It's not so easy to prove harm from internet access.
There are studies that suggest social media can harm adolescent mental health[1] but there are also studies that suggest the magnitude is small enough that we don't really know.[2]
It needs more study (and it sounds like what we really need is more transparency from big tech so that it can be better studied).
For an actual argument against KOSA I would say it doesn't at first glance look like it will target issues that are likely more important: peer pressure, bullying, suicide promotion/romanticization, etc on social media.
Edit: Having spent more time reading the KOSA bill (thankfully linked by another commenter) it does actually appear to try to target the biggest known issues to help minors. Some of the bill seems reasonable.
Except it isn't really an argument, so much as a question. In your example, the good created by eliminating polio are blatantly obvious to anyone who knows what polio is. For your analogy to hold, then the answer to the question posed must be equally blatantly obvious. This doesn't seem at all obvious to me, so fails as a rebuttal.
It's absolutely an argument that filters are unnecessary. It's not a good one. It combines survivor bias with the false implication that today's internet is the same one we had in the 90s; it is not.
I'm opposed to KOSA - I think vague appeals to "preventing harm" are going to be weaponized against queer kids in red states and cause real harm... but again, I think there are far better arguments against it than the "we came out fine" one anti-vaxers and corporal punishment advocates trot out.
> Entire generations have grown up with the unfiltered internet at this point
To be fair, if you look at statistics around gen z you can see that there definitely are negative consequences of internet access (along with amazing benefits of course).
I don't support this measure or measures like it, but some of action should probably be taking considering the skyrocketing amounts of depression.
> To be fair, if you look at statistics around gen z you can see that there definitely are negative consequences of internet access
I haven't seen any such data. It's hard to separate generation effects and look purely at the effects of internet access in any sort of valid way.
You're probably thinking of studies around social media use. It isn't clear to me that internet filtering will combat any of what makes social media use such a mental health risk for teens.
> I'm not sure what you mean by drawing the distinction between internet use and social media use.
They're two different terms that mean different things. Just because something is true for squares doesn't mean that it's true for rectangles even though squares are rectangles. Using the correct words matter because otherwise you are spreading misinformation and confusion.
