Keep the Kiddies Safe

It started in South Australia and now seems to be catching on.

I'm talking about the move to impose age restrictions on access to social media.

South Australia wants to ban access to anyone under 14 years of age while the me too Prime Minister is looking to a national ban for those aged 14 or 16 (they aren't sure yet).

Surprisingly, some of the people pushing for this ban want to give children in this age group the right to vote, to mutilate their genitals or be exempt from criminal culpability.

If that's not interesting enough, I am bemused by what these ban advocates mean by 'social media'.

Does it simply refer to the usual suspects - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like? Or does it include any platform that allows individual accounts and interaction with other people?

If it's the latter, then you might as well rule children out of all digital access. After all, many websites (including this one), provide individuals with the ability to comment and engage with others.

Now I realise that social media is a sewer and that it can have a terrible effect on children and adults alike. There's something appealing about protecting our children from the worst excesses of an online mob.

In that sense, it's a popular policy.

However, we now live in a society where young people are being sexualised and manipulated by social justice warriors.

Children can opt-in to chop their God given organs off and take life changing drugs but now might not be able to use email.

It's an insane inconsistency and the devil really will be in the detail.

You see, by forcing age verification to use social media, it's in effect a defacto license to use the Internet. It means every account will need to be ID verified and that means the government will be able to track everything you say and do on the Internet.

And that identification verification process has to include you and me.

Unless we verify our social media accounts, how will the tech giants know if we are of government approved age or not?

And everything will have to be registered and confirmed with the government.

It's a massive surveillance scheme dressed up as a child protection measure.

We've seen this political trick before.

Successive governments have used safety or national security as an excuse to curb personal liberties. It's usually proposed as a temporary measure but they are rarely resolved.

Of course, we will also never know how much safer we are thanks to these impositions. Everything we are told as a result will be self-serving and impossible to disprove.

However, taking child-protection advice from any politician who endorsed banning children from going to school or forcing them to be deprived of external social interactions is a bit rich.

There are plenty of evils on the Internet - p*rn, gambling, violence (just to name a few). Censorship of social media is merely the tip of the iceberg.

'Protecting the kids' is justification to censoring the Internet of anything the government doesn't think you should see.

And that's a big step toward totalitarianism.

“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all."
Lois Lowry