As a former tongue-in-cheek and non-woke friend of mine used to say with the slightest hint of a smirk:

"I dunno how I feel about that."

As a girl lover, I know there's plenty of shitty, truly predatorial people out there stalking kids. I think of the blackmailing thing that gets mentioned these days, but I seriously doubt that is very common, as horrific as it can get (child suicide, etc.).

No, I am thinking more about what ideas about the world and how to view the world are being placed into kids' heads from an ever-earlier age. I do feel social media seems to have free reign these days for seizing the minds of tweens and teens and even young 20-somethnings through the easy access of entertainment and boredom-occupying slop, but then removing those highways into the minds of kids would still leave the music and the schools and universities with free access and very little oversight beyond banning naughty words and such.

I mean, kids today in many schools seem to be getting turned into little protesters while their reading and math skills falter. Something's not working the way it was intended in many places.

I'd say, if you want to keep kids safe from predators, then it ought to be from all sorts of predation, no? Brainwashing them into little soldiers for political causes seems to me to be an assault on their tendency to trust adults. Dare I say, it's definitely and totally a form of grooming.

I dunno. I see many western countries (mostly the ones that always try to homogenize laws across nations) trying to block kids below say, 13-16, from the internet these days. One impression I get from that is, don't you think the older teens are being mentally groomed and assaulted online by all kinds of ideas themselves?

The other impression I get is that for the younger ones now removed from the cesspools of online boob-tubing, it just makes political grooming by teachers in schools even more impressionable on these younger kids. Why are they learning about gender and climate in math class, for example?

There's a bigger problem afoot. Everyone else is trying to fill their heads with competing beliefs. I just want to love them and warn them to learn to how to think for themselves. What a radical idea.

The internet can turn them into zombie soldiers, or it can be the resource for their own discoveries. So I am not sure what to think about banning kids from the internet. I don't know how I feel about that.