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.

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.

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.

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.

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.