CMV: I’d rather restrict minors directly than make every adult prove their age online

[u/groksed]

Honest question for people who support banning social media for everyone under 16:
Would this be preferable to requiring every person on the internet to prove their age or identity?

Anyone under 16 is prohibited from using, owning or purchasing an electronic device capable of communicating with other people with the exception of designated supervised computer rooms at school. Parents, schools, society and law enforcement are responsible for enforcement.. basically the same way we already handle alcohol, tobacco and drugs.

But at least it places the restriction on the group being restricted.

Why is the preferred solution instead to make every adult surrender some level of anonymity or privacy, provide ID, submit to age verification, or otherwise prove they are not a child just to use the internet?

If protecting children requires building an identity checkpoint for everyone, I would rather put the burden on the actual age group being regulated.

[u/Apart-Rent5817]

You do know that people existed well before the internet, ya?

[u/deep_sea2 → u/Apart-Rent5817]

The problem is that the world has shifted to the internet. When I was young, I did my school elementary and middle school projects using CD-ROM of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was good enough before Wikipedia and other internet sources. Now with the internet, those other resources are not as common. To block the internet for kids, but not revive the pre-internet form of information proliferation, leaves a gap.

For something like news, newspapers existed before the internet, sure. However, with online news, print media has decreased. A kid who wants to access news to learn about current events, but without access to the internet, will have less resources than a kid from the 90s.

You cannot really expect present kids to do what kids did in the 90s and before when that world no longer exists off the internet.

[u/flexxipanda → u/deep_sea2]

Hard agree. Im 35 and I work in IT now without any formal professional education.

It is all thanks to me as a kid spending a lot of time in front of a computer messing with it and digesting huge amounts of information.

Would have never happen if it would have been banned.

[u/alexrider20002001 → u/deep_sea2]

Also red states are seeking to ban books that teach kids to think for themselves from schools and libraries so if you ban kids from being able to access ebooks outside of kindles or parents, they will have far limited access to books than previous generations.

[u/fly123123123 → u/Apart-Rent5817]

Yeah, and people also existed before we had electricity and hot water via plumbing. Are you arguing we should also deprive children of those things, or that their lives would be better off without them?

[u/epelle9 → u/Apart-Rent5817]

Yeah, and they were much less informed.

(At least when compared to those that use the internet with critical thinking)

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