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Notes -
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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