Back in the early 2000s we didn't have people actively recruiting young frustrated men into incel and far-right terrorist groups though. We didn't have people thinking it was cool and edgy to make jokes about gassing Jews. Hell even the pedo/grooming problem wasn't much of a thing. Yes there was porn and vile gore floating around and you had to take care to not fall victim to dialers changing your dial-up information to bleed your phone bill... but that was all in all harmless.

These days, the amount of utter idiocy is just unimaginable, "eternal september" style. You join some random online game discord and whoops half the talk is about rape fantasies, n-bombs and other kind of sickening behavior. Let it slip you're a girl and you'll get flooded with wiener pics, "cum tributes", disgusting fantasies, doxxing attempts, or flat out hate for standing in the way of someone. Go on Youtube, watch a couple of videos and your suggestions have antivaxx bullshit or "shocker videos". Games for children are filled with barely disguised pedos and "moderation" doesn't do shit. Not exactly an environment many people want to expose their children to.

Maybe not in the "early 2000s", but you'd have to be a child of the 90s, not the "2000s", to have missed it, because all of that was around by the second half of the decade (with perhaps the exception of the far-right recruitment, which didn't fully hit its stride until the early 2010s).

It's been out there since the beginning; the problem is not the access to it, it's relationship with the internet. Back in the day, you were told to never give your real name online, now you're expected to type it into forms three times a week, while you have a public profile of all of your picture that anyone can look up while an algorithm serves it to the whole world. And yes, some of it is because kids are getting access to this world as toddlers when we weren't able to get there until early teens or the end of grade school at least. Kids need to be taught digital safety more than we need to continue the losing fight about securing access. Kids are smarter and more motivated than you are, they'll find a way around it.

> Kids need to be taught digital safety more than we need to continue the losing fight about securing access. Kids are smarter and more motivated than you are, they'll find a way around it.

I totally agree. When the reports of how school-issued Chromebooks will monitor texts from any phone plugged into them came out last week, I was tweeting about how we need to do more to teach kids opsec and digital safety/rights. I got some pushback from people who either think that it’s common sense stuff (it isn’t) or that the solution is to legislate something, but I live in reality and reality, as you say, means fhaf kids are smarter and more motivated and will find ways around things.

We need to teach them to protect themselves from prying eyes and how to circumvent the systems their own way.

We also need to stop holding people hostage to stuff they said/did on the internet as literal children, but that’s a separate issue.

I don’t disagree that things are more extreme now and that the algorithm reinforces the most toxic stuff, but as someone who has been on the internet for most of my life , I can assure you that being a woman on the internet has always been terrible (I had pedos trying to get photos from me in AOL chat rooms in 1994 when I was 10 years old), there have always been edgy shitlords making Holocaust jokes, and the whole modern grooming discourse literally started with chat rooms in the early to mid 1990s.

Yes, it is absolutely worse in some ways now, not just because some stuff has become desensitized and de-rigeur, as well as the aforementioned algorithm, but let’s not create a hagiography around the halcyon days of “online” that never actually existed.

Like Bane, I grew up in this pit of darkness and was molded by it, and I have true love and affection for it, but like, this element has always been here. Always.