Thess vs Internet Restrictions
So here's what's going on in the UK right now:
Our fucking PM has decided that not only will social media be entirely banned--
Hang on, I gotta check something.
...They didn't ban Tumblr. THEY DIDN'T BAN FUCKING TUMBLR FOR UNDER-16s. Because Tumblr doesn't fit in the "user-to-user platform" issue, while the "algorithm for recommended content" restriction is a grey area.
In all honesty? I'm pretty sure that anyone who knew about Tumblr while making that list left it alone because it already minimises or outright erases the existence of trans people. THERE; I SAID IT - I SAID WHAT I AM FUCKING SURE THIS STUPID BAN IS REALLY ABOUT ON THE SO-CALLED "MORALITY" SIDE.
...but I'll get back to that.
--Anyway, not only are they banning the major social media platforms for the under-16s, but they're putting a curfew on those same social media platforms for 16-17 year olds. Apparently this is to prevent an issue where kids who have been forbidden from the internet suddenly get unrestricted access to it and kind of go hog wild.
So ... see, there are a few reasons that I'm convinced this is all a bunch of bullshit to let companies have money and/or surveillance data and to keep kids from hearing about anything queer.
They know kids are going to get around this. They know. They can't ban VPNs - however hard they try. They can't patch up all of the ways that kids will use to get around facial recognition systems. If the authenticator wants credit card information? They just have to borrow their parents' card for five minutes - not even to buy anything so if they don't get caught sneaking it into or out of a wallet, the parents will never know. Hell, some parents might throw their card at their kids to shut them up. It's already happening - those same kids are already getting around those exact same restrictions as applied by the Online Safety Act. So they've already got kids getting around those restrictions and ... what, they're just going to add more of the exact same restrictions? But this just "obliges" - though I would say "enables" at this point - companies to take facial recognition data and purloined credit card information and store it on a file somewhere, to be used ... however (see also: why a whole lot of people in this country are trying to keep fucking Palantir out of our policing and health services).
If they were really interested in protecting kids - from bullying, from groomers, from scammers, from the actual dangerous shit that everyone can find online - do you know what they'd be doing? They'd be running mandatory Internet Safety classes at schools. They'd be encouraging parents to fucking teach their children. I'm going to belabour a point I have made several times before - when I was a kid, I had an above-average reading level for my age, a single working mother with a lot of potentially traumatising shit in her bookshelves, and thus a lot of time alone. My mother experienced that sort of shit with me early on, starting with the fucking news. I had Watership Down as a book-on-tape when I was, like, five or six. But she was there with me - to show me what was out there, to teach me how to deal with it, and to let me know that she was there if I had any questions or worries. The government is willing to nanny-state us into fucking fascism, but not willing to teach courses on how to actually protect kids from the dangers of the internet, nor to trust and encourage parents to teach and protect the children they chose to have.
And then I think about the recent Supreme Court ruling that trans women are not seen as women (and trans men not seen as trans men) in the eyes of the law, that only your assigned gender at birth counts. And then I add to that the fact that there's a bill coming down the pipe right now that will not only make it illegal for trans women to use the single-sex spaces designated to their actual gender, but also make it illegal for trans women who pass "too well" to use the single-sex spaces designated to their assigned gender at birth. (Obviously the same counts for trans men, but I notice no law ever talks about that really. Like, it's different layers of shitty.) So basically either there's a segregated "third space" for trans people to use, which on top of being absolute bullshit is also outing people ... or trans people just don't go out into public life.
Which then leads me to remember my life, a good chunk of which preceded the internet entirely. I didn't even know that the concept of asexuality existed when I started dating. I didn't do much with social media until right here on Tumblr in 2012 (I was more IRC and webrings, and then took a long break for my mental health because of fandom bullshit). I didn't know. So I made the assumption that everything around me encouraged - that everybody wants sex and that if you love someone, you must want to have sex with them. I think back on the pain I caused, both to myself and to my partners, just through not understanding that, and I cringe. Not out of self-blame; just out of a wish that I'd known, so I could spare us all that. If I'd had Tumblr or Reddit when I was a teen, if I could have known early that maybe my entire lack of any kind of crush on anybody I didn't know well enough to feel romantic towards meant something...
But I didn't. I didn't know why I only really "performed gender" when I was in the mood, either. And now a whole bunch of kids who don't jailbreak this bullshit aren't going to find out until ... probably eighteen. Because with homework and after-school jobs because of this fucking economy and everything else, when does a kid have time to do a little scrolling, particularly when phones are banned in schools? In the evening - either in after-dinner relaxy-times, when parents who really don't want their kids to know anything about anything but a cishet life might interfere, or before bed - or in bed with the phone hidden under the covers with them, like I had a book and a flashlight when I was a kid. Hell, most of these kids probably won't be given a smartphone anyway, because why would they need one with all the social media bans anyway? Which will cause its own problems because getting a functional brick that only takes calls isn't as easy as it sounds, and with payphones being more or less phased out of existence, how are kids going to get hold of parents in an emergency. This also means that kids won't get the help that smartphones and tablets can offer - alarms, note-taking software, calendar stuff. Even the most neurotypical of teens need that kind of thing. And let's face it - if given that reasoning for giving kids a smartphone, parents would say how they managed without one at their kids' ages and talk about how easy it is for a motivated and tech-savvy kid to get around a phone's restrictions. See point 1.
So this has been longwinded but the point is that this is bullshit. There are so many good reasons for kids to have access to the internet. Yes, there is scary stuff, but scary stuff is part of life, and people's definitions of "scary stuff" vary from person to person. It's better to teach kids how to deal with things than to build walls around them. Kids will stop coming to their parents if they find out something they have questions about if they had to jailbreak age restrictions to find it - and they will - and they'll be easy prey for misinformation, grooming, and scamming at that point. Made so by the exact restrictions these shitheads put in place to protect them from it.
Nanny State can go fuck itself; when did we decide that actual education was a bad thing?
(Oh, yeah - when educated people started being educated enough to see exactly how we're being fucked over every minute of every day.)
