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Child Advocates Back Surgeon General's Call for Tobacco-Like Warnings on Social Media
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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I call shenanigans. We've had bullying when I was a kid in the 70s. Has anything been done about it? No. Why? Because dominance hierarchy is in among our school districts and administrators, and they like sports team lettermen over science nerds. This hadn't changed in the aughts. It's still the same, today. Even when kids come in with proof of violence (e.g. phone camera video) the question is why did you have a phone in school? not can we identify the dude curb-stomping kids three times smaller than him?
We had hungry kids in the 70s. Have we done anything about it? No. We try to set up school lunches, but then the programs get cancelled because socialism bad! So kids are going hungry thanks to ideology.
Are we yet teaching sexual consent (or how about consent in other places like work and TOS?) No. We're teaching abstinence-only education in 26 states with comprehensive sex ed mandated in three (the west coast). We're teaching girls they're like chewing gum, that is, one-use, and a sexual assault destroys their value. And we're teaching boys their sexuality isn't welcome until they can afford to put a ring on it and have a salary in place, driving them to become alt-right war boys for Immorten Joe. ( WITNESS ME! )
So how about dealing with kids who are homeless? In poverty? In the abusive foster-care system? Dealing with DV at home? Not a god damn thing. Kids need food, shelter, basic needs like clothing, playtime, time to bond with their family, time to socialize, stability at home. Until they have these things, any energy we spend not arranging to providing these things is failure of society to serve basic child welfare for the public.
Warning labels on social media will not feed hungry kids, or assure their place to sleep is safe and warm, and we have an outrageous number of kids for whom the latter set are the problem, not dangers of social media. Also warning labels that are not congruent with current scientific consensus only weaken the veracity of tobacco product labels.
ETA: That's not the best link. This search leads to a wider array of stories, and TD is pretty good about including sources within each article.
