Protecting children online

Luzian is 11 years old and like all children his age he has grown up with the internet and loves it. But surfing online is not without its risks. All the content is not suitable for minors, Luzian has found out. When I see violent things on the internet, I talk to my parents about it sometimes, but it depends. If it’s things I liked but that are still violent, I won’t say too much, because I want to continue watching them. No password, no internet. To protect their son, Luzian’s parents have restricted access to the internet at home and installed a parental filter on web searches. Having adopted specific measures for combating child pornography, the EP is now studying this question: How can we protect minors in the digital world? There needs to be a greater possibility of integrating filters that only allow access to adults, those of legal age. We hope that culture will win on the content side and that there’ll be fewer things that are not suitable for minors. But couldn’t tighter control of online content lead to abuses? Are we going too far? One can understand that a number of people consider censoring dangerous sites to be the best tool. I think there are other solutions and that if content must be removed because it’s dangerous, it’s up to the courts to do so. In Europe, young people spend on average 88 minutes per day in front of the internet. It’s a figure that is steadily increasing.

EuroparlTV video ID: 7094c5c9-0f54-44ab-8a49-a0d1010d21a1