It IS a matter of national security if your nations children grow up and witness all the horrors it's government does abroad and heavens forbid grow anti government sentiment or opinions.
The "they" you're all mentioning simply doesn't exist. Who are they ? All the governments of the west somehow working together ? They can't even cooperate more than 6 months on internal matters but they globally agreed on some world wide evil plan ? And the plan is to ban kids from youtube ? Because reasons ?
Who is going to collect more data if there are less websites/users ? Who's selling "the" data ? Who's buying "the" data ? What data ? How are governments benefiting from censoring brain rot in a way that doesn't also benefit me exactly ?
All the data is already collected by US megacorps and stored on US servers the US gov can already fully access, it doesn't get any worse than that
EU is actively working on "age verification" through a digital wallet.
Once that is in place it is a small step to wall off the entire Internet unless you verify yourself through your digital ID.
Since Trump is as borderline fascist as von der Leyen there's no fucking doubt in my mind the United States will follow the EU as soon as there are signs of success or even earlier.
Proof: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...
Especially note "The objective is to develop an EU-wide solution to age verification that reinforces the Digital Services Act (DSA) objective to ensure safe, secure, and trusted digital space and the Louvain-la-Neuve Declaration, which promotes a safer and more trustworthy online environment."
Whenever those in power talk about "security", "safety" and "trust" they talk about other things entirely which, for the larger public, have nothing to do with these topics at all.
If you think any democrat president wouldn't do the exact same, I don't know what to tell you...
But Trump is the current US president isn't he?
Except that it's real and happening, it does not magically become non-existence just because that you don't see it or refuse to understand.
Right now it looks like "something bad happens it 100% has to be a world wide conspiracy against our FrEeDoM", which is like the least likely reason in the list of causes according to occam's razor.