this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Take away the kids access to communicate with friends and what the fuck do they have left? It's not like we have youth centers or shit any more. Barely had any when I was a kid; that's why I fell in love with the internet.
Attack the actual problem: The owners of propagandized social media platforms owned by billionares that have all the money and reason to use those platforms to gain further influence and power. They are the real reason everything is falling apart; not because a 12 year old is on Twitter.
Lots of things! Wellness farms, military readiness camps, factory labor. The possibilities are endless!
How the fuck is banning kids from social media taking away their access to communication with their friends? That's a non-sequiter.
Before the Internet, kids lived isolated existences that precluded communication. They would sit in their rooms, listen to records, and engage in immoral masterbatory behavior.
It’s true. For the first 18yrs of my life I never encountered another kid, just whacked it and played Sabbath records backwards to summon the devil. As soon as I turned 18 I was ready to join the greater community of godless dopesmokers, D&D players, and pornography connoisseurs.
I remember how as a clueless kid, I just went around the internet, and acted as close as my idiot brain could to other people, and I didn't know to have a distinction between old as fuck and young as fuck.
Except I would simply believe older people knew more if they started talking.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, people assumed I was an adult, and would give me horrific insults, ask me things they should not, and expect me to perform at their level, and have situational awareness.
What a massive fuckup.
It's even worse nowadays because there are fewer meatspace options where they won't have the cops called, let alone that are appealing
Social media isn't the entirety of the internet. Banning them from social media doesn't preclude other forms of digital communication.
ok but what is social media? It's basically a catch-all term for any website. Governments currently have their sights on the big websites like facebook and instagram, with the goal of annulling freedom of speech as anything you say will be tied to your ID. They target these websites because they are popular enough. If people move to other forms of communications, you can be sure the government will also label them as social media.
Once the law is in place, what stops them from manufacturing consent to present other websites as unhealthy hazards and force them to have mandatory ID as well?
Every website is fair game. Only websites that can escape this that I can think of are the self-hosted ones because they are decentralized and maybe small forums that don't attract any attention.
"Social media" as defined by law is anything web 2.0
because they made friends through social media and have no other communication channels with those friends?
Or are keeping in touch after a move. That would.have made a big diffrence in my life
So you want kids to be talking to strangers online? Bruh.
Oh my god, are you still on the "stranger danger" moral panic? That was like... 28 moral panics ago!
Kids are at significantly higher risk of being abused by someone they know than by strangers. The risk to kids from strangers online is hugely overblown.
Kids are also more at risk of abuse if they're vulnerable in some way, don't have many trusted adults to share concerns with, and are lonely/isolated. Banning social media for kids just pushes them into more niche platforms.
So, yes, I want kids to have the freedom to talk to whoever they want to.
There is incredibly credible evidence that the US president has raped children. These creeps are more emboldened than ever. You're crazy if you think I would willingly let my children talk to strangers.
What does Trump have to do with this? Do you really think Epstein was sliding into the DMs of kids on Instagram to recruit victims for Trump to abuse? That isn't how it works at all.
High profile cases and sensationalised media coverage make the problem seem more widespread and more significant than it is.
Statistics don't lie. Your kids are much more likely to be abused by you, your friends, your partner, and your family members, than they are by strangers. Do you also sequester your kids from family? Put them in a tall tower to protect them from all the dangers of the world? You are doing your kids a disservice by isolating them, in my opinion.
I first became active on web forums at the age of 10 and didn't keep my age secret at the time. Not once (!) did I encounter anyone who appeared to be a child predator or anything like that. So forgive me if I don't see a lot wrong with "kids talking to strangers online" although it certainly depends on the kid's age and maturity level and also what kind of online space it is.
You presumably grew up on a very different internet than the one we have today, and not in an era with a president who literally raped a child, emboldening these creeps.
Mid 2000s. Web forums based on UBB, WBB, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.
Went on to discover wikis at age 11, IRC at age 12, most of my social contacts in my teen years were with people I met online because they were generally a lot nicer than people I met IRL.
I would see nothing wrong with people born after me doing the same, although admittedly those years would have been a lot better if my school hadn't been full of people I had nothing in common with and I hadn't needed to use the Internet to socialize.
Yeah, that internet is VASTLY different from the internet of today.
You just didn't realize you were talking to pedophiles...
If you told me your age online and you were ten years old, i'd nope out of there pretty quick.
People who want to continue talking to little kids on the internet when they're in their 40s aren't doing it bcz 10 year olds are interesting.
I was also online from a really young age and had a lot of very risky behavior. In my experience, pedophiles are relatively rare, but extremely bad at hiding it. There is pretty much no way that OP wouldn't realize it. Like, they struggle to talk about anything except inappropriate subjects with kids. Everything you say they try to turn it into something weird. It's pretty much impossible to be friends with them and somehow not know.
Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.
That's different than what i did as a kid. I was talking to people on AOL messenger and chat rooms all the time. Didn't occur to me until much later that theses 40 year olds were trying to groom me.
Didn't work, but, it happened nonetheless.
I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don't remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don't think that person was there for any bad purposes.
You assume their Friends are physically close
well, i grew up in the countryside and we did have youth centers. i can guarantee you i made a wide circle around them, in the sense that i avoided them like the plague
it's not the absence of youth centers that's the problem, it's the fact that i grew up in a very backwards rural countryside full of the exact type of shitheads that you would expect to find there. one person more annoying than the next, the excesses in alcohol consumption weren't the worst part, it was how people looked at people who didn't fit their definition of "normal". really not a good place to be.
You can tell who had the privilege of easily comforting to where they grew up and who never had a choice through conversations on this topic
Our society hates kids and wants them to suffer
It's not taking away kids access to communicate with friends though. There's a million and one ways kids can communicate these days. It's taking away adults' access to other people's children.
I agree the pedogarchy is the main issue here, and if you kept up with the 1% of files that were released you would know that having access to children on social media was part of their plan. We can attack that plan from both ends without some slippery slope bullshit about how children need facebook to stay in touch with each other. We all know that's some grade a bolognium.
Cutting off sexual predators is all well and good but it doesn't justify cutting off all perspectives other than those of their parents and immediate community. I think that would overall make abuse worse, which is most commonly coming from family anyway, especially for adolescents that may have something different about them that their parents have regressive attitudes towards. People really don't give enough credit to how much of a positive difference the internet has made with that sort of thing.
When you remember that parents are sometimes abusive and sometimes sexual predators themselves, isolation like this is just enabling abuse
Setting age limits for social media is not the same thing as banning kids from the internet entirely.
It still seems like a very drastic and destructive step, depending on how you are defining social media, which many of these laws seem to do very broadly. If what it amounts to is that minors cannot share their experiences and viewpoints or ask questions in public spaces, there's a lot of harm in that. Personally I feel that being able to talk to people from other parts of the world through web forums, games and message programs when I was 12-18 made a huge positive difference, and I otherwise would have been way more lost and alone.
Everybody knows this age verification crap isn't about protecting children. If you don't realize that, you're naive my dude.
I agree, but that's not the topic of discussion.
You Free the slaves by banning slavery. Not by banning the biggest slave owners.
Free the kids.
from what?
Brainless take, even thought I think your heart was in the right place.
No u
Educate child and parent on how social media and internet work and give parent powerful content restrict tool.
Otherwise no internet access for child.
content restrict tool?
To restrict what content child can see.
censorship lite trust your kids