TBF my boomer parents didn't monitor a single thing I did on the internet, so I kinda doubt it's some unique failure of contemporary parents.
I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.
My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on.
Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.
There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it.
And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster).
"Life, uh, finds a way."
Honest question: If it did, how would we know? Here is a thread on incels.is where a dude tricked a woman into flying to another country because he "knows she deserves it". https://incels.is/threads/i-just-made-a-woman-fly-from-spain...
With reproduction rates falling, and people having all sorts of trouble with relationships, what does "messed up" look like, and why are we so sure that we actually aren't when the world is increasingly polarized and having trouble with authoritarianism? How can we prove those things aren't actually linked?
Theres a long history there. It is already a good thing that most people identify that behavior as weird and awful instead of it being socially acceptable or even the law.