it's not failing, it's not about the kids. when will these people learn, they're doctors right?

There was a pretty good thread on microblogging fedi this week about some of the severe problems with this. A few off the top of my head:

• Not every kid can just "go outside" and "interact with humans" for a whole variety of valid reasons which won't be addressed by social media bans
• Not all kids live in places where the humans outside to be interacted with are safe, non-hostile, etc.
• Isolation in indifferent, non-nourishing, hostile, or frankly dangerous communities is still a big problem for many millions of kids, and blanket regulations like this directly harm the most marginalized.

Anecdata: I was online by age 10 back in pre-HTML days, and by 13 my access was keeping me alive in the ignorant redneck backwater I was stuck in, because it gave me access to people who respected me and offered a broader perspective than my own. This mental health support was absolutely critical, and temporarily losing access to it twice in my teens correlated with a substantial increase in mixing with a bad crowd and doing bad shit because I felt I had no other options.

I still get critical mental health support online today as an adult, because I'm still stuck in a shitty situation where simplistic thought-terminating cliches like "just go outside and interact with humans" come with a number of problems attached. So I'm pretty passionate about this effort by frankly thoughtless normie fucktards to ban kids from the internet. Plus so-called "age verification" is actually identity verification to engage in speech, and isn't it funny how such legislation materialized simultaneously in every western "democracy" overnight, right after it became clear that Israel and the calcified US political establishment could not control discourse about Gaza sufficiently to their liking???

Banning things doesn’t really work… but if you have to ban something I’d suggest banning social media from teenagers rather than banning teenagers from social media, if you know what I mean.

The thing I find funny about age gating social media and such, is that it never really fixes the issues. There are adults who should not be on social media as they are not ready for it, where as like the article states, children and teens can be ready for it.

Personally education like everything would be the better approach than age gating/banning teens and children.