The government social media bans for those under 16 probably sweep too far. And yet I can't help but be sympathetic with them. I think it would do liberals and free speech advocates good to be more open to emerging concerns regarding children and less doctrinaire and hyperbolic when it comes to minimal burdens on adults.
What do I mean? Take age verification, including for VPNs. This does not strike me as a big deal. I'm sure the law could easily preserve privacy and anonymity. I imagine that you would get a token from a third-party site that could then tell every other site that you are of age without disclosing any other identifying information about you. I'm sure this would be as seamless in practice as Google remembering your passwords. Given how much information all of us routinely hand over to companies seeking to profit by our eyeballs, this little burden, to make sure you're of age before, say, letting you watch violent pornography that would probably fail the obscenity test if it were ever enforced, seems trivial.
Yes, repressive regimes use VPN restrictions, but that doesn't render any VPN restriction repressive. Repressive regimes also use police. It doesn't follow that we should abolish the police. VPN restrictions on *children* seem fine.
The concerns are twofold: kids' immediate, easy access to a truly shocking and revolting cesspool with no practical restrictions, and social media architecture that, even as to relatively benign content, gobbles up kids' brains as they scroll through short videos, addict-like, seeking that next hit, making them stupider by the hour. I'm sure there's a good measure of hyperbolic panic in this side of it as well, but I'm increasingly convinced that the experiment we're running on kids right now, not in the name of free speech but of corporate profits, is a real worry.
I read with interest the phrase, "We can work to help parents individually make the right choices for their families," but was left wondering how. So I guess I'll ask: How? How can we effectively and realistically address these two concerns?
Cars without seat belts are dangerous so the government mandated seat belts. An unregulated Internet is also dangerous because "free speech" can be weaponized. Depending on parents to police their children's on-line consumption and/or abuse of social media is a fairy tale. Unrestricted free speech legally delivered Hitler to the Chancellery.
The notion that unrestricted free speech led to Hitler is simply not true. That’s called the Weimar Fallacy; the Weimar Republic actually cracked down on Nazi speech. Nadine Strossen has written/spoken about this extensively if you’d like to look into it.
I am widely read regarding the rise of Hitler and the role that Goebbels and his minions played in convincing more than a third of German voters to support the Nazis. You're welcome to check my personal library for many books that touch on the Third Reich and its rise. We studied the propaganda issue in J school extensively. Your blithe statement indicating that propaganda wasn't the important trigger in Hitler's rise is simple as wrong as you claim my assertion is. I am familiar with Nadine Strossen and her viewpoint on unlimited free speech being the antidote to "hate speech" in the free market of ideas. The Internet has turned that argument on its head because the voters no longer come to the marketplace with the same factual narrative. We are a country divided between those who know and those who just think they know.
Right. And those who 'know' all support your politics no doubt whereas anyone who disagrees with you is, ipso facto, ignorant, yes? BTW, may I speculate that your own 'knowledgeable' views are rather far left?
Ray, you can speculate all you want but actually knowing the breadth of my beliefs, education, experiences (80 years worth), work history, journalism background and reading practices is not something you are qualified to do.
I went out on a limb there quite deliberately. No, I'm not 'qualified' but still I stick to my guess. Am I wrong? My experience is that paternalistic thinking is a strong predictor of leftist/progressive thinking.
It goes with the territory. Progressives believe in progress and they rather predictably believe that they are the ones who know what progress looks like, thus, quite naturally, if the proles don't understand what's good for them, the progressives will impose it on them anyway -- for their own good, yes? Conservatives, OTOH, tend to believe that people should be left alone to progress as they see fit. And what they think or say is their own affair.
BTW, just to come clean, in the current political environment you'd be correct to call me a conservative, but that's purely reactionary to woke excess. At heart I'm a Tommy Douglas socialist -- if you understand the Canadian context.
It's somewhat breathtaking to read someone who honestly believes that letting the government decide what you can and cannot say or listen to is a good idea. He is quite correct that free speech can be weaponized but censorship is certain to be weaponized. The entire project of democracy is based on the idea that a free people will be -- and must be -- capable of making up their own minds about things in an environment of freedom of speech.
Exactly, most defenders of free speech don't defend the principle because they think all the speech they encounter is good, noble, or right, but because they understand the risk of allowing government power to determine the bounds of political expression. It's bad for public trust and most of all dangerous to dissent.
The shocking thing is that whereas Mr. Brittain sounds like an articulate and educated man, he can yet be ignorant of such a fundamental principle of democracy. Or worse, perhaps he understands it and rejects it. Some say that ultra progressives don't really believe in democracy because, as he says, the rabble are not competent to decide things for themselves. Thus Big Sister will kindly, gently, do their thinking for them -- entirely for their own good of course.
I didn't intend to take your breath away, Ray, but you seem to conflate the America of pre-internet with the one of today. Until the country started to bifurcate with the rise of Rush and the malinformation industry, Americans got their news and information from a limited number of legacy media (now much despised on the right and the "enemy of the people" according to DJT). They may not have agreed on what they heard, saw or read but it was the same narrative to be considered through their own perspective. For the most part, Americans then didn't need to be media literate because the media did the gatekeeping of news and information via the practice of legit journalism. Those days are long, long gone, Ray. The media illiterate, and there are millions of them who put DJT into office twice, now get to select their news sources from the providers they like the best, those that bolster their misogyny, racism, xenophobia, class hatred, conspiracy theories and paranoia. I don't know how to put the genie back in the lamp except to try something, anything. Otherwise, America can't survive. Madison said it succinctly, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate".
> Madison said it succinctly, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate".
Yes, many of the FF made similar comments. Democracy can only work with a certain quality of citizen, and if you postulate that that quality is eroding I heartily agree with you. But is giving the people, for example, who ran the Biden administration the power to control what can and can't be said the answer? No doubt the Ministry of Truth would have declared any comment to the effect that poor old Joe was senile to be thoughtcrime. And, were such a regime to have been implemented, no doubt Mr. Trump would be taking huge advantage of it himself, yes?
> you seem to conflate the America of pre-internet with the one of today
I don't dispute that we have a problem, I dispute that government censorship is the answer.
> Americans got their news and information from a limited number of legacy media
Just so. For decades I watched The News Hour with Jim and Robin and if they said something happened then I'd bet my life on it. But then PBS went woke and now the TNH is garbage. If it takes a chancer like Trump to point that out, then that's a crying shame, but he is correct. (For a while I actually tried to watch Fox, but they make me puke.)
This piece effectively throws in the towel on the serious problem of social media's negative effects on youth by emphasizing the free speech concerns and advocating for a system of greater individual involvement by parents. As Cass Sunstein and Leonardo Bursztyn explain (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/social-media-teens-phones-australia-solutions.html), getting young people off social media is a collective-action problem, making this proposed system of individual choice mostly useless. The free speech issues are real. And precautions that would be unacceptable in an autocratic country can't simply be accepted without reservations in the west, which has also seen some backsliding lately. But there is no perfect answer. And this approach -- "too bad, but what can we do" -- is not the right one.
The government social media bans for those under 16 probably sweep too far. And yet I can't help but be sympathetic with them. I think it would do liberals and free speech advocates good to be more open to emerging concerns regarding children and less doctrinaire and hyperbolic when it comes to minimal burdens on adults.
What do I mean? Take age verification, including for VPNs. This does not strike me as a big deal. I'm sure the law could easily preserve privacy and anonymity. I imagine that you would get a token from a third-party site that could then tell every other site that you are of age without disclosing any other identifying information about you. I'm sure this would be as seamless in practice as Google remembering your passwords. Given how much information all of us routinely hand over to companies seeking to profit by our eyeballs, this little burden, to make sure you're of age before, say, letting you watch violent pornography that would probably fail the obscenity test if it were ever enforced, seems trivial.
Yes, repressive regimes use VPN restrictions, but that doesn't render any VPN restriction repressive. Repressive regimes also use police. It doesn't follow that we should abolish the police. VPN restrictions on *children* seem fine.
The concerns are twofold: kids' immediate, easy access to a truly shocking and revolting cesspool with no practical restrictions, and social media architecture that, even as to relatively benign content, gobbles up kids' brains as they scroll through short videos, addict-like, seeking that next hit, making them stupider by the hour. I'm sure there's a good measure of hyperbolic panic in this side of it as well, but I'm increasingly convinced that the experiment we're running on kids right now, not in the name of free speech but of corporate profits, is a real worry.
I read with interest the phrase, "We can work to help parents individually make the right choices for their families," but was left wondering how. So I guess I'll ask: How? How can we effectively and realistically address these two concerns?
Cars without seat belts are dangerous so the government mandated seat belts. An unregulated Internet is also dangerous because "free speech" can be weaponized. Depending on parents to police their children's on-line consumption and/or abuse of social media is a fairy tale. Unrestricted free speech legally delivered Hitler to the Chancellery.
The notion that unrestricted free speech led to Hitler is simply not true. That’s called the Weimar Fallacy; the Weimar Republic actually cracked down on Nazi speech. Nadine Strossen has written/spoken about this extensively if you’d like to look into it.
I am widely read regarding the rise of Hitler and the role that Goebbels and his minions played in convincing more than a third of German voters to support the Nazis. You're welcome to check my personal library for many books that touch on the Third Reich and its rise. We studied the propaganda issue in J school extensively. Your blithe statement indicating that propaganda wasn't the important trigger in Hitler's rise is simple as wrong as you claim my assertion is. I am familiar with Nadine Strossen and her viewpoint on unlimited free speech being the antidote to "hate speech" in the free market of ideas. The Internet has turned that argument on its head because the voters no longer come to the marketplace with the same factual narrative. We are a country divided between those who know and those who just think they know.
Right. And those who 'know' all support your politics no doubt whereas anyone who disagrees with you is, ipso facto, ignorant, yes? BTW, may I speculate that your own 'knowledgeable' views are rather far left?
Ray, you can speculate all you want but actually knowing the breadth of my beliefs, education, experiences (80 years worth), work history, journalism background and reading practices is not something you are qualified to do.
I went out on a limb there quite deliberately. No, I'm not 'qualified' but still I stick to my guess. Am I wrong? My experience is that paternalistic thinking is a strong predictor of leftist/progressive thinking.
It goes with the territory. Progressives believe in progress and they rather predictably believe that they are the ones who know what progress looks like, thus, quite naturally, if the proles don't understand what's good for them, the progressives will impose it on them anyway -- for their own good, yes? Conservatives, OTOH, tend to believe that people should be left alone to progress as they see fit. And what they think or say is their own affair.
BTW, just to come clean, in the current political environment you'd be correct to call me a conservative, but that's purely reactionary to woke excess. At heart I'm a Tommy Douglas socialist -- if you understand the Canadian context.
It's somewhat breathtaking to read someone who honestly believes that letting the government decide what you can and cannot say or listen to is a good idea. He is quite correct that free speech can be weaponized but censorship is certain to be weaponized. The entire project of democracy is based on the idea that a free people will be -- and must be -- capable of making up their own minds about things in an environment of freedom of speech.
Exactly, most defenders of free speech don't defend the principle because they think all the speech they encounter is good, noble, or right, but because they understand the risk of allowing government power to determine the bounds of political expression. It's bad for public trust and most of all dangerous to dissent.
The shocking thing is that whereas Mr. Brittain sounds like an articulate and educated man, he can yet be ignorant of such a fundamental principle of democracy. Or worse, perhaps he understands it and rejects it. Some say that ultra progressives don't really believe in democracy because, as he says, the rabble are not competent to decide things for themselves. Thus Big Sister will kindly, gently, do their thinking for them -- entirely for their own good of course.
I didn't intend to take your breath away, Ray, but you seem to conflate the America of pre-internet with the one of today. Until the country started to bifurcate with the rise of Rush and the malinformation industry, Americans got their news and information from a limited number of legacy media (now much despised on the right and the "enemy of the people" according to DJT). They may not have agreed on what they heard, saw or read but it was the same narrative to be considered through their own perspective. For the most part, Americans then didn't need to be media literate because the media did the gatekeeping of news and information via the practice of legit journalism. Those days are long, long gone, Ray. The media illiterate, and there are millions of them who put DJT into office twice, now get to select their news sources from the providers they like the best, those that bolster their misogyny, racism, xenophobia, class hatred, conspiracy theories and paranoia. I don't know how to put the genie back in the lamp except to try something, anything. Otherwise, America can't survive. Madison said it succinctly, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate".
...
> Those days are long, long gone, Ray.
I quite agree.
> Madison said it succinctly, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate".
Yes, many of the FF made similar comments. Democracy can only work with a certain quality of citizen, and if you postulate that that quality is eroding I heartily agree with you. But is giving the people, for example, who ran the Biden administration the power to control what can and can't be said the answer? No doubt the Ministry of Truth would have declared any comment to the effect that poor old Joe was senile to be thoughtcrime. And, were such a regime to have been implemented, no doubt Mr. Trump would be taking huge advantage of it himself, yes?
> you seem to conflate the America of pre-internet with the one of today
I don't dispute that we have a problem, I dispute that government censorship is the answer.
> Americans got their news and information from a limited number of legacy media
Just so. For decades I watched The News Hour with Jim and Robin and if they said something happened then I'd bet my life on it. But then PBS went woke and now the TNH is garbage. If it takes a chancer like Trump to point that out, then that's a crying shame, but he is correct. (For a while I actually tried to watch Fox, but they make me puke.)
This piece effectively throws in the towel on the serious problem of social media's negative effects on youth by emphasizing the free speech concerns and advocating for a system of greater individual involvement by parents. As Cass Sunstein and Leonardo Bursztyn explain (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/social-media-teens-phones-australia-solutions.html), getting young people off social media is a collective-action problem, making this proposed system of individual choice mostly useless. The free speech issues are real. And precautions that would be unacceptable in an autocratic country can't simply be accepted without reservations in the west, which has also seen some backsliding lately. But there is no perfect answer. And this approach -- "too bad, but what can we do" -- is not the right one.