I feel like in all the current (very valid) worries about privacy and personal information being compromised by online social media verification programs, it’s kind of being lost how we got here in the first place. Having to submit your legal ID or other very sensitive information to a random online database that can be sold or hacked anytime is a nightmarish futuristic robot-apocalypse type scenario, but we’re not here because we’re in the robot apocalypse. We’re here because an age-old avalanche of fearmongering has worked.
Remember, this sort of thing is all being justified around age. Yet while seeing people talk about age restrictions online, I’ve only read privacy concerns and worries about what content will be labeled “mature”. These are valid worries, yes, but to me the most actively concerning part of these laws is this: the entire point is to remove children from the internet.
Kids, like adults, deserve freedom of information and access. Over the past few decades, laws have been passed and cultural systems have closed down on them as never before, leaving children socially isolated and trapped under an incredible number of regulations: in the US, twice as many restrictions apply to teenagers as to active-duty military or incarcerated prisoners. (Source: this very illuminating Scientific American article.)
At the same time, US political platforms on all sides have welcomed a new fearmongering tactic with open arms. By now it’s basically an old classic: Our Children Are In Danger! Drug addicts, gay people, Dungeons & Dragons, video games, strangers in unmarked vans, Instagram, Snapchat, trans people, TikTok, ChatGPT, the list goes on and on about the many unavoidable invented dangers of the modern world that are sure to leave kids…. Uh, I don’t know. Bad somehow, different, *not yours anymore*. This has been largely pointless in retrospect, but one thing it has accomplished is pushing the child into a firmly separate box than the adult. Today, it’s basically solid cultural fact that adults are capable of protecting themselves and therefore immune to these dangers, but kids are Innocent but Terribly Corruptible and thus Must Be Protected At All Costs— including, of course, against their will. The child’s will was never a relevant point of discussion here.
I don’t mean to say that all of these dangers are fake. Certainly some of them have at least a little truth to them. Child abuse is a serious problem worth talking about, but *the first statistic worth talking about* is that the vast, vast majority of child abuse comes from people they know personally: the adults that have authority over them, and other children. I don’t mean to sound cliche, but strangers are far less dangerous than people you know. No matter: more than 20 years after this fearmongering reached its peak, kids are still being taught that talking to strangers is very dangerous, shrinking their circle of contact and their ability to reach out when they need help.
Statistics about Instagram are currently being used to restrict kids’ social media access across the US and many other parts of the world. I haven’t examined these closely, but a few observations pop out to me right away: has anyone found that these apps specifically cause bad mental health, or are they exacerbating or correlating with teens’ already stressful situations? And: what, if anything, suggests that this danger is inherent to teenagers? Why are children the only ones who Must Be Protected from a genuine mental health risk? Or is it just easier for social media companies to remove children altogether so nobody can attack them with that type of fearmongering again?
Finally, I want to talk about what happens when these changes are made. As children have been removed from public spaces over the past decades, adults lose exposure and become accustomed to existing in adult-only spaces. Meanwhile, kids’ literal physical freedom is shrinking, their access to information is locked down, and their options for help are erased. A child alone in public is seen as “unattended” and therefore an *active problem*. Often, the child is a problem in this space because the space is not safe for children, and the space is not safe for children because it simply is not intended to accommodate them— which is an accessibility issue, and certainly not the child’s fault! As children get segregated out of “adult spaces” online, those spaces will become a self-fulfilling prophecy by becoming unsafe for children.
And when I say “unsafe”, I’m not talking about the mature content everyone is so loud about. I’m talking about the rampant ageism across this and so many other platforms that continues to go unchallenged, because the people being demeaned and stereotyped are ACTIVELY BEING REMOVED FROM THE CONVERSATION.
No problem affecting a marginalized group is solved by locking them out of society. Don’t let children be consigned to this ever-shrinking prison.
dailybridgerton
dededos
romaincrisis
titsay
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
