Australian Ban on Social Media Will Make Everything Worse!!!

  Blender Dumbass
November 29, 2024

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#Australia #SocialMedia #Kids #Paternalism #Law #Philosophy #Freedom #LetGrow #FreeRangeKids

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News came to me via Mastodon ( a Free / Libre Social Media platform ) that apparently Australian government just banned Social Media to a certain demographic of people and the consensus is that it is apparently a good thing. Social Media tends to be very bad these days. Due to enshitification and mass surveillance of platforms such as Facebook and Ex-Twitter you can give a pretty solid argument why banning social media all together will make things better. But I fail to see nothing else but an expression of age-discrimination in this ban, when not all people are banned, but only children.

Don't get me wrong, banning social media to all people sounds like a bad thing too. I found about the ban through social media myself. But the one I used was not the one that causes the problem in the first place. Yet, according to what I know so far, the government in Australia doesn't really care.

There is a sense, which I am trying to contemplate through lately, that there is a certain type of oppression that goes largely unnoticed by the wast majority of people. And the reason, which I see more and more often, to this oppression stems from firmness in parents when it comes to deluding themselves that they know better when it comes to what their children need. And any expression of child-autonomy threatens their control and therefor apparently threatens their self-esteem. If a child has Freedom the parent cannot force their world-view upon that child and that makes this world-view not as solid as the parent might want it to be.

There is another, second cause for the same problem, this time coming from those children that have been oppressed throughout their childhoods by parents, or in large, by the entire system, which grow into a certain world-view where this oppression in being justified akin to Stockholm Syndrome. Or the very least being justified as fair. As in: "If I suffered through all this as a child, why would children of today have it any easier?".

Both of those reasons combined create a certain parasitic environment where a feedback loop of age-discrimination is not only maintained, but accelerated exponentially which, if you consider that all adults were children at some point, bleeds very hard into the rest of our lives. Adults everywhere in the world lose freedom to the same problem. Mainly because they've deluded themselves throughout childhood that there was no problem in loss of freedom to begin with, so they don't do anything against it.

On a website called FreeRangeKids.com there is an article which shows a very terrifying map. A map that documents the decline of Freedom in the last century. Here it is:

By the way, the author of the website, Lenore Skenazy, apparently just recently joined mastodon as @FreeRangeKids@mastodon.social. Please give her a follow and share her account with more people. Seeing her having so little followers makes me sad.

The map clearly illustrates the destruction of freedom by Paternalism. At some point there was freedom, but a story or two of some bad people doing bad things, induced a sense of danger in one generation, which restricted their children's freedom to protect them from those dangers, who grew up with this sense of danger being a core part of their world-view, which for them, with another of such stories or two, turned into a hysteria, which they forced upon their children, and that grew into oppression and so on, which gave rise to all the problems that we have today. I talked about it in more detail in my article "The Cult Of Safety".

The privacy problem of social media comes almost directly from that. Most young people today do not give a damn about privacy what so ever. They had surveillance apps installed of their phones when they were kids. So that the parents could "protect" them from all the evils in the world. The grew up thinking of surveillance as being "necessary" for their own survival. To argue to them that it is oppression is worthless.

One might think, then ban it! Ban social media! Ban surveillance apps! Ban phones! It sounds an easy thing to do to increase the level of freedom going forward. If kids would not learn of surveillance as being something "good" for them, they might actually fight for privacy for God's sake.

But the problem is, this is exactly the same hysteria repeating itself!!!

Instead of banning kids from walking around the street, we should teach them how to be safe on the street and let them learn. Let them grow! Instead of banning social media we should make the social media not a problem. Or at the very least teach kids to fight it. Do not ban YouTube, tell them that FreeTube or NewPipe exists that can let them have more freedom, not less, with the same social media. ( I know that Australia specifically listed YouTube as something they don't want to ban. I just can't think of an app to view Facebook posts. ) Do not ban Social Media, direct them toward better options. Advertise Mastodon to them in schools. Let them have the freedom to join Facebook, but nudge them into having better choices. Promote discussions about which one is better and why. Let them grow! Because at some point they will be adults. And their views will effect the future.

Happy Hacking!!!


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