fascist encroachment on civil liberties and the normalization of surveillance and over policing is always sold as some shit to protect the kids.
when i was a little kid, we rode bikes around the neighborhood, ran around in the quiet streets, and explored undeveloped lots. so signs went up telling us we couldn't go to places where there weren't cop patrols and cameras, because SAFETY. and when we stayed in the places left to us, cops would stop us and ask our identities and tell us to go home because they didn't "like" kids loitering, riding bikes, skateboarding, or any of the other shit people once called "playing outdoors". the parks were torn up because SAFETY, since i guess merry go rounds and swingsets are death traps that killed 1 billion children. unlike cars and cops guns.
when i was a teen, we would congregate in the malls. but never in groups larger than half a dozen, or that invited policing. trespass orders for the older kids. no no, no playing, no socializing, no loitering: you must come to the mall and efficiently make purchases or work for $4/hr being a retail/food court pain sponge. when you got off work, you must leave the mall. because you're a teen now, and teens are DANGEROUS. they have NO BUSINESS HERE.
the parks are gone, the malls are dead, parking lots and abandoned lots are hostile places where police cars sit to take naps and accost pedestrians and the poor cutting across on the way to wherever.
outside is BANNED for SAFETY, so kids go online to be social and guess what: that's DANGEROUS. so that space needs to be just as overpoliced, surveilled and controlled until all that's left are places to purchase and places to work. for SAFETY.
every place people invent to find some kind of community beyond the eyes of the bosses and their thugs is a place that is DANGEROUS and must be annexed for SAFETY.
] ^[https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-development]