There's nothing in the world which I feel as strongly about as I do about freedom of thought. I'm serious, if in any way you support any attempt to restrict what people can think we cannot be friends. And when I talk about "thinking", I always mean that to include collaborative thinking. Freedom of speech is just a subset of freedom of thought as speech is one way of sharing a thinking process. It is very important to me that we never restrict the flow of information between humans in any medium, language or art form, as long as the exchange is consensual (in the case of recordings this extends to the consent of those recorded).
You might think freedom of speech is a fundamental right and covers all that so we're already fine. Unfortunately, there are always people who think that there should be exceptions to that rule. Maybe you are even one of them? What about really tasteless art? What about political conspiracy theories? What about instructions for fabricating drugs or explosives? You're free to call me extreme for my views, but I consider none of those valid exceptions. Tasteless art is only a problem if you forget about the constraint that the exchange has to be consensual. Conspiracy theories can be a big problem if radical groups form because of them, but limiting freedom of thought just isn't the right way to combat this. Same goes for instructions on how to do crimes. Those things are already illegal. The problems are not caused by people who know how to commit them, but by those that actually do.
Now that I've made this clear, there's one strategy for limiting freedom of thought in particular that I need to address, because it's the most problematic one: "protecting the youth". For this we have to acknowledge that children under a certain age cannot fully comprehend some topics and are thus unable to give their consent for receiving certain information, accessing certain media or consuming certain forms of art. It's true that they should be protected from that. But to certain people, no communication channel is ever safe enough from the eyes of children and that often escalates to the whole communication channel becoming unusable for consenting adults.
We cannot let this happen. I know that this is just a small blog that only very few people will read, but it's the only way I have to share this opinion which is so dear to my heart. But as long as there are restrictions on sensitive content that prevent children from accidentally stumbling on it, I'd say it's fine. We cannot stop children who are actively seeking out information that is not meant for them and maybe we shouldn't. First, children can be very smart, some may even be smarter than many adults. It is essentially impossible to design a safety measure that is entirely safe. Second, if they actively seek out these information they already know enough about them to have sparked their interest and they don't trust their parents enough to talk to them about it. To me this sounds like a problem between the children and their parents which is not something I think society should have to fix. And third, I think children who are desperate to get access to certain information might at some point be considered to have given their consent, especially if they are smarter than some adults.
Look, I grew up browsing the internet when that really wasn't something that anyone did. Age restrictions simply weren't a thing back then. I had access to some stuff that was definitely not appropriate for my age and I definitely saw things that children are not supposed to see. But it's not like it ruined my life or anything like that. And sure, you can't really infer anything from an observation with n=1, but where are all those victims of the early internet? I can't have been the only child with internet access in a world of adults who didn't even know how to turn a computer on. I can't have been the only child who browsed those websites full of that stuff that we now desperately try to protect our children from. Shouldn't there be support groups for all those poor people who were exposed to it at young age and still fight the trauma to this day? I haven't heard of one, despite technically being one of those victims.
But the more savvy readers will know what I'm about to write next: it's not about the children and it never was. Those people advocating for more "child safety" actually have a problem with some of that material themselves. They just use children as their argument because you can't ban anything on the basis of it "feeling wrong". Most of them probably even believe they're doing it for the children because that's the only explanation they have, even for themselves. They have strong emotional reactions to it because they themselves got exposed to it without consent.
This brings me to what we actually need to achieve: whenever we exchange information on anything that might be considered sensitive, we need to make sure that it does not reach anyone who has not given their consent, no matter their age. The internet is not good at this at the moment. Instead of checking "are you older than X years?", what we should really check is "are you ok with seeing this?". It took me a while to realize, because the answer to the latter question will always be "yes" for me. I've crossed the abyss, I don't think there is anything in the information domain that could disturb me. But I do realize that people on the other side are a lot more ... delicate. And while I 'd wish that more people came to my side of the abyss, I fully acknowledge that this journey must be taken voluntarily.
