This isn’t “I want to believe”, this is “it would be irresponsible to not consider”.
I agree with your final sentence applied to any corporate-owned website operating for profit, as long as you remove the word “developing”.
The solution isn’t to ban kids, it’s to ban the toxic sites, practices, and incentive structures.
I’m also talking about 15-20 years ago.
The influences I had were furries (queers), science/scifi nerds, academics, service members of the military who were otherwise separated from community, etc. The internet brought us together.
It was that or rural Florida where if you went outside and got stabbed by one of those poison palm you’d just get told that those have to be there because they kept the slaves from escaping the circus in the good old days.
What you’re talking about with kids today is what I mean about them being canaries.
I disagree with this point.
I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.
I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.
That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.
I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.
Sharing data with the plebs is the true crime.
Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.
It’s preparation.
Now that human craft have finally made it back to the moon for the first time in decades, human beings and development are set to follow.