This is a little more political than my usual posts, don't interact and just scroll if you disagree with me.
With the under-16 social media ban likely coming into action soon in the UK, as an under-16, I feel as if I need to talk about it.
I am under the age of sixteen. I am an autistic teenager, I am home educated because being in school was actively harmful toward both my physical and mental health. I have online friends who I talk to through social media. I'm at an incredibly low point with my mental health in my life, and social media is something that has helped me immensely through fandom culture, community, and characters. I've made friends, I've socialised, I've picked up healthier coping mechanisms, I've formed good opinions.
The government wants to take this away from me. They want to take away my power, my right to speak as a human being. They want to take away my social life under the guise of "protecting" me. They say that I should "go outside", I should interact with "real" people, I should "make more friends."
There is nowhere for me to go.
I live in the countryside, 5+ miles away from any towns and anywhere where anybody my age lives. The bus prices are increasing rapidly to the point where I can't afford to go anywhere, and my parents can't drive me anywhere most of the time because they're working to make enough money to try keep me and my siblings alive. Even if I did have easy access to any towns or public spaces, nowhere is welcoming to me. I'm seen as "threatening" because I'm a teenager. I can't help how old I am. I can't go into parks or shops without being given dirty looks by adults. There isn't anything for me to do that doesn't cost an ungodly amount of money that I nor my parents simply don't have. Not to mention that I'm disabled, and physically cannot handle being outside and interacting with people every day. I don't have very many friends in real life to start with.
Taking away social media will take away my ability to interact with the communities I've joined and communicate with the friends I've made. The UK government wants to take away my power to speak in a digital age. They say it's in the name of "protecting the kids", but we all know it's just control. They want to control me and mould me into a cisgender, straight, neurotypical teenager who obeys and never speaks out.
I will not stand for it. I am a person, as much as anybody older than me is. I deserve the right to have what little community I can, I deserve the right, as a disabled person, to have friends. I deserve the right to access the resources to discover who I am. I deserve the right to have access to mental health support. I deserve the right to have entertainment. I deserve the right to the world.
The ban won't work. Children will find a way to bypass it, as they always have. It's all in the name of "mental health", but we know it'll only make things worse and take away what little support most children have. The internet is a beautiful, intricate thing, a blossoming part of our world that has been a part of global culture for decades. Taking that huge part of OUR world away from us is a horrific thing to do. But they don't care. They don't care what we want, they don't care how we feel. They want to take away our voices.
Please, speak out, even if you don't live in the UK. We, the children, don't want this to happen. We, the children, don't want our communities taken away. We, the children, want to speak out against being silenced. The government may not care, but we have to speak.
I felt like I should mention; obviously the social media ban isn't the WORST thing happening in the world right now, but I wanted to talk about it and why it's pretty fucking bad. Fuck ICE, fuck Trump, fuck Reform, fuck Israel.
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