8 websites and apps that parents should block from their children

Parents at present worry a lot about the connection of their children and teenage children to the Internet via their phones, personal computers, or tablets, which can no longer be separated from them after it has become a major part of the components of their world that they use for learning, entertainment, communication with others, and so on. However, it is possible to subject them to a kind of supervision, especially for children, and to allocate a certain number of hours per day to use the Internet so that children are not isolated from their world, nor are they preoccupied with these devices from other important activities in their lives such as studying, exercising, and others.

The censorship aims to prevent children and adolescents from accessing any harmful content. The Internet, as we know, is teeming with millions of websites that display content that is not suitable for children and adolescents, or provide a service that is supposed to be for adults only, but does not impose age restrictions, or those restrictions can be easily bypassed if It was found for children to then reach bloody games that depict forms of excessive violence, gambling games, dating sites, etc., and at that time the intervention of parents is obligatory to follow up on the content that their children view and block such sites from accessing their devices to prevent their exposure to content that does not suit them at these early age stages.

Some websites that may seem at first glance very ordinary, may include content that poses a danger to children and adolescents, and even sites and applications intended for children such as the YouTube Kids application have previously been involved in displaying content that is not suitable for children by mistake. or after being hacked. In the following lines, we review 8 of those websites that parents should block from their children and adolescents to avoid their harmful effects on their safety and their psychological, behavioral, and social development.

Tik Tok

The famous short video-sharing site TikTok comes at the top of the list of sites that parents should keep out of the reach of their children, or at least monitor the content they follow on an ongoing basis. Since the beginning of its spread in 2018, the site has enjoyed overwhelming popularity among adolescents and young adults due to its attractive display of sequential visual content with innovative, funny, or entertaining ideas. The site itself may be a kind of addiction for children.

Roblox

Online video game platforms are the most popular websites for children and teens users. The Roblox platform is considered one of the most popular gaming platforms on the Internet at present, and it has a huge audience around the world, as it records about 54 million daily active users around the world.

It is a platform that includes thousands of virtual reality games and informal games, as well as games designed with the users’ efforts, as the Roblox platform allows the users themselves to design their games, and this means that children who use the site may be exposed to watching many games that are not suitable for them, such as games that include excessive violence or Scenes of blood or games that may prompt children to imitate them through dangerous movements or unpopular behaviors. Therefore, if you find your child addicted to playing on this platform, it must be followed closely and ensured that the games that appear to him on the site are not dangerous, and intervene to prevent his access to them promptly.

Fortune 4Chan

Fortune is one of the most inappropriate websites on the Internet for children and teens, despite being specifically targeted at this segment of users. Simply, 4Chan is, in fact, a platform for sharing photos, but differently than any other platform where all users on the site are anonymous, meaning that the user does not have an account associated with a username or password, and therefore all content published on the site cannot be known from its exact source. As a result, some take this position as a way to act more freely than usual, as they do not fear the shame that their actions may cause them if they are known.

4Chan is famous for being the birthplace of the Anonymous group, in addition to that over the past years several scandals have emerged that have occupied various headlines, such as racism, child pornography, leaks of inappropriate celebrity photos, murders, and others. So once you realize the nature of 4Chan and its crowd of anonymous people from different parts of the world, you will also realize how dangerous it is for your child if he encounters it while surfing the Internet.

Omegle

Omegle is especially popular among children and teenagers, and it is a website that specializes in random video chatting. The site is distinguished by its ease of use, as the user does not need to log in before starting use, and it follows the method of random chatting between users connected to the site. And the user can only specify some preferences such as interests or the gender of the person with whom he wants to start a conversation.

There is currently a monitored version of Omegle where the inappropriate content is not allowed, but there is still an unmonitored version of the site, which is likely to be used by children and teenagers who may expose them to risks of exploitation and fraud from other people using the site under anonymous identities.

Ask fm Ask. fm

Ask fm, which is used by millions of people and is very popular around the world, may not seem like a site that raises any concerns about inappropriate content for children. It is a site dedicated to asking questions and getting answers and nothing else, but in fact, the site contains a lot of questions. And misleading answers that include abusive phrases and inappropriate and unsuitable content for children to the extent that misuse of the site has caused in some cases several incidents, as a 15-year-old teenager from England, committed suicide in 2013 due to being bullied on the site, and In the same year, another 14-year-old English girl committed suicide after a user told her to drink bleach.

Some statistics showed that about 26 percent of the site's users had been subjected to cyberbullying, and the British Guardian newspaper revealed that about 10 percent of ask.fm users of children between the ages of 11 and 16 face death or rape threats on the site or are incited to commit suicide at least once a day, which makes it necessary for parents to block this site from their children to protect their safety and security.

Tinder

Opinions may differ on the safety and security of using online dating sites for adults, men, or women, but for children, adolescents, and those under the age of puberty, there is no doubt that the use of such sites carries many risks that may threaten their security and safety.

Tinder is the most famous and popular dating site in the world, and it is a very easy-to-use site that requires only a phone number, a Facebook account, or a Google account to log in. Although the site's policies since 2016 do not allow users under the age of 18 to log in, this hurdle can be easily circumvented by children and teens by changing the date of birth on their Facebook or Google account and replacing it with a fake date of birth.

The idea of dating sites is to provide a space for anonymous people to get to know each other, to facilitate their meeting in reality for marriage or a relationship. The use of these sites in all cases involves great risk since these people are completely unknown to each other and even their data does not carry any degree of reliability in itself.

According to some reports, about 54 percent of adult Internet users have experienced bad attitudes and disrespect on websites, while about 28 percent of them have felt insecure because of these websites. This is for adults, so what about children and adolescents who are more at risk of exploitation and physical abuse from those unknown? So parents should be careful to keep their children away from these types of websites.

Whisper

The Whisper application is available for both Android and iOS smartphones, and it is an application that provides voice chat with other people through group voice chat rooms, as it is very popular in all countries of the world, especially among teenagers. The feature that distinguishes this application is keeping the real identity of users anonymous, which keeps them away from legal accountability, or responsibility for the content that is circulated within those audio rooms, which often includes explicit pornographic content, inappropriate content for children, or meaningful conversations. con man.

Although the application is intended for adults only, as stipulated in the list of terms and conditions on the application, it does not provide any mechanism to ensure that people of age groups under the age of puberty do not access or prevent their registration on the site, so parents should take responsibility for preventing children from accessing the Whisper application and install it on their devices.

Kik application

The Kik Messenger application is available for installation on smartphones and mobile devices that operate on Android or iOS alike, and it is an instant messaging application that allows chatting and communication between unknown people to each other without disclosing their true identities by selecting several common interests and preferences from the program menu, Which is usually related to sexual behavior, which makes the use of the application inappropriate for children and adolescents, and exposes them to the risks of fraud, exploitation, and abuse from people with unknown identities.

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How to prevent children from accessing harmful sites

Parents' access to their children's devices and phones is important to keep track of the websites they view and the applications they use and make sure that they do not pose a threat to their safety, and it is also necessary for parents to install a parental control application or program on their children's devices so that they can intervene when necessary to block the application or harmful website, and prevent their children from accessing harmful content. Here are some recommended parental control programs and apps for both phones and computers.

For computers, websites can be blocked without software by modifying the Hosts file in Windows or using the device usage time feature or Screen Time on a Mac (mac OS) to block websites and restrict harmful content. Incidentally, this feature is also available on all other Apple devices, including It includes iPhone and iPad, just search for it in the settings and activate it from there. Or you can rely on the AppCrypt parental control program, which allows blocking websites and applications that are inappropriate for children, and allows setting time limits that restrict the use time of specific websites and applications.

As for mobile phones, many parental control applications are available for free on the Play Store for Android phones and can be used, or if you are using an iPhone, you can also rely on the “Screen Time” feature, which allows blocking access to certain websites and applications on the phone and keeping them away Out of the reach of children, and through it, the usage time for other websites and applications can be determined so that it does not exceed a certain limit.