This change was 4 months ago, but I haven’t seen any past threads about it.

You used to be able to disable Family Link on your 13th birthday.

Of course, this policy existed for years, and there were no complaints about it until this stupid 2020s Haidt lead panic. But then there was a Linkedin post in December 2025 about the policy. The post was by the leader of a mysterious group called Digital Childhood Institute, which itself didn’t exist until October 2025. The post got 7,600 upvotes which is really only viral in the loosest of senses. (There have been YouTube videos with over 5 million upvotes, and even Linkedin has had posts with over 800,000 upvotes.) But YouTube apparently was scared enough about the post that they changed the policy in January 2026.

Now you can’t disable Family Link until your 18th birthday.

Family Link seems bad even compared to other parental control apps. Link the app apparently now prevents people in Australia from being able to watch YouTube videos at all. For people in Australia who aren’t on Family Link, the social media ban only prevents people from creating a YouTube account and still allows people to watch YouTube videos in a logged out state. But the people who are on Family Link in Australia are apparently now prevented from watching a YouTube video at all.

Also, it has been extremely difficult for parents to allow their kids under 13 off of Family Link even if the parents wanted to. Like read this thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParentingTech/comments/k3008d/remove_family_link_account_without_deleting_the/

So now not only will 13-17 year olds be unable to get off of Family Link if they want. But it will probably be extremely difficult for parents of 13-17 years olds to let their kids off of Family Link even if the parents want to.

Not good.

To make it all the worse, the committee seemed to call for an even stricter ban than Australia's. The committee seem to want to also ban online games like Roblox (which are not subject to Australia's ban), and to have stricter age verification than Australia has.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5902/cmselect/cmeduc/187/report.html

It started in 2020, when there was all that censorship of people who criticized COVID measures, both Trump and Biden called for the repeal of Section 230 (almost the only thing they agreed on in that election), and Trump called to ban TikTok in the US.

Then, in 2022, Elon bought Twitter in order to ban his critics. Then around 2023 or 2024, the social media bans for young people began. Then in 2024, Congress passed the TikTok ban that Trump had called for 4 years earlier, which Trump himself had flip flopped on and was now against. SCOTUS somehow upheld the TikTok ban on some ostensible national security grounds, although Trump would basically allow the ban to be ignored for almost a full year until the US TikTok was sold to his buddy Larry Ellison.

Also in 2024, there were all these bans of people who refused to say that Charlie Kirk was the greatest person of all time. SCOTUS upheld Texas’ porn law, and they refused to block the Mississippi social media law on the emergency docket although Kavanaugh indicated it might eventually be struck down.

It's passed both houses of the Minnesota legislature with just 2 total votes against it in both houses.

It's now in the hands of governor Tim Walz, who was the Democratic 2024 VP nominee. He can veto it without the legislature having a chance to override, since this was passed so late in the legislative session.

This is unlike any other social media law I'm ever seen before. It requires platforms to do some new review on each account every 2 weeks to make sure it meets the law's minimum age requirement of 16. (Which they'll probably increase to 18 within 5 years if this law survives court challenges.)

Good God, these laws keep getting worse and worse in each state.

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/HF/4138/versions/5/

It seems pretty shitty to me, but I wanted to know the sub's opinion of the organization.

From what I‘ve heard, they actually have a few more differences than most people outside the UK realize.

Like Blair was more of a pro-PMC moderate who sought upper middle to upper class voters. Blair is more of a type of politician who would fit into the moderate wing of today’s Democratic Party. Blair was socially liberal but economically conservative.

Starmer on the other hand is more of a type of moderate who tries to appeal to less ”respectable” people. Starmer is trying to create the constituency that Democrats had in some white rural Southern areas (especially WV and Arkansas) in non-presidential races before 2010. Like the type of voter who thought that gays were from Satan and probably just voted Democratic in downballot races because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

There’s an actual poll finding that Labour voters are more likely than Conservative or even Reform voters to say they’d be upset if their child came out as gay.

That would allow Thiel’s butt boy JD Vance to get the maximum 9 years and 364 days as president. If a VP serves less than a half-term as president, he can then serve two full terms afterword.

Israel was created because of the Balfour Declaration to a Rothschild.

Here was the response:

"Peter Thiel and Nelson Rockefeller are surprisingly comparable figures in one sense: both were billionaire elites who tried to shape America’s future far beyond business itself. But they represent almost opposite versions of elite influence in American capitalism and politics.

Here’s the clearest way to compare them.

Major similarities

1. Both came from enormous wealth and elite networks

• Rockefeller inherited one of the great American fortunes through the Rockefeller oil dynasty.
• Thiel became wealthy through Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and venture capital, especially via PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund.

Both operated through elite institutional circles:

• Rockefeller through banks, government, universities, museums, and the Republican establishment.
• Thiel through venture capital, tech founders, think tanks, and startup networks.

In their eras, both were seen as “kingmakers.”

2. Both mixed business power with political power

Rockefeller directly entered government:

• Governor of New York for 14 years.
• Vice President under Gerald Ford.

Thiel mostly influences politics indirectly:

• Major donor and mentor to political candidates.
• Influential in conservative and tech-policy circles.
• Connected to networks around Silicon Valley, AI, defense tech, and nationalist-populist politics.

So:

• Rockefeller held state power.
• Thiel influences state power.

3. Both believed elites should guide society

Neither man was really a populist.

Rockefeller embodied the old “responsible ruling class” idea:

• Educated elites should manage institutions.
• Government should invest in infrastructure, universities, arts, and planning.

Thiel also distrusts mass opinion, but from a very different angle:

• He often argues innovation is held back by bureaucracy and democratic inertia.
• He favors founder-led institutions, technological acceleration, and concentrated competence.

Both are elitists — but different kinds.

Major differences

1. Rockefeller was institution-building; Thiel is institution-disrupting

This is probably the biggest distinction.

Rockefeller expanded public institutions:

• State universities.
• Public infrastructure.
• Arts and cultural institutions.
• Government programs.

He believed large institutions could improve society.

Thiel is much more skeptical of established institutions:

• Universities.
• Mainstream media.
• Bureaucracies.
• Democratic consensus systems.

Instead, he prefers startups, private networks, technological leverage, and decentralized elite influence.

You could say:

• Rockefeller trusted the managerial state.
• Thiel trusts entrepreneurial disruption.

2. Their politics are almost mirror images within conservatism

Rockefeller represented moderate/liberal Republicanism:

• Pro–civil rights.
• Internationalist.
• Technocratic.
• Keynesian-friendly.
• Comfortable with big government.

“Rockefeller Republicans” became synonymous with establishment moderation.

Thiel is associated with a newer post-liberal/right-populist tech conservatism:

• Skeptical of liberal democracy’s effectiveness.
• More nationalist and anti-establishment.
• Strongly focused on technology, defense, and civilizational competition.
• Closer to Silicon Valley contrarianism than old Northeastern Republicanism.

In some ways, Thiel represents the collapse of the Rockefeller Republican worldview.

3. Rockefeller projected optimism about government; Thiel projects skepticism

Rockefeller’s era believed:

• Government could solve problems.
• Experts could manage society rationally.
• American institutions were fundamentally healthy.

Thiel often emphasizes:

• Stagnation.
• institutional decay.
• failure of innovation.
• cultural exhaustion.

Rockefeller was fundamentally a Cold War liberal-modernist.
Thiel is fundamentally a late-modern critic of institutional decline.

4. Their relationship to technology is radically different

Rockefeller’s power came from:

• oil,
• banking,
• real estate,
• industrial capitalism.

Thiel’s power comes from:

• software,
• surveillance/data systems,
• venture capital,
• AI and defense technology.

Rockefeller symbolizes 20th-century industrial capitalism.
Thiel symbolizes 21st-century networked technological capitalism.

The deeper historical contrast

A historian might say they represent two different American ruling classes:

Nelson Rockefeller	Peter Thiel
Industrial aristocracy	Tech oligarchy
Managerial liberalism	Techno-libertarian/post-liberal skepticism
Public institutions	Startup networks
Consensus politics	Contrarian politics
Mid-century establishment	Anti-establishment elite
Big government conservatism	Tech-nationalist disruption

The ironic connection

There’s also an irony:

Rockefeller Republicans were eventually defeated inside the GOP by conservatives who thought they were too moderate and too establishment-oriented.

Thiel rose in a Republican Party that increasingly rejected the Rockefeller model altogether.

So in a long historical arc:

• Rockefeller represents the old Republican establishment at its peak.
• Thiel represents the new tech-driven elite emerging after that establishment collapsed."

This is seriously a title of a book by Twenge in 2006. Posted on here not because of the content of the book (the "generation me" she was referring to is middle-aged now), but because it shows the longstandism ageism of the creator of this tech panic.

And she rather than Haidt is arguably the real creator of the tech panic. Yes, the Anxious Generation has sold a lot more copies than her book IGen ever did. But according to Haidt's own admission, her book IGen is what got Haidt into his tech panic. The same year that she wrote the mediocre selling IGen, Haidt wrote the similarly mediocre selling Coddling of the American Mind. The Coddling book was fairly ageist and claimed that stuff like participation trophies made youth too soft, but it didn't really talk that much about technology since Haidt wasn't really an anti-tech panicker at the time. But Haidt later read Twenge's book, and that's what made him a big tech panicker. If it weren't for Twenge, Haidt would probably just be writing more stupid but relatively harmless books about participation trophies ruining the youth, and there probably would be none of these 2020s social media bans.

Will we have more COVID style tyranny?

As you are probably aware, Elon Musk has been doing an annoying thing since June 30, 2023 where he makes it very difficult to read twitter without an account. You usually can read posts on twitter but not the replies/comments to the post.

Elon originally claimed this would be a temporary measure. But it's now been almost 3 years and he still isn't allowing viewing of Twitter without an account.

And as you are probably aware, these social media bans are now banning youth from creating social media accounts. So now young people can not create Twitter accounts in order to be able to read the Twitter cintent.

Luckily, there are some surprisingly obscure websites like nitter and xcancel where you can read the comments on Twitter without an account. So you can use these websites to see what's happening on Twitter after the social media bans.

Hopefully Reddit, YouTube, Threads and TikTok won't end up moving to the model of requiring an account to view the websites.

He’s so unfunny. Like he doesn’t even make a mildly funny joke 1% of the time like Colbert and Meyers do.

The fact that shitlibs think he’s funny shows that shitlibs will just mindlessly find any anti-Trump comedian to be funny.

His first firing was due up him spreading “misinformation” (which you still sometimes see on Reddit) claiming that Kirk’s killer was a ”groyper.” It was a stupid comment, and while it maybe should not have been a fireable offense, it’s hard to feel sorry for Kimmel with how he calls for everybody else to be fired due to “misinformation”.

Anyway, I don’t even know why Trump is again calling for Kimmel to be fired.

Does Trump not realize that he just makes Kinmel more attractive to shitlibs by calling for him to be fired?

I haven’t listened to it myself. And the more I read about their criticism of Haidt, the less appealing this episode seems to me.

Supposedly If Books Could Kill actually pretty much ends up agreeing with Haidt’s conclusion that the internet is bad for young people. The podcast supposedly just criticizes Haidt on the grounds that he has poor methodology. But supposedly the episode pretty much ends up agreeing with Haidt’s conclusions even though they don’t think he’s a very good researcher. Basically, the podcasters think that Haidt used poor methodology but came to an obviously correct conclusion.

Honestly, if anything that seems even worse to me than believing that Haidt is a good researcher who found some evidence that the internet is bad for young people. It’s like “Haidt has not really found any evidence that the internet is bad for young people. And nobody else has really found any evidence of that, either. But we just intuitively know that the internet is bad for young people, even though no evidence has been found that that’s the case. It’s just an obvious intuitive truth that the internet must be bad for young people.”

Anyway, has anybody on here seen the Haidt episode? Is it at all worth watching?