Technology

I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.

Unfortunately, as a young moldable mind, you probably would have been owned faster and harder by the unregulated internet than any school teacher ever could.

important for Americans to cross examine sources

It always was. The difference for Bush Jr was that Americans could pull up Al Jazerra, RT, and directly chat with all kinds of people all over the globe - so the press had to start pressing harder. Back with Bush Sr in Kuwait, I had a friend from Jordan who spent his evenings listening to his short-wave to get "real news" about what was going on back home - what he heard was apparently a lot more accurate and complete than what we got from TV. It has always been like that, since forever.

cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.

The "facts" on the internet evolve over time. My favorite to repeat is, God rest his soul, Scott Adams' case of ideopathic aphasia - he lost much of his ability to speak (probably a mini-stroke, definitely some kind of brain damage) - he blogged about it openly, candidly, it was an engaging story. Then a few years later he underwent a rather strong shift of political outlook he felt he had "worked hard for all his money and shouldn't be forced to share any of it" - his touchy feely sharing about his brain damage was expunged from the web (to the best of his ability, which, with all that money he worked so hard for, was pretty effective)... but he can't erase the thousands of memories of people who read his writings at the time.

We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school.

My parents were teachers from the 1970s through the 2010s... my father crusaded to spread the teaching of critical thinking, he did his part, made a difference as much as anyone, but he was on the losing side through those decades. Maybe things will turn around someday, they usually do go in cycles.

utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn’t like deviance very much.

If anything has deluded you into the idea that deviance is more persecuted today than it was in the past, you have been fed a whopper of a lie. Again, back through my personal knowledge of the 1970s, the open racism, LGBQT intolerance, etc. that was widely practiced back then makes what goes around today look like playtime.

I’m neurodivergent and I’m queer

Go around saying that openly in the 1970s, you wouldn't get far in most US towns before being beaten into a multi-week hospital stay, or worse.

I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access

I suspect a large part of our current troubles come from "the masses" having internet access, because that gives the internet access to them, and through that we got Cambridge Analytica, and much much more...

robust training in media literacy

Nice sentiment, but the who exactly is going to teach them? I think this is actually a big motivator in the destruction of the US education system.

than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).

Yeah, I don't think those are helping anything either - more symptomatic of yet another authoritarianism flex.