Lazy parents shouldn't set policies.
Here we go again.
Apparently, the internet experience in the UK is deeply unpleasant right now. As someone that doesn't live in the UK, I don't have first hand experience of this, so note that this is all from research. The recent Online Safety Act in the UK essentially forced most platforms to enact an age-gate function for sites that contains "harmful content". This effectively forced websites to collect user information (in the forms of ID, credit card, biometrics, etc.) to make sure the person is a legal adult before accessing certain sites or adjust their content so they don't have any "harmful content". It's either an invasion of privacy or censorship, neither good. Right now, many UK residents report using VPN to surf the web to circumvent the hassle of dealing with all these new barriers.
We've seen this before. This is the same type of moral panic over phones, rap music, violent video games, dungeons and dragons, porn, integration, and if you go back far enough, ballroom dancing was once considered a source of corruption. Conservatives launching a crusade against anything they don't understanding isn't new, neither is their solution.
The appropriate solution is proper parenting. This includes having those tough conversation with the child, being transparent, setting boundaries and expectations, establishing trust, and providing the appropriate guidance on how to stay safe to help children and teens navigate the admittedly complicated online space. But they never want to do that. Too much work. Too much parenting. But they don't stop there. On top of refusing to do proper parenting, they want to push policies that caters to their anxiety at the expense of everyone else. This is the complete antithesis to good public health policies. Public health policies involves small contribution from a lot of people to achieve a greater good, like masking to prevent the spread of diseases or taxes to pay for universal health insurance. What these conservative moral-panic lazy parents want is the opposite: they want large sacrifices from everyone for the selfish desires of a small group of people.
As of right now, the same law destroying the UK is not active in the US, but we are on the precipice of it passing. Please call your senators and representative to vote no on the Kids Online Safety Act. Let's not pull a UK and ruin our online experience. Actually, just call your senators and representatives about any of your concerns really. Hold them accountable and let them know how you feel.
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
- Zora Neale Hurston
Stay Tuned,
MJ
