Katherine Dee, the insightful author behind the Default Friend Substack, argues that some of the censorship efforts and phone panic around teens and children is itself dangerous, even a grift.

The post contains a partial defense of Taylor Lorenz, who has been arguing against school phone bans and other restrictions on teen phone use:

We demonize the phones, something everyone can get on board with. Then lawmakers introduce age verification requirements supposedly targeting uncontroversially bad content like pornography and extreme violence as “harmful to minors.” But the legal language around “harmful to minors” is deliberately elastic, designed to expand over time. What starts as ID checks for explicit content becomes ID checks for any discussion deemed inappropriate for hypothetical children who might stumble across it. And what’s “harmful” will depend on who’s in office—furries, abortion resources, domestic violence hotlines, LGBTQ content, drug review sites, k-pop, plastic surgery.

It’s anybody’s guess.

The endgame has never been protecting kids—and that’s what Taylor is getting at. It’s creating a permission structure where adults need government approval to access legal information online. Once you’ve normalized showing papers to read certain websites, expanding that requirement is easy. Again, if history is any indication: today it’s porn, tomorrow it’s social media, and the day after, who knows. But what we’re opening ourselves up to is extensive digital tracking and surveillance systems like those used in China, or arrests for social media posts that are deemed threatening, harassing, or inciting violence, as has happened in the U.K.

I think this needs to be taken seriously. We don’t have to look far to see this happening in Western democracies. In recent weeks, Coimisiún na Meán, the Irish media regulatory body, invoked its new online safety rules, which were passed explicitly to protect minors from seeing explicit content online, to suppress the circulation on social media of a video of an immigrant stabbing a member of the Gardaí (the Irish police), while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Ireland’s government does not block minors from seeing pornographic material online, but it uses a legal mandate to do so to regulate political content online.

Much of Europe is still committed to managing democracy itself, from above, through regulation of social media content, whether by criminalizing the expression of political views as hate speech or monitoring the spread of information the government doesn’t like.

I still believe that age-gate laws can be written with sufficiently rigorous definitions to be useful, but Dee is obviously right that it is treacherous to write these laws when governments are so obviously anxious to superintend the political speech of their people.