Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife

After looking through various blogs over internet safety, two definitely struck me. The first being one titled “How to Protect your Children from Internet Dangers” and the second titled “Internet dangers and how to keep your kids for staying safe”.  

Both these articles drown the reader with pathos, basically scaring the parent’s reading the articles to death with the fact that their children are going to be sexually solicited, as well as watch porn, be harassed, threatened, or even learn how to potentially kill themselves all while browsing the web. These articles may be a little over kill, especially with a claim like “the harsh reality is that the Internet is full of criminals who will stop at nothing in their attempts to exploit children in any way they can, and just by doing a simple search on Google, children can end up into inappropriate webspaces that are prime hunting grounds for extremely dangerous child predators”. The internet is full of criminals, really? I’ve been on the internet since I was about eight and have yet to come across a criminal trying to “exploit” me.

There’s also mass amounts of logos added in there through the use of statistics about the dangers of the internet, such as the amount of youth that visit adult websites either on purpose or accident, amount of Facebook users, number of pedophiles on the internet, etc. These only reinforce the fears of the parent’s reading the article that their children are going to get into something extremely inappropriate.

These articles are definitely one sided towards the internet being a horrible place full of horrible people who are only out to get the children and youth of today, and does nothing to praise the great things about the internet. Yes, there are many dangers associated with the internet, but children are being taught at young ages how to deal with these. They may be young, but they aren’t as stupid as their parents may think.