Our current political climate is highly polarized, with the left and the right not being able to stand each other and seemingly agreeing on nothing. And yet an issue has emerged that both sides are pushing: Preventing children from having access to information technology.
It seems like only yesterday–it was the 1990s, actually–when federal, state, and local governments with agreement from both political parties, education experts, and the general public were all about wiring schools for the internet, providing computers for every student, and lauding what the technology revolution will do for education. Now, as Derek Robertson points out, those forces are trying to pull the plug on all those screens.
Gavin Newsome, the arch-liberal governor of California–which includes Silicon Valley–wants to ban smartphones during the school day. His rival Ron DeSantis, the arch-conservative governor of Florida, has already done that.
Vivek Murthy, the Biden administration’s Surgeon General, is calling for tobacco-style warning labels to appear on social media platforms, warning young people and their parents that the technology poses a danger to their user’s mental health.
Gov. DeSantis has already signed a bipartisan bill that prohibits Florida children 14 and younger from having a social media account. Parents may sign consent forms for 15 and 16-year-olds, but even if they are okay with their kids having a Facebook account, that would be against the law, and online platforms must have rigorous age-verification processes.
Nationally, Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, is sponsoring the Kids Online Safety Act and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which would apply such restrictions nationwide.
President Biden signed a bipartisan bill that would ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform beloved by young people, though this would not go into effect until after the election. As president, Donald Trump tried to do the same, but has since backed off, saying that while he considers the China connection a national security danger, banning the app would only empower Facebook.
Similar efforts to limit the access of children and adolescents to social media and cell phones are under way in other states, both blue and red.
Ironically, though the left and the right seem to agree on this issue, one would think that it violates the principles of both the left and the right!
It would seem that the government banning young people’s access to technology would go against the grain of the libertarian streak, both of “freedom caucus” Republicans and morally permissive Democrats.
Republicans have traditionally been pro-business, and Democrats have worked to become the party of the rich, cultivating especially a fund-raising alliance with Silicon Valley tycoons. But both sides seem unconcerned with the precedent of imposing age-restrictions for products that are legal and not immediately harmful.
Progressives value change and have traditionally lauded technology as part of the reason society keeps evolving to ever-greater heights. But now they want to rein in technology and keep it away from children, who, as they are always reminding us, are “our future.”
Could it be that the primal need to care for our children trumps all of that ideology?
If so, this is an encouraging sign.
While saluting the sentiment behind these measures, I myself have some qualms about them. Is it really the government’s role to police children’s internet usage? Isn’t this what parents should be doing?
Certainly, there are broader social costs to the dangers of children’s internet abuse, so one could make a case that the government should get involved. Clearly, parents as a whole are not being careful to monitor their children’s use of social media. So perhaps the government should rush into the void. I’m not totally convinced, though.
Perhaps parents want the government to play the role of the tough and protective parent so that they don’t have to. That’s not healthy.
The left has long favored a paternalistic view of government in which the state takes on the responsibilities–such as providing an income and taking care of the children–that traditionally belonged to the family. I’d be sorry to see conservatives taking up that same position.
But now that we have big government conservatives as well as big government liberals, perhaps this is something else that both sides are agreeing on.
Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexelshttps://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-engaged-on-their-phones-8088493/
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