I don't like this Luddite attitude toward the Internet. If it is so bad, then why not quit it? Just refuse to ever go online for anything. Not even to visit this site.
Personally I see it more like marijuana or alcohol or sex.
All of these things have times and places where they are alright, all of them have impacts on the growing human mind, and all of them require some manner of education and experience in a safe learning environment where people can be made pointedly aware of dangers and mistakes commonly made.
Of course people will always figure out new mistakes, and people will always find ways to make the old mistakes despite explicit warnings, but at some point that's
their problem... Unless they make these mistakes so badly they "splash" onto the rest of us.
I would say that redactions of damaging false information, when they must be rendered ought be rendered with the same prominence and length of coverage as the original false statement. Say something on the Friday night news at 7:00 and 9:00 in a 15 minute segment? Get ready to waste a 15 minute segment NEXT Friday saying nothing but "this segment last Friday was false"... For 15 minutes, at 7:00 and 9:00, wasting your best time slots! Post an online story to reddit advertisements that you spend a million dollars advertising to a specific target audience? That's going to cost you a million dollars pushing the redaction. "Lies cost you double, plus the embarrassment".
That said, I think we would all be much better off if there was an expectation that people get a Postal email account that proves there is an adult behind the account (the email account is itself a form of ID as anonymous as a Google Account, especially given PGP layering), and that the adult is liable if they are letting their kid use their account before their kid has their own postal email account.
The technology to make this reasonably anonymous and secure is so easy to implement it's it even funny: "Registering an account requires a postal email address" and then use anonymizing send points and embed the sender via certificate signing instead of via origination points... It's actually unspoofable, since you can verify the sender, and acquire the validation certificate at registration time.
Just go to the post office when you are 16 and register an email address. Don't like your old address? Change it at the post office (and get free forwarding).
You can even have a variety of recover certificates so you can track what registrations attach which self-signed public key for their affiliate spam.
By in large you gain much, lose little, get "carding" about as secure and and even more anonymous as buying liquor at a bar for basic access, it's still quite easy, and for the idiots that can't handle at least that much, little to no effective access at all (there's just the tiniest barrier to entry in terms of competence).
Let people get their postal internet permit at 16 following "internet ed" where they go on a gutted version of the internet with AI bots set up to be predators or misinformers and trolls among many more bots that filter more accurate information from the open web, and educate based on how people inform and consume from this environment.
But who am I kidding, that'll never happen. There are too many Republican congresscritters fishing for underage victims on Reddit and X for that to ever happen.
*This is not a perfect solution. There are potential issues here, but issues that could, with reasonable work, be patched and fixed and made reasonable.
