How to Block Access to Facebook and YouTube? Restrict Web Pages

The Internet is growing at an alarming rate and offers endless content, which is very useful for various aspects of daily life. But it also has a dark side, so requires certain restrictions so as not to become a danger for those who navigate there from your home, especially for children.

There are several methods to block access to certain pages or specific content, like parental control, here we will show you each of them.

What are hosts files and where are they located?

Behind what we see, Internet sites are not hosted on the URL that appears in the address bar, but on specific IP addresses. To know which IP corresponds to each domain, the operating systems use the host files. These are a corresponding address book and they are key in navigation.

In Windows, it is in the path: C: WINDOWS system32 drivers etc hosts. In Mac OS you can find them using from Terminal with the path: sudo nano / private / etc / hosts.

What is the procedure to prevent access to a web page from the hosts file?

Editing these files manually, you can block access to certain web pages from that computer, regardless of the browser used.

With Windows

Open notepad as administrator and open the ‘host’ file from there. You should not modify anything that appears inside the file, you will only have to add a false IP address followed by the site you want to block. For example: 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com.

On a mac

You can use Launchpad o Terminal to access the file ‘host’. It will ask you for the password to be able to edit the file, after which you will only have to add the same formula used in Windows, with the difference that you will have to write the domain name without ‘www’ and then with ‘www’.

What extensions can I use to block access to a website?

Another alternative for block web pages in your browser is to install extensions. This will only have an effect on the browser where you install them, keep that in mind. What extensions work and are they reliable? We present them below.

BlockSite

Due to its simplicity of use, it is the most popular of all. You just install it add the url you want to block and voila. It also has word filters and blocking functions for periods of time. If you wish, you can allow access to blocked sites only with a password. It is very simple to use the BlockSite extension in Firefox.

TinyFilter

Although it does not have an interface as complete as that of BlockSite, it does share its effectiveness at the time of restrict access to any website that you configure. It has the same functionalities as the previous option with a more concentrated interface.

Personal BlockList

A curious alternative that allows you to block sites so that stop appearing in your search results in Google. Next to each result, you will have a small option to restrict unwanted sites.

How can I restrict Facebook or YouTube from parenteral controls?

YouTube has YouTube Kids available, which can be configured by parents to display age-appropriate content of your children following a simple and assisted process. They can also block specific channels or users.

Automatic parental controls are more limited on Facebook, being necessary to configure them from ‘Settings and privacy‘individually. The Messenger Kids application is a chat plugin for parental control in this social network.

How can I prevent a web page from appearing in search results?

Although there are several methods, they all involve complex operations that can be avoided by downloading and installing the Personal BlockList extension in your browser for maximum efficiency.

Can I block access to a website from my cell phone?

The best way to do it is installing a filtering app, like the mobile version of BlockSite. You can configure it with the restriction parameters you want and trust its effectiveness, since it works in all the browsers you use on your cell phone.

How to restrict adult content in Chrome?

A built-in feature of Google is SafeSearch, a complex search filter that allows restricting all kinds of explicit content that may appear in search results or while browsing.