The Byron Review has recommended stricter measures to limit the influence that violent video games, films, and social networking sites have on young people. But are such controls necessary, and can they ever be effective?

The thing is, adults continually view video games as toys, when they are now considered to be a valid form of media in their own right with an adult audience- links here give the average age of gamers as 28 and 29 respectively. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/15/video_games_and_aggression http://www.out-law.com/page-5810 Games have carried age classification for 15 years, films for far longer than that. Unfortunately what happens is that shops (correctly) refuse to sell 18-rated games to children, who then nag their parents into picking it up anyway because it's only a game. The government can't simply stand in for everyone's parents with a constant barrage of legislation in place of common sense. As for social networking sites, this is all stuff that children have access to at home, or at least around their friend's houses or at school. Navigating difficult situations is part of growing up, and as adults surely we'd be better off letting young people decide what they think is acceptable online behaviour? It's still a relatively new phenomenon, and will build up it's own etiquette style over time in the same way that youtube frantically pulls offensive material, yet resists having to approve stuff as against the creative spirit of t'interweb. (possibly also to give them a leg to stand on in court as well, but hey ho!)

Apologies for lack of paragraph breaks, the site doesn't appear to like my mac very much...

I agree that there's a role for parents. But what do young people themselves think? Will they actually listen to what adults say anyway?

Well, young people aren't a homogenous mass, and adults just aren't that great at being responsible all the time anyway. See your mate's facebook pages! We should be careful of killing the fun and spontaniety of these things. Surely it's enough for the bigger sites to have an 'email moderator' button on them, and remind people to use it when they find stuff offensive.