Banning Kids from Social Media Won’t Keep Them Safe | What young people really need is to learn how to navigate the internet responsibly

There are kids that still smoke, and drink. Banning them from doing so is still the right thing to do.

I agree that everyone should be taught to better interact with the internet, but not restricting access to social media and other tools from children is silly.

It’s a good point, except that I don’t know anyone who knows how to navigate responsibly nor a set of principles one could really teach that would achieve that.

There are certain activities that just don’t seem, by observation and experience, to have a reasonable way to “teach” new entrants to the activity how to do it “responsibly”.

I’m willing to consider it, but has the The Walrus considered that a “responsible internet navigation” education might be akin in scope and scale to, say, a driver’s license or a PAL, or an electrician’s license or even a hairdresser’s? The assumption seems to be that it can be laid at the feet of unregulated private home instruction, but I don’t know if that assumption is justified.

It could be that a responsible education in the internet as envisioned would *overall* be more intrusive than a flat ban from the perspective of how much the government is interacting with the individual.

I think we’re trying to solve this problem the wrong way. We should really be banning platforms that aren’t moderating their own content, it’s not about banning free speech but banning hateful or inciting violence ones.

I grew up in the age of FaceBook and MSN being absolutely new. I remember the days of signing on and off to get your crush to notice you. I remember when you would write comments on people’s Facebook “wall”. Social Media used to be a place to connect.

However, the landscape has changed and the content being pushed on the platforms are absolutely insane. There is porn and even violence that are being posted. Countless racist comments about immigration in Canada. The comments almost always look like bots. Twitter, everyone got a blue checkmark so you assume they’re real people with real comments when they’re not.

I can get past places like 6ixBuzz and Rebel News posting bullshit but not when they’re promoting hateful and politically extreme discourse.

This is like saying we should “gamble responsibly”. Gambling is never responsible, the house always wins.

Children don’t have the brain development to manage the behaviours responsibly, hard enough for most adults.

It’s a strange world where instead of teaching children about something that’s dangerous, we block them from it entirely. Then when they reach adulthood they have no knowledge or experience to deal with that danger.

The better solution would be for parents to actually parent their children. Sit with their kids while they use social media, explain about scams, strangers, privacy, manipulative algorithms etc. My 8yo can identify a scammer on Roblox every time. How do I know? Because I’m sitting right beside him and he tells me.

The kids would be a lot better off if the adults in their lives spent more time with them.

Unfortunately people are just painfully misinformed on this issue. Newly discovered negative effects that social media can have on kids do exist, but acting like that means it is universally bad for every kid in every context is just blatantly false and not what these studies or the people studying this have concluded. It’s like looking at the negative effects gaming can have on some kids in some contexts and deciding that we need to ban video games from them all.