Teens SHOULD be banned from social media.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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If parents had the same kind of control over their kids devices that I have over corporate client devices this wouldn't be an issue.
Parents need to be given the power to control the technology that they own. People should own the stuff they buy too.
The solution to having too many children playing in the street at night is not to check everyone's ID before they leave the house but to instead give parents the ability to lock the door and hold them responsible when they don't.
The solution to unsupervised children is not supervising adulthood. Killing off anonymity won't protect the children.
Oh! BTW, headwind MDM is open source and self-hostable I might end up hosting it for my future children
Something tells me if you're the kind of person who is looking up MDM to self host and at least flirting with the idea of reading the open source code on a project or going to implement... Your kids are a little less at risk for commercial exposure.
I'm not saying I'm assuming you're perfect, but I think it's safe to assume you're doing more to mitigate exposure to commercialization than 90% of parents. I want the restrictions placed on the companies to the benefit of parents.
You shouldn't have to be a computer engineer to have ready access to comprehensive parental controls that allow you to manage what you want how you want and in line with your sensibilities rather than being at the mercy of whatever some corporate boardroom has decided is the most profitable way to addict your whole family to convenient advertising delivery systems and minimalistic interface casinos.
I didn't say anywhere that ID-gating the internet was a solution. You're barking up the wrong tree mate.
...but not if it requires real-ID internet laws for the rest of us.
It doesn't require real-ID laws to ban teens from social media, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I'm telling you otherwise. How else do you think the government is going to ban teens from social media without determining who is and isn't a teen?
...by banning teens from social media. Laws don't require constant surveillance to be enacted as laws. I don't have a fucking video camera in my car to make sure I'm following seat belt laws. Make no mistake, real-ID laws have nothing to do with keeping children safe, it's entirely about mass surveillance. We don't need mass surveillance to enfoce this law. Big tech claims they have ai models that can identify if you're a teenager or not. Why the fuck should we as a society give up additional rights when these companies are more than capable of addressing the issue on their own?
Do you really think tech companies are creating age verification software that isn't harvesting that data for mass surveillance? If your car was made in the past few years, then yeah, it does monitor your seat belt usage (among plenty of other things) and sends that data off to who-knows-where.
The idea of banning social media for teens, at the government level, doesn't have anything to do with keeping them safe either. Look back through the past few decades of bills that claimed to be about "protecting the children" and see all the draconian shit built into them.
It's becoming more and more obvious that we can't make laws in America without tailoring them to special interest groups and baking in exploitable workarounds. And it's obvious that these huge companies don't give a shit about safety and privacy so long as someone out there is willing to buy the data. So don't try to say the government has our best interests in mind and the tech companies will play nice.
No, but the fact that they're doing it already means we don't need to ID-gate content.
If your car was made in the past few years
It wasn't.
So don't try to say the government has our best interests in mind and the tech companies will play nice.
I didn't say that at all. Not sure why you feel the need to make things up.
You're right, we don't need to ID-gate anything, but that doesn't mean we should trust the companies' implementation. Just look at what's happening with Discord.
If you're supporting actual legislation for banning teens from social media at this point, and you think tech companies aren't selling off age verification data to surveillance capitalists, then yeah, that's what you're saying.
BTW, I really hope your car lasts as long as possible, and/or you don't have to get another one anytime soon. Car manufacturers are tracking literally everything you do, because they also "care about safety."
The last few years have really changed my mind about social media.
Oh police your kid's fucking usage you gruesome ghoul.
Why can both not be true?