It’s as bad as or worse than (according to the people treating it as a political issue) low birth rates. (From a human perspective it’s much worse).
So if you can suppress discussion of it, you don’t have to talk about solving the “problem” as frequently, you can downplay it, and you can shift blame to nebulous, faceless things like “social media” or “bullying” (both of which are real things and real concerns, but not things most places are willing to earnestly address politically, so in practically they function as a fits-all “evil” that allows redirection from the real problem, which includes things like lack of agency and security.)
If the U.S., for example, had a true grasp on the scope of this issue across all age groups, I think our political landscape would look a lot different. Despite being an issue across all age groups, each age group tends to stratify their discourse to be primarily amongst themselves, so online silencing becomes a ridiculously powerful tool in downplaying the issue, because there’s already a semi-natural cultural isolation in place for discourse in general.
We’ve seen the effectiveness of this silencing tactic when it comes to avoiding discussion of the problem for decades in one particular subset of humanity who, historically speaking, frequently seems to have regular horrible tragic mishaps while “cleaning their guns”.
It’s also really bad for political optics.
It’s as bad as or worse than (according to the people treating it as a political issue) low birth rates. (From a human perspective it’s much worse).
So if you can suppress discussion of it, you don’t have to talk about solving the “problem” as frequently, you can downplay it, and you can shift blame to nebulous, faceless things like “social media” or “bullying” (both of which are real things and real concerns, but not things most places are willing to earnestly address politically, so in practically they function as a fits-all “evil” that allows redirection from the real problem, which includes things like lack of agency and security.)
If the U.S., for example, had a true grasp on the scope of this issue across all age groups, I think our political landscape would look a lot different. Despite being an issue across all age groups, each age group tends to stratify their discourse to be primarily amongst themselves, so online silencing becomes a ridiculously powerful tool in downplaying the issue, because there’s already a semi-natural cultural isolation in place for discourse in general.
We’ve seen the effectiveness of this silencing tactic when it comes to avoiding discussion of the problem for decades in one particular subset of humanity who, historically speaking, frequently seems to have regular horrible tragic mishaps while “cleaning their guns”.