But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.

This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.

I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.

His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.

It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.

Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.

But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.

Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.

The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.

Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.

Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.