手机软件对孩子们的潜在伤害

Months ago, my daughter -- age 9 at the time -- came to my wife and me with a plea to download the app Musical.ly, which was all the rage among her classmates.

几个月前，我的女儿-当时只有9岁-来到我和我妻子面前，请求下载在她同学中风靡一时的应用程序·Musical.ly。

It basically enables you to share your own music videos to popular songs. She reassured me that we could limit the people she shared with to "just friends." And as she described it, the app sounded creative and fun to her, and safe to me.

它基本上可以让你分享自己的音乐视频到流行歌曲。她向我保证，我们可以将与她分享的人限制为“仅仅是朋友”。正如她所描述的，这款应用程序听起来很有创意，而且很有趣，对我来说很安全。

Besides, she added, "everyone else has it."

此外，她补充说，“其他人都有。”

But I wasn't buying it, literally. I told her I'd have to research the app and started with the website Common Sense Media. I've been relying on the nonprofit's reviews of screen media since we started showing our daughter movies at the age of 4. (Full disclosure: I now serve on the advisory board of Common Sense News, and CNN occasionally runs Common Sense content.)

但我并不买账。我告诉她，我必须研究一下这款应用程序，并从常识媒体网站着手。自从我们4岁开始给女儿看电影以来，我就一直依赖非营利组织对银幕媒体的评论。(全面披露:我现在是常识新闻咨询委员会的成员，CNN偶尔也会提供常识内容。)

The site gave Musical.ly an age rating of "16+," pointing out that it is essentially a social network, and "some families have encountered explicit sexual material despite the available settings and controls in the app."

该网站给Musical.ly的年龄评级为“16+”，指出它本质上是一个社交网络，“尽管应用中有可用的设置和控件，但一些家庭还是遇到了露骨的性材料”。

Normally, that would be enough for me say no to my daughter, but she had already argued that the site was wrong if it said 9 years old was too young. She'd been on Musical.ly on her friends' phones and seen nothing that made her uncomfortable. I trust her judgment, so I sought out more information. I read other internet commentary, signed up for the app myself and stayed up after she went to bed to try it out.

正常情况下，我对女儿说“不”就足够了，但她已经争辩说，如果网站说9岁的孩子太小，那就是错误的。她在她朋友的手机上使用Musical.ly，没有看到任何让她不舒服的东西。我相信她的判断，所以我寻找了更多的信息。我阅读了其他的网络评论，自己注册了这款应用程序，在她睡觉后一直熬夜试用。

Within minutes, I saw sexual images in profiles, in homemade videos and in comments that all made the site feel a lot more mature than my daughter.

几分钟内，我在个人资料，自制视频和评论中看到了性图片，所有这些都使网站比我女儿成熟得多。

In fairness to Musical.ly, the app's terms and conditions say as much. Signup requires users to be age 13 and older, but user age is self-reported and parents can do nothing.

为了对Musical.ly公平起见，该应用程序的条款和条件也说明了这一点。注册要求用户年龄在13岁及以上，但用户年龄是自我报告的，父母帮不上什么忙。

I reached out to Musical.ly to ask them what measures they are taking to address the inappropriate content I saw, and they pointed me to their parent Q&A page, which explains that choosing a private account means the only people who can message you are those from whom you accept a follow request. And as for explicit profile pictures in those follow requests, or in the public videos or in the comments to videos, the parents page explains that they can all be reported for moderation and possible removal.

我联系了Musical.ly，询问他们正在采取什么措施来处理我看到的不合适的内容，他们向我指出了他们的家长问答页面，该页面解释说，选择私人账户意味着只有那些你接受关注请求的人才能给你发信息。家长页面解释说，那些关注请求、公开视频或视频评论中的露骨个人资料照片，他们都可以被报告为适度并可能被删除。