Crusades to ban teens from social media, books, public places, and just about everything all exploit the same ugly distortions and prejudices

Rising banish-youth crazes aren’t about safety, mental health, or “protecting children.” They're about repression and evading disturbing truths.

Back in the 1960s, Oklahoma City/County Attorney Curtis Harris was famous for “going to bat” to secure leniency for criminals he prosecuted if they’d just testify porn made ‘em do it. Harris rabidly hated porn, so much that he dutifully kept office drawerfuls of ultra-depraved triple-X-rated pictures and movies to host regular men-only, ain’t-it-awful showings. “Save our children!” the outraged Harris and fans brimstoned.

A sardonic Oklahoma City high school club calling itself The Flat Earth Society invited publicity-obsessed Harris to speak, where students would ask innuendo-laced questions about his porn seminars and jihads against gay teachers… alongside Harris’s notoriety for not actually convicting killers, rapists, and violent predators.

I couldn’t believe then, and still can’t fathom, how many powerful leaders, advocates, and media reporters are infinitely more frantic that a child or teenager might see a pornographic picture or hear a bad word than actually be molested, raped, beaten, or killed.

It’s not just right-wingers

California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta’s speeches, legislative proposals, and weekly newsletter incessantly berate social media for endangering children. However, he never mentions his hugely more important jobs administering the Child Abuse Central Index (in his 3 years in office, over 100,000 California children and youths have been victimized by violence, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and severe neglect inflicted by parents, family adults, and caretakers, including nearly 500 murdered) and Bureau of Children’s Justice, whose obscure webpage states: “One in four children are estimated to experience abuse or neglect. Child abuse or neglect can cause toxic stress that disrupts childhood development and increases risk of physical and mental health problems...”

Yet, I can’t recall a single instance in which Bonta talked about family violence and abuses, the real drivers the Centers for Disease Control finds for teens’ poor mental health and suicidal feelings. The attorneys general’s lawsuit against perfidious social media moguls Bonta joined is filled with hypothetical dangers (led by porn, of course) that children and youth might encounter online, but just about no real cases of proven harm. (The hundreds of pages of briefs were so bereft of real victims they had to cite a case of well-over-age-21 adults who acquired bullets online to shoot two teens – all to argue that teens being online was the problem.)

This isn’t about “protecting children”

Groveling to 2025 zeitgeist that some non-problem needs “fixing,” the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision (Mahmoud v Taylor) upholding “parents’ rights” to prevent schools “from forcing [their] children and other students—over the objection of their parents—to read, listen to, or discuss” stories or media that deal in any way with gay or any other sexual themes parents find offensive was predictable.

A companion Court decision (Paxton v Free Speech Coalition) upheld intrusive age-verification laws for “sexually explicit content” sites, whatever wild extremes censorious activists will stretch that to mean. While porn has generated extreme rhetoric and solutions for many decades, studies consistently have failed to document real harm beyond a small number of users – the same proportions that always seem to suffer from addiction to one thing or another. In contrast, studies have consistently documented the serious harm of real sexual and other abuses.

In terms of our society’s adaptability to a rapidly changing social and technological future, the decision by the Court (minds born on average before 1960) was 100% ignorant and destructive. A society that would ban young people from information, online sites, and public spaces because of made-up panics and offense is exactly the society that should not have that power.

Online bans, book bans, curfews, public bans… the impetus is all the same

The ban-youth-online, ban-youth-from-information, ban-youth-from-public, and ban-youth-from-whatever crusades all deploy the same crude distortions, collective guilt, mass generalizations, racialized prejudices, and made-up panics. The ultimate unfunny joke regarding the paranoias hyping all the evil messages and dangerous people online that psychologist Jonathan Haidt and After Babel colleagues spread in their emotional campaign to ban teens from social media sites (with the aim of forcing more youth out in public) is that those same overhyped terrors are why American grownups of 2025 fear teens being in public.

The political movement to ban youths from public space via curfews, mall and park rules, driving laws, etc., is founded in gross distortions and racialized fear. All, when examined, hype thinly-coded fears of Black teens while hiding behind the generic term “youth” and misuse statistical trends to hide deteriorations among grownups.

Washington DC just extended its youth curfew after admitting it hasn’t worked to prevent youth gatherings in a city over half of whose youth are Black and three-fourths are Nonwhite. New York City is on a similar track. A coming analysis will document never-mentioned trends in gun homicide and violence those cities typically miscite as proving youth curfew needs.

Similarly, PEN America documents 16,000 school book and film bans, which fixate on works by LGBTQ, Nonwhite, and women authors concerning racism, sexuality, gender, history, and education. No crisis meriting these bans is even suggested. The fragility of book-banning grownups is one more reason teens should create ways to get around censorship.

These movements strive to impose laws and policies to force parental/adult “consent” and “supervision” on teens in radically broadening online and public venues at a time when both cold statistics and growing-up imperatives powerfully argue grownup chaperoning is the worst policy imaginable, unless policy makers are secretly hoping teenagers will deter grownups from the drugs, guns, and crime.

Young people need expanded, not censored, access to information – especially information repressive grownups can’t handle. Youth as an age and generation also deserve complete access to public space, which our analysis of hundreds of curfew citations showed is made safer by their presence.

A looming question to be discussed in later substacks is whether today’s leaders are so far off the rails they’re not competent to govern a changing society and young people. Young people must use technical savvy to defy bans and censorship to gain the information and connections they need to survive burgeoning threats to their well-being.