@ptoothfish

And the kids that have made friends from all over the world on social media,because people don't care if they are disabled, or what they look like. Unlike the kids that bully them at school.

Us introverts, who found it hard to talk to people, but thrive with a keyboard and that extra time to create the right sentences?

Or the rural kids, that don't have friends nearby?

Or the kids that have family overseas or far away, that they were keeping in touch with via social media?

Or kids that get information in their native language and follow events in their home countries.

The kids running businesses on social media, gaining life skills?

Or the kids following their heros, gaining information, having mental health and other medical organisations they can easily reach out to?

Kids taking leadership and running environmental, social, volunteer groups, promoting their bands, running events, and coaching others?

Adults making decisions have no idea how kids use social media, let alone how it benifits or harms them.

The Australian u16 ban was pushed by an advertising company and 32 global brands.

Did not care about kids, just wanted them back watching tv and radio, so they could consume advertising they controled.

They also owned AI age verification software to sell.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/09/36-months-teen-social-media-ban-big-tech-brands/

@ptoothfish

It makes an incredulous old bastard like myself suspect that this really isn't about nurturing and protecting children at all.

If I was cynical, I'd say that Zuck and Meta and Microsoft want to know exactly who's clicking so they can charge more for targeted advertising and that local, state, and federal cops want even more specific results to their subpoenas.

@ptoothfish
Also whatever children1 didn't have, and whatever is to be thrust upon children2, will be affecting different children.
If there were notional children0 they grew up into world1 not into the world3 that children2 are heading towards.

And world3 already seems to have substantial differences from previous ones.

@ptoothfish

A school teacher and I think it was Michigan made her class tech free for half the year because she had grown tired, constantly fighting the distractions of mobile devices texting the plagiarism so on and so forth.

So she would collect all the phones the kids had conduct the class with paper and pencil. It was an AP English class.

The kids loved it. They loved the ability to focus and to interact with each other instead of the phones.

@ptoothfish I dunno I see walkable cities green spaces etc being funded where I am.

Also much stricter on speed limits and clean air than used to be making roads safer. Many roads near us are pedestrianised. Lots of anger from car drivers but safer for kids to play.

@ptoothfish If kids now had the childhoods of gen X and elder millennials, the people calling to a return to innocent years that never existed would be calling them thugs running amok, and for long prison terms for shoplifting and vandalism.

The loudest people shouting for this lived blessed suburban or countryside childhoods, with lots of green spaces and horse riding lessons, they never experienced the city childhood, where schoolyards were tarmac and playgrounds and football fields were sold off and built on, while kids were left with brown field sites, bombed out buildings to play in that were never rebuilt, rotting spaces that used to be factories or train tracks, or used to be home to prefabs that still had the concete based amid the scrub. Places where the ground crunched with hidden glass that we were told not to play, but went because there was nothing else, the parks were sold so the only other option was to play on the roads where we'd suck in leaded exhaust fumes from passing cars and be subjected to unearned hostility, shouts of abuse for being too loud from boomers without kids. And then there are the absentee parents, working long hours, needing us to have house keys as kids were released at half three and parents at five, or later, leaving them fending for themselves...

@ptoothfish Damn, you beat me to it.

https://todon.eu/@disorderlyf/116755051262671184

@ptoothfish this is so much more articulate than me just shouting about how stupid it is.

Going to store this in long term memory as a point of discussion when someone takes a moderate uninformed position and attempts to agree that it is a good idea to censor the internet "for the kids"