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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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My main problem with the proposal is that it intends to make the internet safe for children.

This is both impractical (there are tons of sites not suitable for kids for any number of reasons, many in foreign jurisdictions) and more generally not desirable (else we would need an age check in front of the motte as well, as well as a small fraction of Wikipedia).

Generally, ten year olds do not buy their own devices, their parents buy them for them. Let them take care to lock the devices down (using whitelisting), if they feel the need to buy them at all.

By the time kids are old enough to circumvent the blockers, I would argue your best bet is to have raised them to have raised them to take enough care of their own mental well-being that they will not search for videos of beheadings or porn acts which would disturb them, nor join every weird cult whose website they stumble upon.

If kids share porn in the schoolyard, the way to get rid of it would be to ban devices with unrestricted internet access from school.

"Think of the children" has long been a rallying cry of people opposing the free internet. Once these laws are in place, the legislative will notice that there are other countries which do not feel the need to follow US laws. The next step is then to pass laws to force ISPs to block these evil foreign websites. Once that infrastructure is in place, one might as well use it to block copyright infringement. Or hate speech.

Over the years, we have had moral panics about kids being exposed to rock and roll, satanic dungeon and dragons role playing, violent video games, et cetera. (Neither is this new: Socrates was charged with corrupting youth back in his day.) Given how these things turned out, I am not overly worried about a teenager being corrupted by seeing a sex video after searching for it.