Also we need to acknowledge that age appropriate freedom for some ages of children means they get hurt sometimes. A 16 year old should have access to their town unsupervised for certain lengths of time. Most will be fine. Some will get hurt. Those without this freedom will have to learn how to function in that environment as an adult and are at similar risk of being hurt then because they’re stunted in that way.

What we’ve been doing with the internet is the equivalent of never telling children about the dangers of their local area, what danger looks like, or how to get help if you’re in danger then letting 8 year olds wander around town without even checking in.

Some of these freedoms are important. Things we may want to censor for good reason can give children the words to know what isn’t ok in their lives. That can range from “my parents shouldn’t be fighting all the time actually” to “this aspect of my body/mind is a symptom of something to check out” to “that adult shouldn’t behave that way to me” to “this aspect of me is actually a perfectly fine but uncommon trait”.

The current internet is a funhouse mirror of reality for dopamine. When I was a kid we all knew movies were that. So we were taught what the idealized underweight for the time looked like and how unhealthy it was.

I wholeheartedly endorse things like mandatory internet safety training in schools. Much like I think health classes should teach what a healthy and normal body looks like and can do. I tentatively endorse a way to set age recommendations and reasons so blockers can keep the 7 year olds away from porn, though I fear it will result in queer kids being blocked from factual information and teenagers being prevented from accessing good sex ed resources before making decisions regarding their sexual health.

Censorship has a cost to everyone, and maybe mid moral panic isn’t the time to decide to censor things

We’ve had an answer since the Internet was created: don’t let kids have unsupervised access to it.

I’m very much against this bill, I don’t even think it will help kids any, but lets admit that this is very much easier said than done. If we really mean to be honest, this is just something we say to mean “it’s not our problem, don’t bother us with it”. But it’s not a solved problem, even remotely.

Assuming a moderately tech savvy parent, which is not a given, there are so many alternate ways to access sketchy content, and supposedly child-friendly platforms are so poorly moderated that very few parents can truly manage to control what their kids see. Even YouTube Kids and Roblox are full of stuff that shouldn’t be there.

Then there’s the matter of longer and longer shifts that parents face today, and consequently the diminishing time they have to watch over their children. We also went from wired internet and a single shared household computer to everyone having smartphones and Wi-Fi in every corner. A parent can do everything right and their kid might still end up exposed to inappropriate content by their friend during recess because their parents didn’t bother with any of it.

I don’t want the internet to be child-proofed or that this is used as an excuse for government overreach, but I don’t envy parents who need to deal with this matter today.