Social Media Bans Miss The Point

I want to get something crystal clear, here, before I begin this piece. By no means should this be construed as me saying I want people like Zuckerberg to get off scot free for all the crap they've done to the modern web. Absolutely not. I want nothing more than for these chucklefucks who ran Web 2.0 into the ground to be held accountable for the garbage that flowed forth from their respective companies.

 

These ghouls are the very people that delivered us into this crappy society we now enjoy where technology is no longer seen as a net good, but rather a net bad. These people are the reason I wax nostalgic for the tech landscape of the mid-00s. I carry a vehement distaste for these people. Do not think I ever, ever want them to get off easy for anything.

 

That said, I think these social media bans going around are stupid, and also fail to solve the problem. Worse, they're being used as a means for government overreach, and on that alone I do not support them.  

1. It (potentially) takes away a teen's only community.

I'm going to preface this with "I know, I know, the internet of the mid-00s and the internet of now are worlds apart". 

 

I feel like to really hit it home how intensely I feel about this, I need to talk about my teenage years for a sec. I'll try not to monologue too long, promise.

 

High school was absolute hell for me, your average nerdy dude who was trying to make the best of this whole thing whilst getting to grips with an autism (at the time, Asperger's) diagnosis. Unfortunately for me, I was tossed into a school that prided itself on its sports program, much to the chagrin of every other elective class/program at that school. As you'd probably guess, this school was full of jocks. 

 

The result was a school where I didn't really feel any sense of community. Most of my friends went to other high schools, or were still working their way through middle school. A couple of closer friends I had in middle school ended up moving away. I did make some loose friends with the goth kids, but I was more or less just kinda orbiting them rather than being directly in their friend group.

 

Around this time, too, I picked up some online gaming (Diablo II, baby!) and actually ended up making some friends there, alongside playing some browser games and finding those communities and getting involved there, too. It was there that I actually felt like I had found my community, for once. It was chock full of nerds who were on the same page and weren't judgemental pricks like the jocks that populated my school.

 

In fact, I still talk to some of those friends, to this day. I've even met one of them in meatspace! Hell, when I was going through my first real break-up many years ago one of these people actually called me and spent an hour on the phone with me just trying to keep my head screwed on straight.

 

That isn't to say I completely failed at finding some people to befriend in high school. Things got better in 10th grade, where some new kids came in that I found actual common ground with. A miracle, I can't believe it. 

 

But having that online community to fall back on--especially when things got real complicated and my parents began restricting when I could leave the house as I grew older--arguably saved my life many times over, because I hesitate to think what could have happened if I didn't have that lifeline.

 

This is probably the biggest reason why I'm against these laws. because I just think of myself, back when I was a teenager, trying to find their place in all this and utterly failing because they got dropped into an environment that might as well be completely alien to them.

 

Worse, I think of the teens who have rough home lives who rely on online communities for support to mentally get through some rough shit, or LGBTQIA+ teens who are from areas where acceptance of anything not straight and cisgender is nonexistent and the only lifeline they have to people that accept them is online.

 

Do I agree, again, that social media is a vastly different beast than it was when I was growing up? Of course. Do I think technology these days is generally a soul-sucking pile of garbage? Absolutely. But do I also see the good in it despite that? Yes! 

 

What should be happening is the parents taking accountability here and educating their offspring about proper internet habits, how to spot predators, how to not fall into a doomscroll loop, so on and so forth.

 

But that would be too logical, I guess. Which leads nicely into the next point:  

2. It's the government trying to do what the parents should be doing.

(...and committing overreach in the process but we'll get to that soon, I promise.)

 

Proper education on the power of social media, its downfalls, and how to navigate it all should fall onto the parents, not the law.

 

It should be up to the parents to make the call on when a kid is allowed technology, not the government. It should also be up to the schools to properly educate kids if technology is going to be forced upon them (in the form of things like Chromebooks, iPads, what have you).

 

Expecting the government to step in and enforce what the parents should be enforcing just feels like an exceptionally bad idea. Healthy habits should be taught by the parents, not forced upon you by the government. That shouldn't be their job. 

 

Further, these bans don't really fix anything. The people who are pushing these toxic algorithms aren't being adequately punished for their transgressions. Stronger privacy laws aren't being put into place because of this. Banning social media for a class of people who have zero voting power just seems like a "we did it reddit"-esque pat on the back to say that hey, we did something without actually addressing the root cause of the problem (that affects adults, too). Why do you think companies like Meta are actively pushing for these laws? Because they feel it absolves them of the responsibility to make things less predatory on the chance a minor might interact with it.

 

If you want to fix this problem for good (and also do a favor for us adults)? Hold the execs at these companies accountable for their bullshit. Enact stringent privacy laws that protect everyone, regardless of age, gender, or anything. Technology is a tool, and a tool is something that in and of itself does not have its own intent, it takes on the intent of the entity wielding it. And right now, some incredibly fucked up people are wielding it. Those people need to be held accountable for their actions.

 

But none of that will happen, because...  

3. It's all a facade to push age verification/ID laws.

In fact, every time a government says they're doing something for the children, I will bet a tasty sandwich 99% of the time that they're not doing jack shit for "the children", but rather taking advantage of--again--a class of people who have zero voting power who cannot meaningfully advocate for themselves to further their agenda of trying to control the internet.

 

These people in government are absolutely wetting themselves at the chance to finally, finally put a leash on that pesky internet that they've been chomping at the bit to lock down for decades. If they had it their way, every single person on the internet would be personally identifiable such that if they said something someone didn't like, they'd face consequences for it. No matter the justification for it.

 

Free speech? Yeah, they want it dead, and forcing everyone to be personally identifiable is a huge step to that. I'd argue they'd even want to go so far as to have a social credit system, but that's getting out in the weeds.

 

"But xo," I can hear some say. "ID laws and age verification are different from a social media ban!" 

 

To which I say: How do you think they're going to meaningfully enforce a social media ban? If I can just rock up to Discord and click a button that says "I pinky promise I'm over 16" do you think they'll be happy with that?

Absolutely not. They're going to want to try and hardcore enforce this, and we can already see it happening in some countries. Bluesky, for example, wanted a copy of my ID (though I realized this was because my VPN was set to the UK, oops).

 

Discord--in a move that attracted a ton of controversy--stated they were going to be rolling out age verification worldwide, and using a company that has ties to a certain VERY controversial PayPal person whose name I'm not uttering but you probably already know who I'm talking about.

 

Because as you can probably guess, there's the motive! These ghouls want these laws not to protect the children, but to build a surveillance network to tie peoples' online personas to their real world identities. Which has ramifications beyond getting punished for basic things you say. It puts LGBTQIA+ people, especially transfolk, in danger. If someone LGBTQIA+ lives in an area where being as such is treated as a crime, these laws can directly compromise them for the "crime" of daring to find their community online.

 

As you can probably guess, politicians (mostly right wingers, but some dems--looking RIGHT at you, Richard Blumenthal--are joining them on this) are salivating at this prospect.

 

And saying it's for the protection of children is a very effective one-two punch: They get to put words in the mouths of a class of people that are unable to advocate for themselves, either vocally or at the ballot box, and they can use this to paint you as the bad guy for calling them out on their hubris: "Oh, you don't support protecting children? What is wrong with you? Do you WANT them to get trafficked? You must secretly want to do bad things to children if you're arguing against this legislation that is clearly intended to protect them!" (and not at all us trying to hide our government overreach, no sir.)

If they really wanted to protect children, as I mentioned before, they'd start going after actual predators rather than let them sit in high places with zero consequences. They'd hold the execs of these social media companies accountable for not doing more to rein in the toxicity of modern day social media (like combating misinformation and such). 

 

A lot of the things they could do would be beneficial for everyone, too! Not just children and teens! 

 

But no. They'd rather just ban teenagers from the internet entirely. Not for their safety, ha. No, because it simply gives them a good reason to lock down the internet which has been a wet dream of politicians for decades at this point. And as mentioned before, it's all too convenient they're putting the words in the mouths of those who have no voice at the ballot box and cannot advocate for themselves.

 

And it's scary how close they're getting to finally, finally realizing their dream of controlling the internet.