Much to the ire of certain corners of the Right, Twitter has evidently suspended the account of “Mini AOC,” an 8-year-old girl who lampoons liberal firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Any self-actualized conservative ought to admit that the tech giant was unequivocally right to do so.
We rightfully criticize the Left when they prop up Greta Thunberg as an authority on climate change. Thunberg being a 16-year-old Swedish girl with a number of mental health problems renders her uniquely susceptible to the pressures of the global political stage. We understand that hiding behind children to voice the political opinions of adults is grossly disingenuous, and even more important, we know that the public sphere, especially the political one, is a vile, nasty, and cruel space. There’s nary a journalist, politician, or activist who hasn’t been harassed online, and plenty of us receive death and rape threats on the regular.
To throw children into that arena is cruelty.
The case of Mini AOC (whose real name I’ll not be using) is even more egregious than that of Thunberg. Whereas Thunberg’s parents were complicit in allowing her to become a pawn of the Left, Mini AOC’s mother actively instigated turning her daughter into a living political parody. Remember, this child is half Thunberg’s age and less than a third of the real Ocasio-Cortez. As cute as the girl may be and as funny as her anti-socialist quips surely are, an 8-year-old with zero political agency should not be forced to express opinions she may not later agree with as an independent, adult individual.
Twitter often wrongly bans people out of its sheer political bias. While that’s its prerogative, the public is right to call out its supposed dedication to free speech as hogwash.
Social media companies rightly ban users under a certain age to protect them from millions of child predators lurking the net in droves. Facebook requires that users be at least 13 years old when they make an account, as does Twitter, at least officially. A heartbreaking investigation from the New York Times found that tech companies reported over 45 million online instances of media depictions of child rape, and even innocuous videos of children being children have become fodder for pedophiles thanks to YouTube’s automated recommendation system. A majority of teenagers report being harassed online, and those propped up as public figures surely experience much worse even more often.
Keeping children off the internet can literally be a matter of life and death, and if parents won’t do their jobs, social media companies are right to step in.
Mini AOC may wind up espousing the exact same beliefs as her online persona when she grows up, but her political ideology and public identity should be her choice. To rob her of that agency isn’t just cruel, it’s dangerous. Twitter rightly has an age limit for that reason, and they’re right to enforce it.
