I grew up during the 90s/2000s and I used the internet, first social media platforms, messengers, etc. – a lot. My parents had no idea of computers, how to use them, how to use the internet, what is out there etc. Yet I am convinced that the way my parents dealt with it is still the gold standard.
Their parenting equipped me well to deal with weird, dangerous or otherwise harmful things I encountered. They were the kind of parents who would let us play in the woods till 9 in the evening, no questions asked if there were scratched knees or dirty cloths. If there was something they thought might be problematic, they talked to us in a way that left the ultimate decision how to deal with a situation with us, displaying a high level of trust into our ability to make good decisions ourselves (and sometimes letting us make bad ones just to talk about it after the fact).
Turns out if you want your kid to be able to deal with unexpected situations you need them to deal with situations, period. And the opposite of that is what I even back then saw with many of my friends parents: trying to shield their kid from every encountering (and mastering!) even the tiniest of dangers themselves, alone. You think you tell your kid about the dangers of the world, so they know, but the actual lesson you teach is that only their parent knows what is and isn't dangerous and that they themselves can't be trusted to judge it. That is a bad lesson.
Don't get me wrong, we did stupid stuff, like jumping of bridges into rivers and so on. But we were very careful about how we did it, diving beforehand, etc. The real stupid stuff in my youth was all done by other kids that had never learned to judge risks themselves and who in one brazen attempt of rebellion bit off more than they could chew in one go. That landed them in the hospital. My brother and I were the only kids in our friends circle who made it to 18 without having broken a single bone in our bodies, despite being regular skateboarders, snowboarders, climbers, cliff jumpers and all other kinds of borderline insane past-times, some of which don't even have a name.
One aspect: Since my parents had no idea what was on the internet and how to protect against specific dangers lurking within it an educational method that didn't have to rely on them knowing and enumerating every danger in the world proved to be a really smart choice in hindsight. Since the landscapes of social media especially for kids and young teenagers is shifting constantly at a high pace, any parenting ideas would need to keep track of all this as well. I can't even imagine how that would work.
The alternative is to ban everything. But how do they build a healthy immune system if they are never even exposed to the mild dangers first?
I think the best thing most parents could do is ban the Internet from their own life. I grew up in the 80s and I have watched the evolution of parenting since then. The world is measurably safer today than it was then. Stranger danger is vanishingly rare. What the hell happened? Fear happened. Things like 24 hour cable news accelerated it, and the Internet turbocharged it. We cannot untangle the horrors we are exposed to on the Internet with what real life dangers face us, we conflate them to the detriment of our children.
Maybe our children will figure it out as they become parents. I hope so.
Stranger danger was always rare. It was a media hype-cycle. Child abductions have always predominantly been by family or other close persons.
When the dangers consist of invisible targeted manipulation of thought processes it's a whole different category of risks that kids (and most adults) are not equipped to handle. The effects are playing out around the world as we speak.
I don't know that universal tracking is the answer. I also don't think unrestricted access to children by manipulative predators (companies in this case) is the right answer. But then, I don't think they should have unrestricted access to adults either.
This is the only insightful comment in this entire thread but it will be ignored because people love a good moral panic.
Millennials having kids has turned them into their boomer parents, bringing out the pitchfork for whatever braindead hysteria was featured in CAPITAL LETTERS on the 6 oclock news that day.
The kids are going to be fine. None of the moral panics of previous generations are even talked about anymore, because it's all irrational kneejerk reactions to change ("this new music is different, it's destroying our kids!"). Social media doesn't even exist anymore, its just short form cable TV.
The adults on the other hand...that's the actual group we need to be worried about. They don't adapt like kids do.
The boomers mismanaged the entire developed world into a giant debt spiral and are collapsing every social welfare system their parents generation created.
The real question is: What institutions and assets the boomers created (like the internet) will the the millennials ruin with their poor governance?