If so, how?

Praying more? Fasting?

I saw someone recommend this techno lent idea a few years ago that I really liked: **give up Color for lent. **

You might not be able to completely give up screens or the Internet. You might not even be able to give up social media. But one thing you can probably give up is Color. All mainstream OSes have a "grayscale" option. It's typically for color blind people and found under your OS's accessibility settings. But if you turn it on, you'll find that your brain gets a far lower dopamine hit when looking at a grayscale screen than a full bright color screen. Nevertheless, the features you actually need will still mostly work just fine.

Well made videos for youth discussing online and other personal safety.

I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord's new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.

They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.

They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn't start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.

The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.

How how is Discord's policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.

So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That's one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn't want any kind of protections at all.

#Christianity #rituals