Who should be doing the allowing and monitoring? The sex offenders in government who repeatedly call for the age of consent to be lowered? Why should youth get collective punishment but nobody does anything to creeps?

Should the government do nothing but pass on information to parents who might not be monitoring? That seems like quite an invasion of privacy no matter how you pull that off… do adults who care about privacy have to be subject to whatever the government defines as “educational” and appropriate for children? You also risk taking away safe spaces from queer youth and youth in abusive families, and some parents just won’t care anyways.

For the sake of argument, let’s say some utopian socialist government managed to solve all of these questions, and more (e.g. how do we draw the line about “educational” and “abuse reporting”, what should happen if a kid gets a hold of a careless adult’s device, etc.) … what happens when these people get “old enough” and now a generation of new adults are subject to the Internet in its entirety with no experience or no experience of a BS filter to manage it? Won’t this create a host of new problems and people wanting to raise the limit further (e.g. “Who’s letting these adult children use the Internet unrestricted at 18 anyways? We shouldn’t let them until they’re developed 25 year olds…”)

I’m actually curious how you would defend against that last example argument. Why should adults be trusted with the Internet? After all, they seemingly can’t help but pretend to be minors and be creepy, can they?

Monitored by whom? Their parents? Oops, you just outed a bunch of trans kids to their kkkristian parents and now they’re being shipped off to “troubled teen” camps to be abused.