An Internet for Kids

It might be better to ban kids from the internet.

Across the West, governments are pushing for more power to regulate cyberspace even as authoritarian political parties are gaining more official power, portending a future in which what people can say online is subject to the whims of ill-meaning bureaucrats.

Often, calls for regulation and even censorship are justified by the highly defensible and probably correct anxiety that the status quo ill-serves the internet’s youngest users.

In the United Kingdom, the government in a white paper a crackdown on any website that “allows users to share or discover user-generated content, or interact with each other online.” Its proponents that “the impact of harmful noted “growing pressure on the government to act in the wake of the death of teenager Molly Russell,” a 14-year-old whose father believes that “exposure to images of self-harm on social media was a factor in her taking her own life.”