What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?
Truth be told the worst kind of content is nominally child friendly - just incredibly addictive and overstimulating. We're all so preoccupied with preventing our children from looking at gore or porn or even meeting predators online that we forget that those who stand to make money on addictive content will pull every lever necessary.
In large part that's because, if they'd done so, the kids would've been socially isolated from their peers, at least the most normal ones with the most normal parents, which are the kinds of friends most other normal parents want their kids to have.
It's a collective action problem, except instead of "I can be better off if I ignore what I know is best for society", it's "if I ignore what I know is best for my kids psychologically, they will still have friends, and social media brainrot is a lesser evil than socially isolating my kid from all the normal kids at school."
And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
I never had any of the popular social medias when I was growing up, and I wasn’t isolated from anybody aside from the one bloke who insisted on doing all his texting via instagram. I’m in uni now and people kind of laugh when I ask them for a phone number, but if anything it’s improved my social status.
>And also, giving kids social media interaction devices is a convenient form of babysitting. It reduces up-front effort of parenting.
This is the real issue to me. Parents are overworked and exhausted because you can’t support a family on one salary, so there’s no more stay-at-home parents. I was extremely lucky in that my mom’s firm got bought out when I was in 5th grade and she retired on the severance package. Parenting is a full time job and society needs to treat it like one. If stay-at-home parents got a salary from the government, 90% of what’s wrong with kids would be solved (and the falling birthrate issue too).
This is a natural consequence of women joining the workforce en masse. This isn't a social comment, but rather an economic one. It made couples have much more buying power, so they could bid massively more. They they worked stressful jobs for the next 30 years to pay the bank back, while the older person they sold it to got loads of cash.
And single women (or mums), who this was supposed to help, now instead of working extra hard to compete economically against single-income households, now have to compete against two-income households.
What is the next step?
Ok, that sounds snarky, but this is where we are. Parents are asking for age controls, and governments are happy to give them what they want, with them getting an added level over privacy.
My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.
Because children can be in the outside world, which has shops. It's not the same as parents choosing to buy their child a very expensive device.
I mean its been what three decades of internet without age verification and people can't really point to specific issues with it, just sort of gesticulates that they must be there despite the millenial generation being about as well adjusted as any other. I would say seeing a pulverized squirrel on the road with the brains scattered about in real life is far more traumatizing for a child than seeing even human on human violence and gore on the internet. Movies have done a lot to desensitize that sort of thing when it is served on a screen versus in real life where you can smell it and walk all around it.