As a blogger and someone who spends so much of his life online, I suppose I will be expected to say something about the proposed social media ban for under sixteens. To be honest though, I honestly can’t decide where I stand on it. We all know that the internet is becoming more and more of a hellhole of extreme ideas and repugnant content: certainly no place for kids. But I also feel that there’s a lot of weight in the notion that the web is just an efficient, convenient means of exchanging ideas and content, and it should be up to parents to control what their children are accessing. After all, if someone commits a crime after reading a book detailing that crime, would you ban the publisher? Or perhaps prevent everyone else in the same ethnic or social group as the criminal from reading books? I know they’re not trying to prevent kids from using the web altogether, so the analogy doesn’t quite work; but this whole affair just reeks of parents trying to absolve themselves of responsibility. I know how useful and powerful the internet can be, including social media. The contention that it is somehow addictive is total nonsense. Trying to put limits on it in any way is a step in totally the wrong direction. Thus while I have definite reservations about sprogs using Facebook, thinking they’re older than they are, I have even greater reservations about parents trying to put the blame onto such companies for their failings.