> There's nothing inherently problematic about DMs.
You should definitely talk to some women. They generally have a drastically different, dick filled, experience with DMs. Multiply that by the felonies involved with interacting with a minor, the legal requirements of COPPA, and the PR problems of things like "grooming groups found on <platform>", and the problems become more clear.
Of course, the real issue is parents giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.
That the wider world of millions of adults should have an infantalized version of internet be their only option unless they completely sell their privacy down the river in the most fundamental sense because some parents can't watch over their children's digital access is a grotesque justification for mandatory age verification.
This aside from the question of just how fragile many minors are if "exposed" to things like porn.
Anecdote of course, but I was able to view all kinds of dirty stuff well before I was of legal age in my country, and who can forget the now legendary rotten.com website, as just one example. None of this made me or any of my many friends at the time turn into raging pedophile serial killer schoolshooter psychopaths.
These sorts of proposals are in part a rehashing of the utterly idiotic blame game against video games for cases of truly disturbed minors who ended up committing mass murders in the past.
Some people are just going to end up badly disturbed by default or much more systemic causes like a bad home. A mass sanitization of all possible sources of content and media applied to everyone unless they consent to X or Y heavy intrusion won't change that.
More anecdote too but worth noting that of the friends of mine from childhood and high school who did later turn into really bad apples, all but one had come from broken or dysfunctional homes and social landscapes. The only exception to that was one friend from a good family who later ended up serving over a decade for kidnapping and armed robbery. He had made friends with a pretty rough crowd well before that. In all cases, seeing some porn before they were adults or seeing other nasty online content had only the most absurdly dubious connection to anything about their future conduct.
If anything, I see rules for content control in minors as a very convenient step by government to kill two birds with one stone: On the one hand, implement more social control, surveillance and normalization of restricting access to unpredictable media (dangerous that for government bureaucrats who want to control narratives). On the other hand, offset blame for systemic problems in a society on "dangerous online content" instead of government's own potential failures in managing a legal system, mental health services or economic administration and etc.
I agree, but I also don't think there's been a time in history, other than the last 10 years or so, where iPads and cellphones have become completely norm for 8 year olds to teens, with constant access to unrestricted internet. I don't think a reasonable conclusion could be made from the little time this has been the case.
> Of course, the real issue is parents giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.
I agree and yet blaming negligent parents doesn’t help the children. These sorts of mandates don’t make any sense when I think about my kids, who have devices quite locked down. These sorts of mandates make a lot of sense when I think about all the kids who have unfettered access to the worst parts of the internet.
You should definitely talk to some women. They generally have a drastically different, dick filled, experience with DMs. Multiply that by the felonies involved with interacting with a minor, the legal requirements of COPPA, and the PR problems of things like "grooming groups found on <platform>", and the problems become more clear.
Of course, the real issue is parents giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.