It took Billie Eilish to tell us that pornography on the web is a serious problem for our youngest children. It took the candor of a courageous singer-songwriter to tell that the images she chose to see when she was little, too young, destroyed her life, ruined her idea of sexuality. It took the honesty of a young woman to recognize that the various filters that we parents can apply to the smartphones that we give to their children when they are still 10, 11 or 12 years old, and they are not yet boys, often turn out to be inadequate: with some precautions a digital native manages to get around them and thus finds himself surfing the great sea of the Web where, alongside wonderful and useful things, there are also horrendous things.
In short, but Did it really take Billie Eilish to find out how things stand? It is not about causing alarmism, but neither is it about ostriches. Pornography existed even when I was a kid, but it was, if you can say so, in moderate quantities: a magazine that occasionally passed from hand to hand, a rare VHS cassette to be seen secretly. End. On the Web there is everything and without end (and as we discovered months ago, unfortunately videos that have teenagers as protagonists, or rather, victims, are strong). I mean, if it really took Billie Eilish to open our eyes, let’s not close them again. Possibly it does not exist an effective technological tool that can help parents manage this delicate phase of their children’s growth? A few months ago the proposal was made to move the solution of the problem from platforms to smartphones and computers, providing for the insertion of an age block directly on the device so that the owner always has a content filter suitable for his: it is a wise and feasible proposal. Let’s not drop it. Let’s do it for Billie Eilish, let’s do it for us.
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