March 18th 2020 archive

Imagine wanting to use Discord so badly…

(And this is relevant to this blog, because Discord is frequently used by gamers to text and voice chat.)

…that you come up with some form of fake ID so that you can use it, because your first account got banned when you were reported to Discord administrators for being under the age that you have to be (thirteen years of age or older) to use the chat program, as per COPPA rules. Remember that whole story that I’ve mentioned from time to time? Well, come to find out that the person that I, and one other person, had actually reported to Discord had actually been banned. He had been given fourteen days to prove to Discord that we weren’t lying when we reported him for being twelve years old, and he couldn’t, because… wait for it, he was twelve years old, under the age of thirteen, which you have to be over to legally use Discord because Discord adheres to COPPA. So he gets himself some fake ID, which is going to make reporting him a lot more difficult, and makes himself another account, and comes right back. I’m not even sure if reporting him again is going to be worth it since his birthday is coming up in several months unless he makes an absolute prat out of himself in the chat, because man, y’all, this kid is actually that determined. And I don’t know whether to be impressed, frightened, or both. Were any of us this way when we were pre-teens?

But was the Internet this way when we were this old? No, it wasn’t. Point made. Point absolutely made.

The impression that I get is that this kid’s parents just don’t care what he’s doing online because they seem to… I don’t know, take him at his word that everything he’s doing is okay, no, it’s fine, really. And this makes me want to watch everything that my own kids do online all the more, even though with both of them being autistic, I mean, I do that even more already than I would if both of them were neurotypical, so there’s that…