This Pride Month, I’ve been thinking a lot about young LGBTQ people’s right to be online. As a teenager, social media played a huge role in my self-discovery. I watched the first generation of YouTube coming out videos. I was on Tumblr, where I learned about all the letters and the flags and also about slash fiction. My friends and I saw and accepted that being queer was an option for us. We had language and community and culture that wasn’t accessible to us before.

That’s something Republicans are scared of. It’s one of the real reasons behind proposed social media bans for teenagers, like the one the U.K. just announced for children under 16. It has also been folded into bipartisan legislation in the U.S. that promises “kids online safety” but actually puts them more at risk.

After Australia implemented its own social media ban for children under 16, early reports indicate that most kids are getting around them with ease. Some parents said their kids have adopted even worse alternatives to their previous accounts, like watching YouTube while logged out and getting fed slop content or migrating to lesser-known and less regulated platforms. Other kids have actually stopped using social media, but that doesn’t mean their lives have magically transformed for the better. Some of them are more isolated from their friends. Others are still facing the same systemic issues that they were before, but now they’ve lost a way to communicate and learn about those issues.

But as far-right authoritarianism is surging around the globe, lots of other countries are considering social media restrictions for kids. In the U.S, the White House is currently looking to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the App Store Accountability Act that would require big tech companies to collect all of our most sensitive data and potentially link our identities to our online activity.

KOSA is supposed to “protect” kids from being online too much, accessing harmful information, and encountering dangerous adults. But the Republican Party in power has very different definitions for those things than the rest of us.

In a widely-cited interview clip from 2023, KOSA co-sponsor and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn described how “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture and that influence” would work under her bill: “This would put a duty of care and responsibility on these social media platforms. And this is where children are being indoctrinated. They’re hearing things at school, and then they’re getting onto YouTube to watch a video, and all of a sudden this comes to them.”

Blackburn’s reps have long denied that she was connecting the two ideas, suggesting that her transphobic talking points were separate from her intentions with KOSA. But other anti-LGBTQ organizations have supported KOSA for similar reasons, while Project 2025 equates “transgenderism” and “transgender ideology” with porn and the sexualization of children. That’s how the conservative party has justified pulling books from library shelves, censoring academic curricula, and eliminating federal funding for anything to do with “woke” "DEI.”

And although I’m coming at it from the opposite perspective, what Blackburn said about the internet actually makes a lot of sense to me. It is a powerful social tool for increasing acceptance and self-identification. Alongside the growth of social media in the 2010s, LGBTQ rights and representation were on the rise. Now, alongside the bipartisan movement to censor the internet, we’re seeing a major backslide.

Same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in the U.S. the day before I turned 18. Today, there are more than 600 active bills in the U.S. seeking to codify discrimination against trans people. Fewer people are self-identifying as LGBTQ compared to previous years. The trend of influencer coming out videos on YouTube has faded, but I’m constantly encountering viral ex-gay and detransitioning videos on Instagram. Even some queer influencers from the 2010s have renounced their previous “lifestyles” in favor of Christianity.

This isn’t an organic shift. It’s a manufactured backlash to the progressive gains over the past decade-plus. Online, it’s partly the product of corporate monopolization and the tech broligarchy. But these bad internet bills don’t even present the threat to big tech companies that supporters say they do. That’s why Meta is openly supporting KOSA and why social media platforms have complied in advance with Project 2025’s agenda. They know that they will benefit from this regulatory environment and administration more than their competition. Their CEOs will make billions or even trillions more dollars as their company valuations soar. They can withstand expensive legal challenges and fines, while smaller platforms can’t.

The bans also ignore the reality that many children, both LGBTQ kids and beyond, are not safe with the adults in their homes and communities. They need access to information and support they can only find online. Banning and limiting their communication with outsiders is a way to help their abusers, not rescue them.

LGBTQ teens who oppose KOSA and bans say that social media is an imperfect lifeline. Much like adults who use these platforms, the kids don’t love everything about them either. But it has given the most vulnerable among them a way to access resources, education, and news at a time when state and federal governments are simultaneously criminalizing trans people, erasing LGBTQ people, and withholding access to medical care for both trans kids and adults.

As an out journalist, I often hear from queer high schoolers and college students who have followed me and my work for years, looking for advice and sharing their appreciation for reporting and commentary they can relate to. I cherish these conversations and they remind me of myself just a decade ago, when I was desperate for queer mentorship and media that spoke to my experiences.

Even though they aren’t all adults yet, these are still young people who deserve access to the world adults inhabit. In addition to the dangers this type of legislation poses for LGBTQ kids, I also fear that the sentiment behind it is part of a broader trend of limitations on autonomy and privacy of younger generations that will only hinder them. The proposal is ultimately ridiculous—some of the teenagers banned from social media will be parents themselves, applying to be in the military and for colleges, working jobs, about to vote, making sexual and reproductive decisions, and so on and so forth. We don’t need to take their internet access away like they’re grounded.

I wanted to compile some recommendations for newsletters and other media and culture I’m enjoying in celebration of Pride Month. If you want to support queer independent journalism that reaches the next generation, you can also consider upgrading your Spitfire News subscription if you haven’t already!