I got a response to this that has since been deleted (or perhaps I was blocked by the responder, I'm not sure) that I want to talk about.

I can no longer see their posts, so I have to paraphrase their arguments, unfortunately.

The poster made the argument that social media is legitimately harmful to children and restricting children's access to social media is a good thing, and that even if Age Verification laws do some bad things, they are good because they will prevent children from access social media.

I had a hard time believing this argument, and said:

- It sounds like you're saying "its okay if some children get abused as long as no children use social media" and I know that can't be what you mean, but I'm not sure how else to take it.

Before I sent that response, they responded again and said explicitly that keeping kids off of social media was a bigger concern than any hypothetical abuse children might receive as a result of the various pieces of proposed legislation.

This is a shocking argument that I really hope I misunderstood, but it's gone now and I can no longer contact them so I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about this arguement in general and why I believe it is part of a disinformation campaign.

Now, there are several problems with the argument that "social media is harmful to children and access to social media by children should be legally restricted."

1) Prohibition just creates black markets. Children aren't going to stop communicating online because we've made it more difficult for them to use commercial social media platforms, they're just going to move to platforms that have less moderation, less control, etc.

Keeping kids off Instagram isn't going to keep them from posting photos online, it's going to move those photos to unmoderated image boards. They'll just be on whatever the modern equivalent of 4chan circa 2006 is, and anyone who survived the internet of the 00s can tell you that this is going to be significantly worse for the kids that end up there than instagram.

2) Commercial social media isn't just harmful for kids, it's harmful to fucking everyone. These companies are hoping that by pretending to care about "the children" they'll be shielded from any real consequences.

Legislation against Commercial Social Media companies should focus on providing a way out of commercial social platforms.

3) Both of those points are irrelevant in this discussion because they are smokescreens.

These age verification laws aren't about keeping kids off social media, they're about surveillance, control, and locking LGBT people out of public discourse.

It's a fascist power play.

Centering Children on Social Media as the argument for mandating IDs to use computers is a smokescreen, so that we're spending time arguing about how to best solve this very complicated problem, instead of talking about all the ways that this legislation will be used to facilitate the abuse of children and marginalized people.

4) Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.

They might not *be* disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the *work* of disinformation spreading propagandists.

This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today.

This is how it works:

Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect.

One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who *always* has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal.

Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic.

Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal ("think of the children") and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue ("social media is bad for children") and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against.

There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They're sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they *are* real people, but they're also sockpuppets.

The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing.

And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children.

And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost.

So, again, these age verification laws aren't about children.

They aren't about protecting children.

They aren't about children on social media.

They are about surveillance, control, and abuse.

If we wanted to make social media safer for children, we would pass legislation that actually addressed the way commercial social media is harmful to everyone: limiting notification frequency, mandating interop and data export-ability, preventing surveillance driven advertising models, mandating algorithmic transparency, and enforcing anti-trust against companies like Meta who buy up all their competitors and unify them.

Just had another one!

"I'd rather give my 13 year old child a bottle of whiskey than access to Roblox" is a hell of a take, y'all.

I'm not here to argue that Instagram or Roblox are good for kids (the opposite!) but

1) these arguments are still just providing cover to normalize laws that mandate sending government IDs to 3rd parties (like Peter Thiel) in order to use a computer or phone, which we have decided to allow politicians to call "age verification"

2) What the fuck? That's a hell of hot take.

But! It's *exactly* the kind of hot take you'd get from a PR firm sock-puppet or propagandist who is trying to distract from the issue at hand.

It provokes such a clear and immediate negative emotional response that it completely re-frames the conversation away from the very real threat of increased and increasingly inescapable mass surveillance and towards what is more harmful for kids!

That is the propaganda tactic in action!

See it here: https://retro.social/deck/@Mark_Harbin[email protected]/116426651304109650

Oh? You want to talk about Mass survielance? Too bad! Instead we have to talk about how repealing section 230 would kill the social media platform you're using while leaving only Meta and X and Alphabet with enough resources to effectively run a social media platform!

Oh, you didn't take that bait? Well... I guess I'll just give my kids a bottle of Whiskey!

This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is how conversations about important, active threats end up in shouting matches over fucking nothing.

Is Roblox as harmful for kids as alcohol? Absolutely not! Obviously not. It's not even comparable.

But by making that bold and outrageous claim the PR sockpuppet, propagandist, or unwitting tool thereof has effectively shifted the conversation away from Age Gating (and the fact that it is a thinly veiled expansion of mass surveillance) and back to an emotionally driven conversation over the incredibly subjective act of parenting.

So, to be clear, this isn't a choice between "age verification on computers" vs "unfettered internet access for children"

It's an attempt to force a massive expansion of mass surveillance onto everyone with children as a thin, flimsy excuse.

We can absolutely discuss what a safer internet for children might look like, but we can't discuss it in the same breath as "Age Verification" because they are entirely separate issues.

I do hope the PR sockpuppets, Propagandists, and unwitting tools thereof continue to show up in this thread and provide more examples of their techniques.

I feel like this is becoming a legitimately useful operation in how to spot someone arguing in bad faith.