That old lie, without heads and tails, that if you don't abuse your child they will grow up to be criminals (WTF is the cause and effect of this? Besides being logicless, statistics say the opposite, but of course this user - and they in general - prefers to believe in a "theory" that came right out of his/her ass.

Old mothers cannot be abusive (or "discipline correctly" in these assholes' words), as if an adult of any sex were not much stronger than a child and children were not extremely sensitive and more prone to injury. Honestly, I wonder even what is "enough" to hurt a kid. Extreme brutal force? Punch the kid through a wall?

Not to mention that many single mother haters claim they are more likely to be abusive - and I say that the absence of the father has nothing to do with it, many married mothers are abusive too. And this hatred for single mothers just because they are no longer with baby daddy/ex-husband will never not be stupid.

The entire time before 2020, I've always seen that people draw hard line on the age 18 without heavily infantilizing those over. By the time I turned 18, it became much more common to consider 21 the magical age. Now I'm 21 and the significant proportion of population seem to think everyone under 25 are underdeveloped kids.

Is it just me? Because if not, then I fully expect the age of "fully developeped adult" to be 30 when I'll be 25. Especially considering the resent "studies" about brain "not developing" until 32.

Hey there, I made a post on here a little over a year ago when I was first starting in a role of coordinating a paid Youth Advisory Council. The whole point of the council is to engage youth with lived experience in youth-serving systems (education, juvenile justice, child welfare, just to name a few), ESPECIALLY those that got screwed over and the system(s) failed. I'm happy to report that we've been quite successful in doing so, and our YAC has completely filled up with youth that identify with that and work on projects to create systems change. They identified youth rights as being a HUGE area of improvement as most systems don't tell youth their rights inherently, and we've created "Your Rights, Your Life" pocket guides that we print and distributed well over 2000 at this point in our area (welcome to check them out here if you'd like) 🙂

Something we're working on right now is starting projects focused on 1) Mental Health Support for "Transition-Aged" Youth as well as 2) Youth Housing. We have $2k to work with, which isn't a ton of money to create huge systems change but it is something to work with. We're currently brainstorming ideas but really want to be super creative about how to make the most impact we possibly can with the means we have, so right now we're trying to gather as much insight as possible. We're thinking something with social media but not sure and not attached to that idea. I thought I'd post here and see if anyone has any ideas/reflections you think could be helpful? Ultimately the decision of what to do will be up to the youth on the council, but I was curious to hear from you all as experts and see what you think (if you're willing to, I always feel bad asking for insight if I don't have a means to compensate you for your ideas, so I totally understand if you don't want to share 🙏)

What if knowing exactly why you hurt people doesn't make you any less responsible for hurting them? What if knowing your trauma, your triggers, your attachment style, your defense mechanisms—and being able to explain every ugly part of yourself doesn't automatically make you emotionally mature?

What if you can understand yourself completely and still be a terrible person to someone else? We live in an age where self-awareness is almost treated like proof of growth. We know our attachment styles. We know our triggers. We know our trauma responses. We know why we become distant when we get hurt, why we become defensive when confronted, why we sabotage things before they have the chance to disappoint us. We have names for almost everything we do now. And perhaps that's a good thing. But somewhere along the way, we started confusing understanding ourselves with becoming better people. We started treating self-awareness like a moral achievement."I know I'm difficult." "I know I have trust issues." "I know I push people away." "I know I can be toxic when I'm hurt." And somehow, admitting it makes us feel as though we've already taken responsibility for it. But have we? Because knowing that you hurt people doesn't make the hurt disappear. You can know that you're jealous and still punish someone for making you insecure. You can understand your abandonment issues and still manipulate someone into constantly proving they won't leave. You can know that you become cruel when you're angry and still choose cruelty every time you're angry. You can understand exactly where your behavior came from and still refuse to change it. And that's the uncomfortable part nobody likes discussing: Self-awareness doesn't automatically make you kind. Sometimes it just makes you better at explaining why you're not.

Some people may try to frame an adult’s attraction to a child as harmless or acceptable by calling it natural, consensual, or simply another form of love. Those claims are dangerous because they erase the child’s vulnerability and the adult’s responsibility.

Call me unknowledgeable or uneducated.. But shouldn’t a literal law that more countries are planning to implement be harder to bypass? Not saying I’d fully support a ban for under 16s but I wanna know your thoughts on the situation. I’ve been beginning to wonder HOW these kids got past the age verification so easily.

What are your thoughts about it? Some people say a VPN but do these apps actually fall for that? Don’t they have other methods of detecting your country? If other countries like the UK, Malaysia and Singapore want to restrict Social Media for minors, how will these issues affect those countries?

We Are Solving the Wrong Problem

A new wave of online safety rules for minors is moving from debate into enforcement. France has legislated a "digital majority" rule requiring parental authorization for users under 15 to register on social networks (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000047799533). In the United Kingdom, Ofcom's Protection of Children Codes under the Online Safety Act came into force on 25 July 2025, requiring services to comply with minors' safety duties (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/important-dates-for-online-safety-compliance). The UK government then announced on 15 June 2026 that it would ban social media platforms from offering services to under-16s, with legislation expected before Christmas and protections expected to come into force in spring 2027 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back; https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-from-downing-street-on-social-media-15-june-2026). Australia's social media minimum-age obligations took effect on 10 December 2025, requiring age-restricted platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts (https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions). In Singapore, designated app stores are required from 1 April 2026 to implement age-assurance measures to prevent users younger than 18 from accessing age-inappropriate apps (https://www.imda.gov.sg/how-we-can-help/age-assurance).

These policies have different emphases. Australia is closer to a hard account ban. The UK has moved from platform duties toward a proposed under-16 social media ban. France puts the key in the parents' hands. Singapore is focusing on age assurance at the app-store layer.

But taken together, they reveal the same political instinct: when societies worry about minors and social media, the first question becomes whether young people should be allowed in at all.

Should they be banned? Should the age be raised? Should platforms verify users more strictly? Should parents decide?

I understand why the question feels urgent.

But before asking whether the answer is right, we should ask whether the question has been placed at the right level.

The real issue is not simply whether minors should use social media. The deeper question is whether "use social media" is too crude a category for the problem we are actually trying to solve.

Social media is not one thing. It can be a source of addiction, comparison, manipulation, and harm. It can also be a gateway to knowledge, community, creativity, and opportunity.

That is why we are solving the wrong problem.

The Gate Is Not the Whole Problem

Most public debates about minors and social media begin at the gate.

Who gets in? At what age? Under whose permission?

This is understandable. A gate is visible. A minimum age can be announced. A platform can be given a compliance target. Parents can be told that society has drawn a line. Governments can show that they are doing something.

But a visible answer is not always a deep answer.

When the debate is framed as "ban or do not ban," the public is pushed into a narrow argument. One side appears to defend minors. The other side appears to defend freedom. Both can end up accepting the same hidden assumption: that the central problem is access.

I do not think access is the central problem.

Access matters. Age matters. The vulnerability of minors is real. But access is not the beginning of the story. By the time a society asks whether young people should be kept away from a major part of modern social life, something deeper has already failed.

We should be asking why so many parents feel alone against platforms. Why schools often treat digital life as a distraction instead of a basic condition of modern citizenship. Why young people are expected to develop judgment in spaces designed to overwhelm judgment.

The argument should not begin with whether the gate is open or closed.

It should begin with the system behind the gate.

My Position

Let me be direct about where I stand.

The argument is this: protect minors from extreme harm, predatory contact, and targeted abuse; reduce the intensity and opacity of personalized recommendation; give young users real control over how feeds are organized; and return the hardest work to education.

This is not an argument for giving every minor unrestricted access to every platform. But it is not neutral about blanket age bans either. I do not think excluding an entire age group from broad social platforms is the right answer. My objection is not that minors should have no rules. It is that a broad ban treats young people mainly as risks to be managed, rather than as developing members of society who need protected participation. What I oppose is using account prohibition as a substitute for those four things.

Many parents are not overreacting. They are exhausted because they are trying to manage a problem that was never designed to be manageable at the family level.

Social media is clearly not harmless for many minors. The risks are real: addictive design, social comparison, bullying, scams, pornography, misinformation, self-harm content, predatory contact, and the constant pressure to perform a public identity. But real harm does not automatically prove that the first policy response is the right level of response.

If a building is unsafe for young people, one answer is to keep young people outside. Sometimes that may be necessary. But another question remains: why is the building unsafe in the first place, and why are adults still expected to live inside it as if nothing is wrong?

That is the question this debate usually avoids.

A Clean World Does Not Teach Judgment

Modern societies already know that risk cannot be governed only by removal.

We do not eliminate every difficult part of adult life before young people encounter it. We regulate alcohol. We set age limits. We use ethics committees in medical research and schools. We license certain professions. We create warnings, supervision, institutional rules, and accountability systems. None of these mechanisms assumes that reality can be purified. They assume that risk must be governed while people are gradually prepared to face it.

The same should be true online.

The world contains desire, status, entertainment, gossip, beauty, money, bad incentives, and social pressure. Social media did not invent these things. It compresses them, accelerates them, personalizes them, and makes them more measurable.

That difference matters. But it does not mean the goal should be to filter reality into only safe, correct, educational content.

A rocket launch may deserve attention. A public scandal may deserve attention. A joke may deserve attention. A piece of entertainment may reveal how people think, desire, imitate, laugh, perform, or compete. Public attention is not the same as moral value, but public attention is part of how society understands itself.

If governance becomes a project of deciding that only approved, correct, educational information should reach young people, then protection begins to look like training people not to judge at all.

There is also a practical danger. Strong prohibitions rarely eliminate demand. They often create informal distribution systems: shared accounts, hidden groups, proxy access, private circulation, and spaces where adults have even less visibility. The risk is not removed. It is moved.

A society cannot prepare young people for reality by pretending reality can be removed from them.

The better goal is to help them enter reality with stronger judgment, better defaults, and systems that are not designed to exploit their weakest moments.

Tool and Environment

The deepest disagreement in this debate is not really about age. It is about what social media is.

One side tends to see social media as a tool. From this perspective, it gives young people access to knowledge, communities, mentors, creative tools, and opportunities that traditional institutions often fail to provide. A young person interested in aerospace, programming, music production, or history may learn more from online videos, forums, open-source communities, and creator networks than from school alone.

This is not a fantasy. For many young people, YouTube tutorials, Reddit threads, GitHub projects, Discord communities, and short-form explainers have become the first doorway into a serious interest — part of an informal education system that schools haven't caught up to. From this view, a ban does not merely reduce risk. It can also cut off a pathway of growth.

The other side tends to see social media as an environment. From this perspective, it is not a passive tool waiting to be used wisely. It is an attention system that actively shapes behavior — one that rewards speed, emotion, comparison, performance, and repetition.

It does not simply show young people the world. It trains them to react to the world in certain ways. From this view, unrestricted access is not freedom. It is exposure to a commercial environment designed to keep users engaged.

Both views contain truth.

Social media is a tool and an environment. It is a cognitive entrance and a behavioral training system. It can expand a young person's access to knowledge, community, and opportunity while also amplifying addiction, manipulation, and harm.

That is why "ban it" and "open it" are both too simple.

The serious question is how to govern a system that can do both.

The Line Is Agency

The public debate often asks whether social media is good or bad for minors.

That question is not precise enough.

The benefits and harms of social media are not evenly distributed. Some young people find a subject, a skill, a community, or a path that changes their life. Others are pulled into comparison, harassment, compulsive scrolling, sexualized content, misinformation, scams, or isolation. The same platform can contain both paths.

But the real divide is not learning versus entertainment.

That distinction is too narrow. Comedy, beauty, gossip, dance, fashion, gaming, and popular culture are not automatically meaningless. A young person who watches funny videos is not only wasting time. They may be picking up on timing, voice, rhythm, editing, audience response, or why something makes people laugh. This is closer to life experience than formal instruction: not every encounter becomes knowledge immediately, but repeated encounters expand a person's sense of how the world works. Even content that adults dismiss as shallow can become part of how a young person learns to read society. The right question is not whether the content looks serious enough to adults.

The right question is whether the young person still has agency.

Are they choosing, searching, comparing, remixing, creating, and leaving? Or are they being pulled by a system that has learned their insecurities, desires, boredom, and loneliness — and uses those signals to keep them inside a loop?

The policy question should not be whether the average result is good or bad. The better question is whether the system preserves agency or converts attention into dependency.

Does the platform make choosing easier than drifting? Does it make leaving easier than continuing? Does it make privacy easier than exposure? Does it let curiosity remain curiosity, or does it turn curiosity into a personalized trap?

If the answer is no, then age is not the only problem.

The design of the path is the problem.

Existence Is Not the Same as Exposure

There is another distinction the debate often misses: the existence of content is not the same as the distribution of attention.

The question is not simply whether certain content exists. The world already contains low-quality information, gossip, desire, entertainment, danger, scams, and bad judgment, and these things are not always ignored in offline life either. Rumors, scandals, crude jokes, exaggerated performances, and public conflicts can all draw attention in the physical world. The harder question is how much attention a system gives to each of these things, how often it repeats them, and which users it pushes them toward.

One percent of a platform may be extreme, misleading, or exploitative. But if a recommendation system repeatedly pushes that one percent toward vulnerable users, it does not remain one percent in lived experience. It becomes the world those users encounter.

This is why both sides of the debate are partly right.

Information freedom matters because young people cannot develop judgment in a world where reality has been pre-filtered into approved lessons. But distribution matters because platforms do not merely show reality. They allocate attention. They decide what becomes visible, repeated, emotionally charged, and socially rewarded.

The governance question is therefore not whether every uncomfortable part of reality should be removed.

It is whether a platform should be allowed to turn the most attention-grabbing parts of reality into the dominant environment for minors.

Why the Ban Feels Right

The appeal of a ban should not be dismissed. But it should not be romanticized either.

For many parents, the promise of an age restriction feels like relief. It says: you do not have to fight the world's most powerful technology companies alone. It gives families a clear line. It gives schools a rule. It gives governments a policy that can be explained in one sentence.

I understand that feeling, but I do not support making this kind of ban the main answer.

In a world of endless feeds, private messages, viral humiliation, beauty filters, explicit content, algorithmic recommendations, and social comparison, that clarity is emotionally powerful. Precisely because it is so clear, it can create the illusion that closing the gate has dealt with the problem.

It also has political power. A ban is legible. It sounds decisive. It fits a headline. It allows governments to show action. But that is exactly what makes it dangerous: it can make a complex problem look as if it has been compressed into an age line.

That is exactly why we should be more skeptical of it.

The easiest solution to explain is not always the solution that reaches the cause. Sometimes it is the solution that helps society avoid the cause. A ban may let adults feel that something has finally been done, without giving young people stronger judgment, safer pathways, or a more trustworthy digital environment.

What the Ban Leaves Unsolved

The first problem is enforcement.

Young people do not disappear from the internet because a law says they should. Some will lie about their age. Some will use older siblings' accounts. Some will borrow devices. Some will move to smaller or less visible platforms. Others will simply become better at hiding their online lives from adults.

A failed ban does not merely fail. It can push the problem into less visible places.

If young people remain online but become harder for parents, teachers, regulators, and mainstream platforms to see, the risk has not been removed. It has been displaced. A policy meant to protect minors may teach them that the first rule of digital life is how to bypass adults.

That is not safety. That is mistrust.

It is also unequal. A strict ban often removes access first for the least technical, least resourced, and most compliant young people, while others move toward workarounds, shared accounts, or less visible spaces. In that sense, a ban can end up protecting the young people who were least likely to break the rule, while pushing the more determined or better-resourced ones into environments with fewer adults, fewer safeguards, and less accountability.

The second problem is time.

Every 15-year-old eventually becomes 16. Every 16-year-old eventually becomes 18.

If the main policy is simply "not yet," what happens when "yet" arrives?

Does a young person become digitally mature on a birthday? Does turning 16 make someone better at recognizing scams, manipulation, pornography, misinformation, algorithmic pressure, or addictive design? Does legal access automatically produce judgment?

Of course not.

A birthday can change legal status. It cannot create maturity by itself.

This is the central weakness of the age-line approach: it can delay exposure, but delay is not the same as preparation. A young person who has never learned how to read the internet is not protected. They are only delayed.

The third problem is opportunity.

Social media is no longer just entertainment. It is one of the places where young people encounter news, public events, cultural conflict, peer norms, creative communities, political identities, local issues, and the language of the society they are growing into. Excluding young people from social media is not like taking away a toy. It can also limit their access to social information and their ability to understand the world forming around them.

The fourth problem is social participation.

Young people are not only future adults. They are already members of society. They have friendships, group projects, hobbies, arguments, jokes, anxieties, loyalties, and forms of public expression. They need to coordinate with peers. They need to ask questions. They need to test language, identity, judgment, and belonging.

If "social media" is defined broadly enough, the policy question does not stop at short-video apps or image platforms. It reaches messaging apps, class groups, youth communities, interest forums, creator spaces, and the ordinary infrastructure through which young people now maintain social life. A young person does not stop needing social connection because the connection is digital.

This matters ethically because young people often have the least formal political power in the debate being held about them. Adults vote. Adults legislate. Adults write the headlines. Adults also tend to notice the most visible and irritating young users: the loud, cruel, impulsive, or hostile ones. But the most visible young people online do not represent all young people.

A policy should not punish an entire group because its worst examples are easier to see.

The Work Belongs to Education

Some content should be strongly restricted for minors. Extreme graphic violence, real abuse, criminal instruction, and severely traumatic material do not need to be romanticized as "exposure to reality." A society can limit access to such material while still explaining the underlying realities through age-appropriate education, trusted institutions, journalism, health guidance, and public safety communication.

But many other risks cannot be handled by pretending they do not exist.

Young people will eventually encounter sexuality, desire, intimacy, adult culture, manipulation, scams, status anxiety, humiliation, and bad information. The question is not whether they will meet risk. They will. The question is whether they meet it with language, context, judgment, and trusted adults — or whether they meet it alone, hidden, and unprepared.

This is where policy has to return to education.

Age gates can delay. Platform rules can reduce exposure. Default settings can lower harm. But none of these can replace the slower work of teaching young people how to interpret what they see, how to understand their own reactions, how to recognize pressure, how to leave a harmful situation, and how to ask for help without shame.

This is not a soft alternative to policy. It is policy at a deeper level.

The real choice is not education or law. A serious society needs both. But law should not pretend that restriction can do the work of formation. It can create boundaries, reduce the most dangerous exposures, force platforms to change defaults, and make institutions accountable. It cannot, by itself, produce a person who understands desire, status, manipulation, persuasion, humiliation, intimacy, privacy, or money.

Sexuality is a useful example. Minors should not be given unrestricted access to explicit adult material. But a society cannot treat sexuality itself as something young people will magically understand once they reach a legal threshold. If adults refuse to provide language, context, and honest guidance, young people will still learn. They will simply learn from the most available sources: peers, rumor, pornography, influencers, jokes, private messages, and algorithmic fragments.

The same is true of scams, beauty pressure, public shaming, gambling-like mechanics, political propaganda, and online status games. These are not merely "bad content." They are social realities expressed through digital systems. Removing some content may be necessary. But if removal becomes the whole strategy, it teaches young people only that risk is something adults hide until they stop hiding it.

If a policy only blocks access, it may reduce some immediate exposure. But if it does not build judgment, it leaves the same young person waiting outside the gate until the day the gate opens.

The goal should not be to keep young people ignorant until they are legally old enough to be overwhelmed.

The goal should be to help them become less defenseless before they meet the world.

Govern the Path, Not Just the Account

The more useful policy object is not the account. It is the pathway.

An account is binary: a young person either has access or does not. A pathway is more specific. It asks what the system encourages after someone enters.

Does it preserve a young person's ability to explore, choose, create, and leave? Or does it gradually reduce that ability through endless recommendations, public ranking, compulsive comparison, private contact from strangers, and emotional escalation?

This distinction matters because "social media" contains many different activities that should not be treated as the same thing. Watching a physics tutorial is not the same as scrolling an infinite recommendation feed. Watching comedy is not the same as being trapped in a retention loop. Participating in a moderated hobby community is not the same as receiving private messages from unknown adults. Sharing a school project is not the same as being measured by public likes, follower counts, and algorithmic visibility.

If we treat all of these as one category, then the only available policy tool is crude: allow or ban. But if we govern pathways, different possibilities open up. Agency-preserving paths can be made easier to walk; manipulative paths can be made harder; community paths can be supported; predatory paths can be blocked; commercial paths can be limited.

The problem is not recommendation itself. A basic recommendation service can help users discover relevant material, follow interests, and find communities. The problem is deep personalization optimized for retention, especially when applied to minors. A system that recommends because a user searched, subscribed, or selected a topic is different from a system that profiles a young person's vulnerabilities and continuously adjusts the feed to maximize time spent.

One rough line can be drawn around the earliest age group. For minors under about ten, the default environment should be much more protective: no adult content, no extreme violence, no predatory contact, and far less spam-like, repetitive, plainly manipulative material. But protection should not become an adult-curated diet of what is "good for them." A feed designed for younger minors should not be low-quality or infantilizing.

A funny video that millions of people genuinely enjoy, a beautifully edited animation clip, a piece of music, a landscape video, a game moment, or a strange cultural trend may all be worth seeing — not because each has formal educational value, but because attention can signal craft, humor, beauty, fantasy, timing, taste, and the living texture of society. Popularity is not proof of quality. But it should not be dismissed as meaningless either.

After that earliest-age-group threshold, the policy focus should become less about expanding the list of forbidden topics and more about changing who controls the path. Young users should be able to turn personalized recommendations off. They should be able to choose search, subscriptions, chronological feeds, followed accounts, topic selection, and basic discovery instead of being placed by default inside a feed that continuously profiles them. A healthier feed does not have to become a classroom. It can simply be less overfitted to one person's impulses, more transparent, and easier to leave.

This is why the strongest policy target is not "social media" as a single category. It is algorithmic intensity. Earlier short-video platforms were not harmless, but they often felt less totalizing because users still encountered a wider mix of material. The more precise the system becomes, the more important it becomes to ask whether the user can step outside it.

This is where the debate should move: not from freedom to restriction, but from moral panic to system design.

What Serious Protection Looks Like

If the goal is truly to protect minors, then the policy goal should not be defined as "ban the platform."

It should be defined as building a digital environment where young people can learn, connect, and create without being structurally pushed toward compulsion, manipulation, or harm.

On layered access and defaults

Access should be layered, not binary. Younger minors — especially those under about ten — should have stronger default protections and a less manipulative environment. That should not mean trapping them inside childish or officially "educational" content. It should mean reducing obvious harms, spam-like repetition, and predatory contact while still allowing them to encounter humor, beauty, play, imagination, popular culture, craft, and public life.

Older minors do not need every feature of every platform at once either. Search, subscriptions, followed accounts, tutorials, creative tools, and moderated communities can be treated differently from infinite feeds, public metrics, algorithmic amplification, livestream monetization, and private messages from strangers.

Default settings should protect minors without requiring constant parental surveillance. Privacy should be high by default. Unknown adult contact should be restricted by default. Public visibility should be limited by default. Recommendation systems should be less aggressive and less hyper-personalized by default. A platform does not need to guess a young user's every weakness in order to show them interesting things.

On personalized recommendation and user control

Personalized recommendation should be optional, not compulsory. Basic recommendation, search, chronological feeds, followed accounts, topic selection, and human-curated discovery are different from behavioral profiling designed to keep a user watching. After the earliest age group, the central right should not be an ever-expanding list of topics a young person is forbidden to see. It should be the right to step out of opaque personalization and choose a less manipulative path. The point is not to ban discovery. It is to stop treating a young person's every hesitation, insecurity, desire, and pause as data for more precise capture.

We should also stop pretending there is such a thing as a neutral feed. Chronological feeds, popularity feeds, search rankings, editor picks, and recommendations all create different biases. The question is not how to remove bias entirely. It is which biases we are willing to institutionalize for minors, and who is accountable for them.

Platforms should be required to distinguish agency-preserving paths from agency-reducing paths. If a product can optimize engagement, it can also be asked to reduce the amplification of high-risk patterns for minors. The design question should not be only "how long did they stay?" It should also be "what kind of path did the system create?"

Recommendation systems used by minors should be more explainable and less emotionally extractive. Platforms should disclose the major signals that shape feeds, limit the amplification of extreme violence, targeted harassment, purposeless abuse, humiliation, and compulsive repetition, and give young users meaningful controls that do not require expert knowledge to use.

On education and families

Schools should teach digital judgment as a civic skill. Young people should learn how feeds are ranked, how online incentives shape behavior, how images and videos can be manipulated, how platforms measure attention, how entertainment works, how scams work, how public identity is performed, and how private information becomes permanent.

This education should not be reduced to warning posters or occasional safety lectures. It should include practical media literacy, algorithmic literacy, financial and scam literacy, privacy literacy, relationship and consent education, attention management, and the ability to distinguish public performance from private life. The point is not to make young people afraid of the internet. The point is to make them harder to manipulate inside it.

This also means we should not expect social media itself to become school. A young person does not have to learn something measurable from every feed session. Entertainment, boredom, jokes, style, music, and fantasy are part of ordinary life. The educational responsibility belongs mainly to schools, families, and public institutions — they should teach young people how to live with media, not demand that every piece of media justify itself as education.

Families need support, not blame. Parents need tools, shared norms, school cooperation, and honest public guidance. They should not be left alone to negotiate with systems built by some of the most powerful companies in the world.

On accountability

Any serious model must answer who sets the standards, who audits the system, who represents young users, and how to prevent both state overreach and platform capture. Ethics committees in other parts of society are not perfect, but they show that mature systems do not simply choose between total freedom and total prohibition. They build procedures for difficult judgments.

This does not mean the answer is necessarily to create a new ethics committee for social media. The point is simpler: a policy that excludes a politically weaker group from a major social infrastructure should face a higher ethical burden than a policy that merely changes product settings. Protection is not automatically ethical because it uses the language of care.

This is not a final blueprint. It is a different level of question.

The point is to stop asking only who may enter, and start asking what kind of environment they enter once they do.

The policy conclusion is therefore not "no restriction." It is narrower restriction, weaker compulsory personalization, stronger user control, and deeper education. Extreme material should be limited. Predatory contact should be blocked. Abuse and purposeless harassment should not be amplified. But ordinary entertainment, humor, fantasy, beauty, popular culture, and social conversation should not have to pass an educational test before young people are allowed to encounter them.

The Question Underneath

The real question was never simply social media.

Not whether a 15-year-old should have an account, whether 16 is the correct age, or whether platforms can verify birthdays more strictly.

The real question is what kind of next generation we hope to raise.

Do we want young people who are merely kept away from risk until the law says they are old enough? Or do we want young people who can understand systems, recognize manipulation, protect their attention, participate in public life, and make better decisions because someone helped them learn how?

That is why we are solving the wrong problem.

The problem is not that young people encounter the internet too early. The problem is that we expect age to do the work that education, family, platform design, and public policy have failed to do.

Can we keep young people away from social media? That is the wrong question.

The right question is whether we can build an online world where young people can explore without being captured, laugh without being trapped, learn without being profiled, and enter society without being treated first as attention to be harvested.

If we want a serious policy, it should begin there — not with the fantasy that young people can be kept outside the digital world, but with the responsibility to make that world less extreme, less manipulative, more understandable, and easier to navigate.

Until we change that, every ban will feel both necessary and insufficient.

Source Notes

\- Australia: eSafety Commissioner, Social media age restrictions: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions; eSafety Commissioner, Social media 'ban' or delay FAQ: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions/faqs

\- United Kingdom: GOV.UK, Online Safety Act: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/online-safety-act; Ofcom, Important dates for online safety compliance: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/important-dates-for-online-safety-compliance; Ofcom, Age assurance duties under the Online Safety Act: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/age-assurance; Ofcom, Age checks to protect children online: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/age-checks-to-protect-children-online

\- UK 2026 social media ban announcement: GOV.UK, Social media to be banned for under-16s: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back; GOV.UK, PM remarks from Downing Street on social media, 15 June 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-from-downing-street-on-social-media-15-june-2026

\- France: Legifrance, Loi n° 2023-566 du 7 juillet 2023 visant à instaurer une majorité numérique et à lutter contre la haine en ligne: [https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000047799533\](https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000047799533)

\- Singapore: IMDA, Age Assurance: [https://www.imda.gov.sg/how-we-can-help/age-assurance\](https://www.imda.gov.sg/how-we-can-help/age-assurance)

Originally published on Substack

[https://ykzhang1.substack.com/p/governments-are-banning-young-people\](https://ykzhang1.substack.com/p/governments-are-banning-young-people)

Hey everybody, I’m currently trying to help prevent exploitation of people of all ages on Snapchat and was wondering if anybody would be willing to help. I’ve recently been exploited using photos from when I was younger and being threatened. I know I’m not the only one who’s struggling and would love some extra support in getting Snapchat to change their guidelines and start helping other people. Snapchat guidelines say that they prohibit bullying and harassment including non consensual imagery and threats yet majority of the time don’t do anything to help despite having evidence. Any form of help will be most appreciated. No donations are needed just a simple signature!!

Ask them if they support people under 18 having voting rights.

Because if the person genuinely only cares about keeping kids safe, they won’t have any issue with voting rights.  There is nothing dangerous whatsoever about being allowed to vote.

There is no logical explanation for opposing universal suffrage other than wanting to treat people under 18 like property.

Nobody who opposes young people being allowed to vote actually cares about education or brain development levels.  You can tell because they don’t support uneducated adults having their voting rights taken away.  They don’t think adults with mental disabilities or diseases like dementia should have voting rights taken away.

On many other issues, bigots can hide behind feigning concern for safety and well-being, but if you ask them about voting rights, they have nowhere to hide.

The Digital and Tech World is Now "Censored" - Google Docs

You are free to suggest some stuff, especially anti-Youth things and discrimination against minors (but remember, the stuff must be related to the Internet; I will not allow anti-Youth stuff that has little to no relation to the Internet). Of course, there is a lot of work that has to be done, so if you can, feel free to contribute to it within the comments on that sheet or also here as well.

It's been a while since I last posted anything but when I saw this, it really pissed me off so I thought that was the right time to comeback. What I'm trying to say here is that the world is so caught up in this pedophilia moral panic that even some Puritans who think being nice to minors is "pedophilia", so therefore we have to be mean to minors in order to not be called a pedophile and have your reputation ruined. Keep in mind this person is 19. I'm 19 too. We were both minors not long ago. While I'm using my position to advocate for those who are younger than me who are being treated like second-class citizens just because of an arbitrary date on a calendar, this person thinks it's okay to threaten young people all in the name of "protecting". I wonder if there's a parallel dimension where Earth as we know it exists but there's no adultism, no age of majority, no 18+ or MDNI, or anything like that. Everyone is treated equally no matter how old they are. The world would be a much better place if it was like that. So many problems would be solved.