Recursive Call

Stop lying

Another day, another attempt by Congress to pass an age verification mandate, another useful idiot in the HackerNews comments section saying “okay but we have to protect the children”.

Stop lying. This isn’t about protecting the children, and if you actually believed it was, you are the most gullible person alive. I don’t even need to start conspiracy theorizing about how Meta was the one who lobbied for this bill. I can prove it more easily than that.

What are the harms people claim they’re trying to protect children from by getting them off the internet?

Which of these are caused by social media? Sure, some of them are enabled by social media, but that’s not the same thing.

If the government actually cared about preventing bullying, they would make and enforce anti-bullying laws. If someone bullies someone until they commit or attempt to commit suicide, they should be tried for murder/ attempted murder, and all the adults who stood by and did nothing should be charged as accomplices. We’ve created a society where bullies can do whatever they want, and when the victim snaps and punches them, guess who gets punished? Banning social media is not going to reduce bullying because social media does not cause bullying.

If the government actually cared about preventing teenagers from developing eating disorders, it would do something to make society less of a nightmare for fat people. I didn’t have social media when I was growing up. I developed anorexia anyway because I was terrified of getting fat and becoming diabetic in a country with a healthcare system so broken that people die because they can’t afford insulin. If healthcare didn’t cost an arm and a leg, maybe we could stop fearmongering about fat people being unhealthy, and then maybe teenagers wouldn’t be exposed to constant fatphobic rhetoric from every single angle.

Gambling is a non-issue. You can’t get a credit card until you’re 18, and it’s nearly impossible to pay for anything online without one. If the parents are letting their kids develop a gambling addiction using the parents’ credit card, what on earth is the government realistically going to do to prevent that situation? Parents’ rights.

Explicit content is also a non-issue. You don’t see that stuff without looking for it. I made it to 20 years old without ever seeing a picture that could be described as more than risqué, and when it finally happened, I knew what I was getting into. There are always going to be teenagers who want to look at boobs. If you ban them from doing it on the internet, they’ll just go back to buying lewd magazines from gas stations (yes, I have really seen them there) and hiding them under the bed.

“Okay,” you might be thinking, “but how could you possibly explain that social media addiction is not caused by social media? It’s in the name and everything.”

My dear reader, do you believe that alcohol addiction is caused by alcohol? No, right? Because the issue is not the addictive substance, it’s whatever problem that person has in their life that causes them to use the addictive substance. Millions of people drink alcohol sometimes and are totally fine and not addicted to it. Similarly, there are plenty of people who use social media but are not addicted to it. The real reason teenagers get hooked on social media is that there just isn’t anywhere else for them to spend their time. Outside of home and school, where can they go? Is there a park nearby? Will someone call the police on them if they go there because people always assume teenagers are up to no good? Can they walk around the neighborhood freely without someone asking “where are your parents?”. Can they knock on their neighbor’s door without having to worry about being shot at? Do they even get along with anyone of the teenagers who live nearby? DO any other teenagers even live nearby?

If you want to get teens off their phones, give them somewhere to hang out with other teens with similar interests without having to spend money or needing adult supervision. Otherwise what do you expect them to do all day? Stare at a wall? Write the Next Great American Novel?

Finally, the issue of grooming. I don’t know how many times people are going to have to say this. Statistically, the largest source of child abuse is the parents and other people the child knows in real life. Grooming on the internet is not even remotely close. If the government actually wanted to prevent child abuse, it would make laws and create institutions that give children somewhere to go to escape their parents, who are, I repeat, the greatest perpetrators of abuse. But the government is made up of child abusers so why am I surprised that this doesn’t happen and instead they wave around the specter of the scary random internet pedophile to get people to freak out and agree to whatever they want. Just the same as how they used the specter of the evil brown terrorist to pass the Patriot Act when most terrorism in the USA is committed domestically by white men.

But I digress. If the government actually cared about preventing grooming, they would make a law saying that internet safety has to be taught in schools. Education is the only defense against online grooming. Or do you think when someone turns 18 they magically become impossible to take advantage of? Of course not! If you prevent them from social media but don’t educate them, then they enter it as naive adults and get manipulated and abused just the same.

I don’t have a conclusion. I just wish people would stop lying.