Special commentator Liu Chen
According to statistics, in 2022, the number of Internet users under the age of 19 in my country will reach 186 million, accounting for 17.6% of the total number of Internet users in my country. Among them, the mobile phone ownership rate of minors aged 9 and above reached 97.6%. The popularity of mobile devices has enabled minors to access the Internet earlier and more conveniently.
In addition to daily study and socializing, minors mainly use the Internet for entertainment activities, and under the conditions of lacking guidance and establishing their own perfect world outlook and values, minors may engage in online entertainment activities. Negative incidents such as indulging in entertainment, exposure to bad information, etc. Purifying the online environment of minors has become an important task for all online entertainment companies.
Recently, the Game Working Committee of the China Music and Digital Association, the China Game Industry Research Institute and Gamma Data jointly released the “2022 China Game Industry Minor Protection Progress Report”. The report shows:
Over 70% of minors play games for less than 3 hours a week, and the problem of minors’ game addiction has been further solved; the data of minors’ total game time and consumption flow have greatly increased Reduce…
We all know that the protection of minors has always been one of the key points of game companies. Tips, parent supervision platform and other measures to help minors avoid game addiction. At this stage, in addition to the face recognition function with a high threshold, leading game companies have implemented real-name authentication and game age reminders.
However, it has to be admitted that there are still certain loopholes in the anti-addiction system that mainly applies to real-name authentication. For a period of time, many parents have reported that minors can still “crack” the restrictions of the anti-addiction system by renting game accounts and other methods.
Borrowing a rented game account, through a plug-in program, automatically provides the account number and password to the game platform to log in to the game, thereby bypassing the real-name system and realizing account authority control. It is understood that this kind of game account rental and sales transaction has already formed a gray industrial chain, and some game account rental merchants even put up slogans such as “no time limit” and “play for as long as you want to play” to attract minors.
Although on September 8, 2021, relevant persons in charge of the Central Propaganda Department and the State Press and Publication Administration, together with the Central Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and other departments, made important comments on Tencent, Netease and other key online game companies and games. The account rental and sales platform and the game live broadcast platform once held interviews, emphasizing that minors should not be provided with online game account rental and sales trading services in any form, but this phenomenon of “taking advantage of loopholes” has been repeatedly prohibited.
It seems that technical loopholes still require further work on the technical level. Cracking the online game addiction of minors is a systematic project with a long way to go.
However, it is worth noting that with the gradual tightening of the game anti-addiction policy, while the “game addiction” of minors has been controlled to a certain extent, new problems have also emerged one after another: children’s game Play less, but watch more short videos, including a lot of game videos.
The report shows that after the implementation of the new regulations, the entertainment behavior of minors has shifted from games to other activities. According to user research, minors who still have gaming habits tend to Invest time in short videos and online videos.
In order to guard against the excessive addiction of minors, the professional short video platform has a relatively perfect “prevention of minors’ addiction” module. “. This is not the case for some social applications that add short video sections across borders. Because they are embedded in social communication software, the age screening, time limit, and content pool filtering for minor users are crudely designed, which not only constitutes a “supervisory depression” “The “rule depression” also makes children’s short video behavior more subtle and unpredictable.
In 2021, the Haidian District People’s Procuratorate of Beijing filed a civil public interest lawsuit against Tencent, pointing out that the WeChat product “Youth Mode” does not comply with the relevant provisions of the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Minors” and infringes on the legality of minors. In terms of rights and interests, the main shortcoming is the video account.
As a short video platform with a large number of users, it is urgent to make up for the protection of minors. At the same time, the content management level of video accounts should also be improved as soon as possible.