That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.
Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.
But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.
we owe today’s teens a better internet experience. we should focus on building something that would have been ideal for us to have had when we were their age
Teens and children, and the pushback you’re seeing is because a lot of people, even terminally online people, believe that limiting or preventing children (and teens) from accessing social media as they currently exist is part of making that happen.
You have to slow the bleeding first. You can’t just ignore the broken leg and start physical therapy.
Teens vary wildly in maturity and are likely to be unfortunately caught up in rules for children. There’s no easy cutoff age before 18 for when one can be trusted to be online without guard rails. I can speak from experience that teens will find a way whether its legal or not, so I’m not really super concerned about the ones who need access. They’ll find a way.
And for every person like you that says they are still alive because of unrestricted internet, there’s another one who is dead because of it. 4chan, tumblr, reddit even (remember when they “totally figured out the boston bomber”?), and more direct cyberbullying all claim lives. There were 3 suicides in my highschool growing up, two determined to be cyberbullying caused and the third just rumored. I almost lost one of my younger cousins to cyberbullying as well.
This isn’t stopping the bleeding, the people who caused the bleeding in the first place of the ones doing this. I don’t trust a single person in the Epstein files to have good intentions towards children or teenagers.
That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.
Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.
But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.
we owe today’s teens a better internet experience. we should focus on building something that would have been ideal for us to have had when we were their age
Teens and children, and the pushback you’re seeing is because a lot of people, even terminally online people, believe that limiting or preventing children (and teens) from accessing social media as they currently exist is part of making that happen.
You have to slow the bleeding first. You can’t just ignore the broken leg and start physical therapy.
Teens vary wildly in maturity and are likely to be unfortunately caught up in rules for children. There’s no easy cutoff age before 18 for when one can be trusted to be online without guard rails. I can speak from experience that teens will find a way whether its legal or not, so I’m not really super concerned about the ones who need access. They’ll find a way.
And for every person like you that says they are still alive because of unrestricted internet, there’s another one who is dead because of it. 4chan, tumblr, reddit even (remember when they “totally figured out the boston bomber”?), and more direct cyberbullying all claim lives. There were 3 suicides in my highschool growing up, two determined to be cyberbullying caused and the third just rumored. I almost lost one of my younger cousins to cyberbullying as well.
This isn’t stopping the bleeding, the people who caused the bleeding in the first place of the ones doing this. I don’t trust a single person in the Epstein files to have good intentions towards children or teenagers.