Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
These laws aren’t about children, that’s just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.
If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn’t have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children’s future on it for private profit. We wouldn’t then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.
The United States doesn’t give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We’d throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.
Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn’t be allowed to see sexual content until they’re 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?
The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it’s this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don’t know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone’s so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.
I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.
