Cutting off sexual predators is all well and good but it doesn’t justify cutting off all perspectives other than those of their parents and immediate community. I think that would overall make abuse worse, which is most commonly coming from family anyway, especially for adolescents that may have something different about them that their parents have regressive attitudes towards. People really don’t give enough credit to how much of a positive difference the internet has made with that sort of thing.
It still seems like a very drastic and destructive step, depending on how you are defining social media, which many of these laws seem to do very broadly. If what it amounts to is that minors cannot share their experiences and viewpoints or ask questions in public spaces, there’s a lot of harm in that. Personally I feel that being able to talk to people from other parts of the world through web forums, games and message programs when I was 12-18 made a huge positive difference, and I otherwise would have been way more lost and alone.
Cutting off sexual predators is all well and good but it doesn’t justify cutting off all perspectives other than those of their parents and immediate community. I think that would overall make abuse worse, which is most commonly coming from family anyway, especially for adolescents that may have something different about them that their parents have regressive attitudes towards. People really don’t give enough credit to how much of a positive difference the internet has made with that sort of thing.
When you remember that parents are sometimes abusive and sometimes sexual predators themselves, isolation like this is just enabling abuse
Setting age limits for social media is not the same thing as banning kids from the internet entirely.
It still seems like a very drastic and destructive step, depending on how you are defining social media, which many of these laws seem to do very broadly. If what it amounts to is that minors cannot share their experiences and viewpoints or ask questions in public spaces, there’s a lot of harm in that. Personally I feel that being able to talk to people from other parts of the world through web forums, games and message programs when I was 12-18 made a huge positive difference, and I otherwise would have been way more lost and alone.