While I have problems with the implementation of the social media ban for under 16s, I also think the reaction I've seen from progressives my age about it is incredibly frustrating.
I think there's a lot of deeply emotional and trauma-induced projection, surrounding the sense of community we found online as alienated queer and disabled people, at a time when there were fuck all provisions for young people, austerity, closing of youth centres, rampant homophobia and transphobia, in short an absolute alienation of people like us, coinciding with us having no political voice or power due to being teenagers/kids, and adults at the time who did have that power being completely incapable of understanding our situation, let alone advocating for us or representing our interests politically, because they'd never experienced anything like what we did.
The terror of kids not having the fallback/coping mechanism/sense of inclusion, representation, understanding and acceptance that we tie to our own online experiences as kids/teens is still the absence of those things within our society, and the underlying alienation and bigotry that the internet soothed for us. The idea that if you take away social media from kids, they suffer some kind of deficit, is entirely correlated to how deficient our society is and how reliant we've been on social media to step in where society hasn't.
As kids, especially LGBTQIA+ or disabled or neurodivergent kids, we were politically dispossessed, subject to bigotry and unfathomable alienation, because adults did not use their political power to uplift us, and the chasm illuminated by the prospect of a social media ban shows us that we have done fuck all, since before these kids were born, to fix that. It's all a matter of responsibility from my perspective. However you feel about it all, I think it undoubtedly raises the point that that societal deficit shouldn't fucking be there in the first place. If kids have to turn to social media to find inclusion, representation, a safe-feeling avenue for authentic self expression, we've monumentally failed our kids!!! Even if the ban doesn't happen, it doesn't change the fact we have to fucking fix this, because big tech shouldn't have the monopoly on the access kids have to those basic needs, it's fucking insane. We shouldn't ever cede that to being a cyberspace thing.
I do understand there being such an emotional reaction, I'm absolutely amongst the cohort who found representation, acceptance, community etc online; tumblr itself gave me the self-knowledge to be the only out trans kid in a school with thousands of kids, and was a respite to the transphobia, homophobia and ableism I faced day in day out. But the depth of my depression came from it dawning on me, throughout the leadup to and during the early years of Tory rule, that the system, the "grown ups", capital etc, were all treated with a defeatist, ambivalent, apathetic naturalisation.
"I'm apolitical", "it's just how it goes", " yeah it sucks but what can you do?", "I'm just an average person, I don't know about all this, I'll leave it to the politicians", " there's no point in engaging with politics, it's all the same", and then shortly after, as the mental health crisis really set in, seeing - finally - representation of depressed kids like myself on the news, but trotted out like a novel conundrum, a curious symptom but with nothing done about the root causes. No amount of patriotic propaganda could have touched the betrayal and abandonment I felt from the adults in our society, their lack of political imagination, their dereliction of responsibility, their disavowal of any stake or agency in the wellbeing of myself or kids like me.
To emotionally project from my own trauma, I think it's a far greater betrayal to the kids of today to frame their current predicament through our experience of the internet during our own teenage years. The difference being, we are now the adults in our 20s, 30s, who bear the responsibility of fighting for the wellbeing of the kids, and though it's well meaning to hope the internet could help them as it did us, that's actively harmful if we don't also fix our fucking society to meet kids needs offline. Social media sites owned by billionaires and engineered to addict and propagandise young people into fascists with no attention spans, less critical thinking skills and emotional engagement-driven reactions, cannot be a load-bearing pillar of the wellbeing of our kids. What the fuck are we doing?
As much as I found inclusion in such crucial ways, I also distinctly remember the bigotry I faced by the time I was 16 was being fed to my peers by the internet, too. Just as I finally began to feel we were making progress with visibility, representation and inclusion, and shifting the conversation on the basis of this... gamergate happened. I do not mean to compare the severity of the bullying before and after, but I will very pointedly say that the talking points leveled against me went from confused ignorance, to people parroting Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, hell even Idubbbz and Filthy Frank. Some of my friends were devastatingly transphobic towards me because the edgy, anti-woke content they watched made it seem cool, and because they turned to that side of social media to ameliorate their own social alienation - I could tell they did not even actually have a problem with me as an individual for being trans, or with trans identity itself, they were just lost in the sauce of the far right pipeline. Hell, one of them was a 4Chan-reading blackpilled incel misogynist who stalked me, attempted to blackmail me and commit suicide. And that was a decade ago. A couple years later I went to study at Plymouth University, the same year there was, you know, the teenage incel shooting. And I had to tell the adults around me what that even meant.
In that decade, the tech companies have perfected their Nazifying algorithms, and in the ~15 years since our generation found community online, the nature of these platforms has changed, the potential harms have changed, and we cannot forget that when we're faced with the emotional weight of how much of a lifeline the internet was to us, when adults and society weren't. We need to face what social media has become, and we need to fight to forge the society and be the adults that the kids need, that we didn't have.
And the beautiful irony of this is that, that sense of community we found online, the self-knowledge we could foster and gain, has raised us largely into young adults who are far, far more progressive than those we couldn't turn to as teens ourselves. I won't accept the argument that we're incapable of reshaping society to avoid repeating the alienation and mistreatment we faced, those tired old arguments that politics isn't ours to shape. While we all know how consolidated and unwelcoming politics can be, this isn't our first rodeo and we know how apathy goes - besides, if we tacitly submit to the idea that we can't fight domestically for the offline lives of kids to be full, how the hell can we tell ourselves its okay to leave that up to social media when we have far, far less autonomy over these companies than we do over our own domestic governance?
