Children do have rights to free expression. They're not property and honestly some of us would not have survived to adults without the ability to explore our identity independent of parental supervision.

Plus you're just setting kids up for failure by keeping them from understanding the adult world. You can't keep them ignorant and then drop them in the deep end when they turn 18, and expect good outcomes.

It's not to deprive them of understanding the adult world or free expression, it about the protecting them from the cesspool that is the internet. The pace at which kids are consuming information and maturing too early. Many of their "firsts" experiences being online. Your child being blackmailed by some online troll is not teaching them to understand the online world - they are actively being traumatised. It is parents responsibility to teach their children about the adult world - not the internet's (being other kids, companies, trolls, predators, propaganda machines, ads...).

You can explore your identity independently of parental supervision just fine without the internet. I'd much rather have my kids have 5 good friends in real life and spend time together offline, than 500 online (10 of which are predators) while they are spending all their time in their bedrooms or in front of screens.

How would you not have survived to adulthood without the internet? You know how that sounds right? Billions of kids have grown up without the internet just fine (and hello poverty?).

Man, just no. You not getting it is absolutely the reason children need independent access to knowledge. Growing up as a gay kid in the 90s was not easy, and I seriously doubt I would have managed it without finding community online. Life can be very isolating if you don't have the machinery to fit in, and you can't rely on parents to understand. People like me tend to find their own exit, the internet was a life line.

It's incredible how quickly people will call for authoritarianism if it means supporting their Reddit-like aversion to children.

Okay so let your kids own guns, sign contracts, do sex work / use drugs, buy & use alcohol/cigarettes, let them drive your car without supervision.

I'm no authoritarian - simply the parents need to take responsibility for their kids & their actions, how they spend their time, what they allow into their minds.

Most countries child laws states that the parents (esp the mother) are ultimately for their children’s welfare. Remember that kids cannot consent - the parents carry that responsibility.

Oh and I'm not averse to children at all.

Maybe american culture is just rotten to the core and how you raise your kids is just bewildering and gross to outsiders. At this point I feel that american parents are fully consenting to whatever is happening to your kids (being brain raped by tiktok/instagram/snap/fb/youtube/porn and others ("news")).

> Okay so let your kids own guns, sign contracts, do sex work / use drugs, buy & use alcohol/cigarettes, let them drive your car without supervision.

Letting my child simply use an online service isn't even vaguely similar to any of these things.

> Maybe american culture is just rotten to the core and how you raise your kids is just bewildering and gross to outsiders. At this point I feel that american parents are fully consenting to whatever is happening to your kids (being brain raped by tiktok/instagram/snap/fb/youtube/porn and others ("news")).

I'm not American, I live in GB and know all too well about overreaching internet regulations.

May I also point out the irony of complaining about pornography while simultaneously using "rape" as an adjective when a more appropriate one would have sufficed?

Children is always an Achilles's heel of libertarians. It either opens up an inner authoritarianism or force someone to answer some uncomfortable questions.

What about YouTube, Wikipedia? Although I can say the Internet for me was damaging in some ways, it bring more benefits like math (my math professor was really bad and I learned with YouTube) and just exploring random things in Wikipedia, also I learned English that way. Maybe a restricted internet could help here, restricting bad sites and content.

As a parent I consider YouTube broadly harmful because of the algorithms promoting harmful, age inappropriate content (and I'm not talking about adult content) promoted to child accounts, even on YT Kids, lack of the blocking capabilities (in 2025 this is equal with company knowingly harming users), and making YouTube shorts (which are exceedingly hard to block).

This is just TikTok tier crap.

How will you enforce this?

What if a child is at school where there are Chromebooks and teachers aren’t as tech savvy as the majority of hacker news?

What if a child is at a library that has Chromebooks you can take out and use for homework?

Wha if a child is at an older cousins place?

What if a child is a park with their friends and uses a device?

Should parents be next to their child helicopters parenting 24/7?

Is that how you remember your childhood? Is that how you currently parent giving zero atonony to children?

Blaming parents is ridiculous. Lot of parents aren’t tech savvy and are too dumb to be tech savvy and stay on top of the latest tech thing

You don't enforce it. The point of such laws is not to actually be enforced, but as a legal tool when problems come up. For example, if you as an adult say something inappropriate to a child online thinking it's an adult, you'd be protected if it's ever brought up, because the child shouldn't have been online to begin with and it was not your responsibility to check the other person's age. It's not unlike being in a bar and assuming everyone is 18 or older, because it's the bar's responsibility to forbid entry to anyone younger.

Such a mindset is ripe for selective enforcement and discrimination if society or someone powerful does not like you.

Selective enforcement of what? If society does not like you, "you" being who exactly?

"You" could range from being a scapegoat in a family/school class, to you being a member of an undesirable minority.

Doesn't really answer my question.

Do you have kids? How would school even work? 20 years ago in high school we were expected to use the internet.

And these days internet integration in school is far stronger, my 6 year old's daily homework is entirely online.

Yep. People love to make blanket statements like this without remembering how hard it was for parents to supervise Internet use even when there was only one Desktop computer in the family area. Nowadays you can almost any device to lookup porn.

When I was growing up home LANs weren't common, but nowadays you could solve it with just a little box that does all the filtering in a way that can't be bypassed. Blocking connections to non-whitelisted domains based on the internal IP or MAC is pretty easy. If people don't use these solutions it's because they either haven't researched enough or don't want to deal with the inconvenience (or, in at least some cases, don't really care).

and I was so sure that this time, the best course of action was also the easiest

"they can't get offline because they're now online" doesn't make any sense

Take the homework offline, remove screens from schools,

Right. Companies get to externalize all the social costs of what they do, and simply reap profits.

A child cannot enter into a contract (ToS) with a company as they are minors. Whats strange is that american companies can get away with interacting with children, lawmakers/politicians ignore it, parents ignore it...seems like this is what everyone wants and consents to.

Remember a company is just a building filled with people. People are exploiting & profiting off your kids, not companies.