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I am perhaps the only one that seems to think that children should have access to the Internet. Just like they should have some measure of access to the real world.
Yes they can both be dangerous and harmful. Navigating those harms is a requirement for all adults, and only learning how to navigate them when you turn 18 seems like a recipe for disaster.
The combined "children shouldn't be allowed outside or on the Internet" seems the most draconian. Why not just drop them off in a prison until they turn 18?
I'll register my agreement.
There is a motte for internet access and particularly social media use being dangerous -- kids have gotten groomed and kidnapped that way -- but the danger is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. I don't think I've seen any serious attempt to quantify the risk, which I take as pretty strong evidence it's not the real reason for this age verification push. Having done no research whatsoever, I'll preregister my expectation that it's vastly less likely than getting abused by a relative or school teacher.
The bailey -- that children might encounter psychologically damaging content that poses no physical danger, which can run the gamut from porn to anything non-educational or that doesn't reflect the speaker's politics or morals -- I find much less credible. Such content might be upsetting, but children can learn to handle upsetting information and do actually need to do so at some point. Such content might be more entertaining than school work, but so what? Unschooled children -- children who are not merely home-schooled but not formally educated in any way -- do not have meaningfully worse outcomes, let alone children who do go to school and do get their work done but are allowed to watch random youtube videos occasionally at home. Sexual content... Well, maybe? Sexual development is complicated and hard to model, so I suppose I'm not confident that stumbling across porn at a young age isn't damaging somehow... but it can't be that bad, since I'm sure 80%+ of younger millennials/older gen z had that experience, and for all the much-discussed problems with the modern dating market, sexual dysfunction per se isn't very high on the list. (Adults deciding porn is close enough and giving up on dating, sure, but it's not clear to me that has anything to do with age of first exposure.)
As for the hyper-stimulus of content algorithmically selected to be maximally addicting... I want to ask whether these people have actually used these apps. The algorithms are and have always been pretty shit. It's bizarre to go from reading complaints about how Netflix won't recommend anything good to panicked screeds about how TikTok is hacking your brain. (To be fair, I've never used TikTok, maybe they have figured out how to hack your brain.) I mean, I personally find themotte.org's 'algorithm' (ordering posts by when they were posted) more engaging than most other forms of social media.
I do think there's a sane middle-ground here: Make sure your child attends to their responsibilities and spends some time outside and with friends, and make sure to explain to them they shouldn't share personal details with strangers, and let them know they can always come to you if they encounter something bad online. But far beyond that (and some people do go far beyond that), and it just seems like another moral panic similar in kind to violent videogames or D&D or rock music.
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Because we can't afford to pay for full-time public schools.
On the one hand you've got the parents who think "children shouldn't be allowed outside or on the Internet". On the other, there's the ones who think both the world and the Internet should be childproofed. No wonder TFR is dropping.
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I will note that social media algorithms could conceivably be bad for developing brains the same way drugs tend to be.
Of course, "social participation de-facto relies on you taking drugs" is a horror for adults too, and so I'm leaning heavily toward the "destroy Web 2.5" and/or "heavily-regulate algorithmic social media so that it stops being addictive".
It’s not a horror to be expected to take drugs as part of social participation. What did you think alcohol was?
A normalized horror.
#RepealThe21st
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Alcohol isn't required for social participation. I very rarely drink and I've never once had someone insist that I have to drink. Someone who makes a point of not drinking and gets sanctimonious will find himself excluded, but nobody cares about a person who just happens to not drink.
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