Ridiculous. Would we have had a similar ban against flash video and game websites growing up if it were today? Against AOL Instant Messenger?

I already had a local net nanny software to contend with, if the government had also tried preventing me from participating in online culture, assuming I didn't kill myself because of a lack of escape from my abusive situation, I would 100% have ended up being an absolute menace to the government in defiance and retaliation.

I would have opened myself up to fraud charges creating accounts with private information from adults. And once I was over the wall of censorship, I'd only find adults and other criminally-minded children. I'd be on a conveyor belt to more serious crimes. Is that what we want the next generation of computer enthusiasts to grow up with?

We're talking about 8-year-olds here not 15-year-olds, and a website intended for passive consumption, not active participation.

I would say the circumstances are pretty different.

When I was 8, I was already hacking around net nanny software and involved in several online communities operated by other children, I was learning how to program and hack and generally use the internet as a gateway into culture that I otherwise never would have experienced.

I tried involving myself in a lot of communities related to my interests, but some sites were just for entertainment and not active participation, or I simply didn't participate in the community. That doesn't change anything.

Now a software engineer and artist, my entire life was shaped by that time, and as I said, I likely would have committed suicide due to my abusive situation if it wasn't for these communities.

I will always fight to provide that kind of environment for others and not pull up the ladder now that I've climbed up.

8 year olds having unmonitored access to the Internet doesn't seem to me to be the fault of the platforms, the government, or me.

If you substitute the word “television” for “YouTube” or “social media”, you can almost exactly replay the arguments of the 1970s.

Except in this case the content is basically totally unmoderated and mediated through an algorithm designed to keep the childrens attention permanently, so I would say the circumstances are at least a little different than back then.

Yes. And yet.

It’s like every generation gets fixated on something new which can be perceived as moral decay and societal harm, and then rails against it. Making it even more popular with the younger generation, of course.

I’ve seen the same thing play out with rock music, television, computer games, and now social media. There’s likely examples back throughout history.

I think you can mount an argument against all of these things. In retrospect though, it doesn’t hold up. I wonder if social media is the same?

YouTube isn't social media, though... It's basically just television with a massive amount of really really bad channels.

For every big tech dystopic platform going all wack there is some "the old greeks complained about kids these days" going my way.

Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.

I think that the operational incentives for advertising-funded, for-profit social media make them unavoidably bad.

Conceptually, a digital means of communicating life’s events between friends needn’t be terrible, but … the impulse to self-promote is human, and ultimately destructive.

This is all irrelevant though. You can't enforce this without surveiling everyone, and what you're trying to achieve would fail if the target group have unrestricted access to the Internet otherwise.