"We should ban kids from the Internet until they turn 18"
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"We should ban kids from the Internet until they turn 18"
I had a hard enough time finding people like me even with the Internet. Finding anyone locally who was anything like me was impossible.
The idea that people want to actively cut people away from their support networks, to isolate them from others, and banish the youth to a primitive 20th century lifestyle? That's fucking bullshit.
What next, do you also propose that kids only be allowed to speak to their parents, no one else?
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Passengerreplied to Hadley T. Canine (fox) last edited by
Elder millenial here. My cohort mostly started getting online at between 15 and 18, and even then it was usually on a shared family computer in a shared room with no privacy.
Your parents could totally control what sort of world you thought you lived in. Did gay people exist? Did women have libidos? Was there such a thing as a moral atheist or a non-criminal Black person or a bad cop? Your parents might decide to simply not have you learn about these things.
A lot of us didn't survive, one way or the other.
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When I see modern theocrats and social conservatives saying "we lost our kids" or "we must protect our kids" this is what I think they're actually saying.
"We lost our kids" means "we lost total control over our kids, and now they can discover for themselves who they are."
"We must protect our kids" means "we must isolate our kids from learning about the world in ways we don't like."
My generation broke free of that control. I don't want to see it reestablished over your generation.
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A trans friend from a conservative family once said that his parents would have preferred to see him die than see him be happy and male: the former can live forever in their hearts as the girl they wish he was, while the latter they have to see every day as the confident young man he became.
Information control kills a lot of people. It happened to my generation. I think for a lot of conservative people this isn't even a bad thing: a child dying is heartbreaking but a child escaping and being a happy gay adult is, to them, worse.
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@hadley I feel like the biggest threat to kids safety and well being is their parents, so I really hate that virtually all of these online child safety bills are just making kids more vulnerable to that. If we want to protect kids, we should educate them about grooming, make sure online spaces have decent moderation, and make sure there are good support systems in place that are easy to access.
