One of the main issues is regulation. With TV, government was able to regulate the content via FCC. The movie's example to this was Saturday morning cartoons compared to YouTube for Kids. The latter is very much self regulated by Google/YT and parents, rather than government which, given history, has the actual power to curb it. Giving the keys of regulation to the target of it is not the way to get it done. YT in this example will set the main goal to driving their product to further profit over content regulating one way or the other.
I definitely understand your argument of "leave it to the parents" but why add to their ever growing pile of worries? What if they don't know any better b/c of technical illiteracy? This issue of an unregulated media line has been seen and dealt with before yet we're hesitant in doing anything about it.
The reason to be hesistant is /because/ we saw how it was dealt with before! If we had the same godawful most self-righteous prude standards we would be censoring the very concept of LGBT people as "corrupting". It is no accident that acceptance's first step was from unregulated media who slipped through the crack and was able to laboriously crack and pry through the societal bullshit.
Fuck the parents - they should be adults and taking responsibility for their life's direction if they have kids.
What "unregulated media" do you feel was responsible for "acceptance's first step"? I'm not an expert on this by any stretch, but I've studied both media history and LGBT issues, and the shows that get cites most often for doing a shocking amount of work in shifting American attitudes toward LGBT folk were, well, regulated media. Specifically, the network sitcoms "Ellen" and "Will & Grace," with earlier tentative steps in "L.A. Law" and, in the late 1970s, "Soap."
While "unregulated media" may have become leading edge in LGBT presentation in the years since, it's also become leading edge in reactionary backlash, from Fox to internet media to the right-wing propaganda pushed by Sinclair Broadcasting to their local TV stations -- which in many markets they wouldn't have been able to own if local TV markets were still more tightly regulated.
I'm not suggesting regulation is a failsafe panacea by any stretch -- I'm just suggesting that deregulation isn't, either. There is probably a balance to be struck, and it is not at all clear to me that the balance we have now is correct.
They are the Johnny come lates - look at the various zines and very small newspapers published way back when homosexuality was actively illegal for one and would have been called obscene material but regulation thankfully couldn't be meaningful. Although niche they certainly had a role in growing networks of allies.
On the other end of the contact Internet contact is a later one and although nothing concrete it seems very non-coincidental that generations where straight people could watch gay or lesbian porn, and fanfics being ubiquitous enough that Draco and Harry ships were well known even among people who never read a single one due to lack of interestm
The "balance" is a golden mean fallacy. Best illustrated by a rhetorical question that sounds like a death threat: Is there a balance to be struck between you being alive and unharmed and stone dead?
I'm not sure we're using "balance" in the same way, precisely; I don't mean "balance" in the "present both sides of every issue as if they're equal," I mean that there's a continuum of regulatory options in a given field and that "less regulation" is not always the correct direction. (Not that regulation is really a spectrum, for that matter, as you could conceivably have high levels regulation in a given field that's still regulating badly.)
So, to answer that last rhetorical question with the way I'm intending "balance" to be used: I'm not at all opposed to regulations in food safety, wiring standards, water treatment, etc., that shift the balance of likely outcomes for me toward "alive and unharmed" and away from "stone dead." :)
I definitely understand your argument of "leave it to the parents" but why add to their ever growing pile of worries? What if they don't know any better b/c of technical illiteracy? This issue of an unregulated media line has been seen and dealt with before yet we're hesitant in doing anything about it.