by jchw | 2025-09-30 16:31:28+00:00
It's kind of amazing just how horrifically wrong this is all playing out. It actually feels like it's playing out worse than the worst case scenarios I could come up with.

First there is the obvious question: who is giving teenagers unfettered access to the Internet? Phones cost money. Home Internet costs money. Mobile data costs money. Best you can say is kids could get online using McDonalds WiFi with a phone they bought for lawnmower money, but we don't have to play pretend. We know how they got phones and Internet, the same way kids and teens were exposed to TV. Apparently though, despite this obvious first step in accountability, it's just absolutely all shoulders. This step is apparently so unimportant it has been completely not worth mentioning. I hate to just bitch about parents because I absolutely know parenting isn't easy, is important for society, and that the conditions we're in make it hard to feel "in control" anymore. On the other hand, this isn't really exactly a new problem. All the way back in 1999, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut basically addressed the same god damn thing. And I don't mean to equate obscenity on TV with the kinds of safety risks that the Internet can pose, but rather particularly the deflection of blame that parents engage in for things they directly facilitated. Seriously, the "Blame Canada" lyrics somehow feel as prescient as ever now:

Blame Canada Shame on Canada For the smut we must stop, the trash we must smash The laughter and fun must all be undone We must blame them and cause a fuss Before somebody thinks of blaming us

Though honestly, I absolutely think that this doesn't mean social media companies aren't to blame. Everyone knew we were selling sex and ads to kids. I think that Twitter and Tumblr were extremely violently aware that they were basically selling sex to kids, and if anything just tried as much as possible to ensure their systems had no way for them to be able to account for it (on Twitter many people have always wanted an option to mark their accounts as 18+ only, but as far as I know you still can't. A few years ago I think they added a flag they can apply to accounts that hides them, but it's still not possible. And although Twitter has sensitive content warnings... It doesn't actually let you specify that something is explicit. Only that it is sensitive, or maybe even that it contains nudity. I think this blanketing is intentional. It provides some deniability.) For their role in intentionally blurring lines so they can sell sex and ads to kids while mining their data, they should be penalized.

But instead, we're going to destroy the entire Internet and rip it apart. Even though the very vast majority of the Internet really never had any problems that crop up with kids on social media to any particularly alarming scale, we're going to basically apply broad legislation that enforces ISP level blocks. In my state there was a proposal to effectively ban VPNs and Internet pornography altogether!

I think ripping apart the Internet like this is basically evil for all parties involved. It's something regulators can do to show that they really care about child safety. It's something parents can support in stead of taking accountability for their role in not doing the thing called "parenting". And I bet all of the massive social media companies will make it out of this just fine, essentially carving their own way around any legislation, while the rest of the Internet basically burns down, as if we really needed anything to help that along.

We will never learn.