Is this what you wanted?
When you decided there was no greater nightmare than… young people existing in public?
Or that they must be banned from anything that “affects their developing brains”?
Such that when someone means to do harm to young people in a place, your conclusion is that young people must be removed from the place, rather than removing those who would do them harm.
So we all must lose online anonymity (as much as we have it anymore with data mining) lest one of those anonymous names be someone “underage”.
Because our society is so brain-rotted from anti-youth bigotry that someone can be taken seriously saying something like “social media is as bad for youth as smoking or alcohol” despite how incredibly fucking stupid that sounds.
We’re being inundated with ads for “Instagram Teen Accounts” about all the ways the social media sites of Mark Zuckerberg, who kisses the asses of the Orange Thing and others who spent a lot of time on Jeffrey Epstein’s island, are pretending they truly care about the well-being of youth by empowering parents to restrict the online activities of their chattel- er, I mean, nearly-adult offspring.
Parental control tools get promoted without a shred of acknowledgement that these things don’t actually know the relationship of the user to the “child” and thus get used all the time by abusive intimate partners. I’ve come to realize this is a feature rather than a bug.
Protecting kids is never the point. It’s a smokescreen, a flimsy excuse. A distraction.
In a country where kids are suffering actual severe trauma while locked up in ICE detention camps, the point is to pretend the real trauma is being suffered by the kids who are learning about it while scrolling through TikTok.
In a country where trans kids are persecuted more and more by the day, when their only escape from a family that doesn’t accept them just might be the affirming friends they find online, even those who fancy themselves supporters of LGBTQ+ youth still champion half-baked attempts of restricting their access to that lifeline, perhaps buying into those affirming friends being groomers.
In a country that recently bombed over a hundred Iranian schoolgirls and has been supplying the weapons resulting in Gaza having the largest cohort of child amputees in our time, we’re so convinced that consuming media that’s not “age appropriate” is so uniquely harmful to those under 18 that mountains must be moved to keep it from happening.
Or maybe the mountain moving is the point.
This does give Discord and others free rein to acquire (and sell) personal details about users they have no good reason to have. You’re forced to comply if you want to continue using your apps. Maybe you’ll grit your teeth and bear it. Maybe you’ll quit altogether, although the more sites and apps and countries implement such social media age checks and bans, the less you’ll be able to opt out. You’ll hate it, but underneath it all, you’ll decide it must be worth it. You made it happen, after all. When you decided that a 15-year-old using a social media site, or even in general just engaging with and taking up space in the wider society, was the worst thing in the world.
Maybe it’s time to ask why you believe that. So what if young people use “screens” a lot? That’s just the age we live in. Do you really buy all the concerns about brain development or age inappropriateness? Even if we’re to pretend for the moment those concerns are valid, well, so what? Isn’t that their own business, nothing to do with you? And, in your heart of hearts, is that what you’re really worried about?
Or are you so profoundly offended that you must share the world with those younger than you that you latch onto any remotely plausible excuse to reduce that sharing?
Put it this way. Those bombed kids in Tehran and Gaza? Those isolated trans kids? They aren’t sharing the world with you anymore, are they?
And those visitors to Epstein’s island whose asses Mark Zuckerberg likes to kiss? They’re still walking around free and part of the wider society, aren’t they?
None of this is to protect kids. It’s to keep them silent and ignorant. Exactly what those who would prey on them want.