this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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What really irks the living s#it outta me is not so much that states are blindly suing social media sites just to get on the bandwagon of pretending they're doing something to help kids -- it's that nobody, not one of those people in any of those states, NO ONE - has asked kids if they feel like they're being harmed by social media. Outraged puritanical parental groups are making ridiculous assumptions right and left about what kids are seeing, and worse, assuming they know what kids are feeling as a result. They are wrong on this in almost every way. Any kid will tell you, they see worse stuff than this in other places than online almost every day of their lives. It's popular to make social media the villain - but how can you just ignore input from the very people you're pretending to be protecting.
While I get your point, and I totally agree with it, there are some actual dangers that must be recognized, and they are dangers to which everyone is exposed somehow, but that could probably affect children more. These are the privacy problems (the article is about Meta collecting children data probably without them caring about it) considering that a child could not know how to properly use the internet (again, it is not so obvious given the fact that there are probably more internet illiterates among the boomers and older population in general), and cyberbullism. Younger people could act less consciously, they are young anyway. But that has nothing to do with the dangerous content that our children should never see with their pure and innocent eyes. I mean, explicit and harsh contents on the internet do exist, and while it's probably not desirable to voluntarily expose children to these contents, what disturbs me the most is the puritane posture that the adults take in relation to the Children, as you say. Yes, they are not really understanding the children, nor helping them