A famous photo of Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri(R) throwing his fist up in the air. It was widely used during the Jan. 6 Investigation Committee in the last few years. Sen. Hawley has recently authored a bill that seeks to require social media users to be 16 years of age. (Photo courtesy of Vogue)
Social media saw a large amount of activity in the last three years as the pandemic kept many sheltered from socializing early on, only for people to retreat back to the digital world with the revolving seasons as the COVID pandemic reached apexes both during & after vaccines first became available.
For many, social media brought a virtual refuge that even COVID couldn’t touch the last few years, yet many knew full well that the pandemic itself was the reason it drove them to social media. No doubt social media has played an important role in how we communicate in modern times in both pre-pandemic as well as our current environment. In fact, it has become as pervasive in modern living like e-cigarettes- so much so that now government wants to regulate it.
Enter Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Sen. Hawley has recently introduced a bill to make it a requirement for social media users to be at minimum 16-years old. While many in either party, whether one leans left or right, or even if they lean moderately as an independent, might not make much of a fuss over this. However, supporters of lowering the voting age might find this useful, even if it doesn’t address the voting age at all.
For the party that has not been supportive of lowering the voting age, it is interesting to note that this legislation came from a Republican senator. In contrast to a bill that was introduced in the House of Representatives two years ago this month, House Joint Resolution 23, Democratic sponsor Grace Meng proposed lowering the national voting age to 16. So did 17 other co-sponsors of the bill.
Often, people see the right & left hardly ever agreeing on any partisan issue. Yet both parties see 16 as a line of demarcation of sorts, even if those reasons range from whether they should be allowed on social media or whether they should have a political voice in who represents them. We already have the latter in several cities in Maryland, so all the more reason to make it uniform across the United States. Even many countries that have had faced difficult opposition to the idea are slowly, or even rapidly, moving in that direction. Not to mention that it already exists in so many other countries even before many supportive organizations started working on the idea.
This post isn’t questioning whether there should be a set minimum age for social media- that can be sorted out in the digital sphere. Instead, this post looks at one of the uncommon common grounds that the left or right even have- setting a minimum age for anything, coming at a time when we have a divided Congress.
Now that we have something we an agree on, let’s get the voting age lowered.
Jester Jersey
DavisKiwanian@mail.com
#16ToVoteAdvocacyProject 