Well, I call them weird because it’s not like harmful things suddenly stop being harmful when you turn 18. Why protect children but let adults fuck themselves with harmful and addictive behaviors? It’s not like there’s some switch being flipped where one’s responsibility somehow fundamentally changes. For things with potential harms we should be asking ourselves what responsible engagement looks like at differing ages instead of drawing some arbitrary line in the sand between total ban and free-for-all. If we want social media and porn at all we should regulate good versions of those things.

And teaching people responsible engagement by banning any engagement with it outright is very ineffective. I think we should do the, admittedly much more difficult, work of scaffolded teaching. Engaging with the subject under guidance first before letting adults figure things out themselves. This would require people admitting however that teens like the same fucked up things adults do, which seems very scary to many people.