down environments for your child is not that hard. The issue is as mentioned before, at a certain point children have motivation to break free from that environment. The older they get, the more these restrictions become more apparent because they realize there is more out there, perhaps via interactions with peers who operate in less or differently restricted environments.
This leads me to the following: 1) No Bubble Boy: any demand for zero-risk is unreasonable. Instead, the demand should be on the ability to control for risk, such that freedoms can increase as they grow older, in line with what a parent deems a reasonable level of responsibility in relation to the child’s level of development. 2) Overly restrictiveness is motivation for escape. Following 1, the system should be flexible in its ability to adapt to the ever-changing social context of a child while growing up, and allow for interactions with others to the degree that moderation overlaps. 3) Internet hygiene. As with anything, what is appropriate depends on time, place and crowd. The system should be able to enforce what occurs where, and under what name. Teaching children how to navigate the internet while protecting them from mistakes. 4) Practicality. Parents should actually be able to operate the system, given that they have more to do in their lives other than judging content, and figuring out complicated settings.
With those four things in mind, I think Nostr specifically is able to provide a solution. To be clear, this is a moonshot project. It will require all aspects and tricks in the Nostr toolbox, from cryptography, clients, relays, web of trust and signing bunkers. With the long list of requirements and low risk tolerance involved some complexity is unavoidable. Yet this will only succeed if it remains simple enough such that developers actually bother to implement these things in an interoperable way. Months of thinking and internal discussion has led to an initial proposal of something that is semi-concrete. Hopefully it is enough of a starting point that open discussion can be had such that it can be optimized and find support in the broader ecosystem.
In the next article I will provide a technical description of the system I have in mind.