As of Wednesday morning, the Australian government has enacted a ban on all social media accounts for anyone under the age of 16. From Facebook to Instagram to Reddit and dozens of other sites, no child can have a social media page. The justification for the ban is the negative impact upon a child's mental health that these social media sites have. A child burying his or her face in a cell phone or a tablet is inarguably a bad thing. It stimulates young skulls full of mush in the wrong ways as well as giving them a skewed view of the world. Influencers are not successful and their accounts are enhanced in ways that are not healthy.
Our government has talked about following suit. Even some of my more conservative friends think this is a good idea. My question as always is, what does the government do well? Why have so many people decided it is the government's responsibility to protect our children? Where are the parents? Isn't it their responsibility to make these decisions for their children? The answer is clearly yes, but for 30 to 40 years so-called experts have told parents they don't know enough about educating or raising their children.
Gen. X brags about being the last generation to get kicked out of the house by their parents, having to fend for themselves playing outside, drinking from water hoses and not coming home until the streetlights came on. They brag on social media about how this made them tough and self-sufficient. But they are the ones that have raised the snowflake generation and ceded responsibility for raising their children to the 'experts'.
Some of the woke crowd are the ones that actually fought against Australia's ban. They claim that minorities and members of the LGBQT plus demographic will be harmed by not being able to see people like themselves on social media. That's bull hockey. They also say that requiring some kind of identification is discriminatory. Again, more bull hockey. Especially since the law does not require social media companies to demand identification for someone to prove their age. That requirement is left up to the discretion of the platforms, which will likely work ohh so well.
The solution is rather simple. Parents should be the ones deciding if their children can have access to any website or social media platform. The companies that run these platforms and websites could easily require identification and tie a child's social media page to that of their parent. The parent would have the ability to see everything the child did online and to select categories of content that their child can or cannot access. But that would go against the desire of the politicians to raise the children and stand in the way of indoctrinating them. Which is, of course the ultimate goal.
I'll ask the question: Parents, where are you?
