Matrix, it is an open standard and the reference server implementation along with some other server implementationa and the various popular clients are open source. The Element X client and the main fork of it called schildiChat both look a bit like Microsoft Teams. But there are other clients and a company could fork an existing client and customize it to suit their needs or even create a new one if they really wanted to spend the resources.

Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don’t have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It’s usually the parents paying for this stuff.

There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn’t what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child’s phone.

There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.

https://families.google/familylink/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech

Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated

If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.

A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)

Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.

A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.

The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.

Respectfully, this is a bit more nuanced than that. There are free VPNs ran by non profits supported fully by donations. Yes somebody is paying for it but it’s people donating to the services.

For example there is an open source application called Bitmask that has 2 VPN providers by default, Riseup VPN and the Calyx Institute.

You can download the Bitmask app itself or download the RiseupVPN app which is based on Bitmask but just pre configured to only use that single Riseup provider.

https://bitmask.net/

https://riseup.net/en/vpn

I have never used a Windows machine with a Microsoft account. I just keep it disconnected from the internet during setup and it eventually gives me the option to not use it with a Microsoft account.

I mostly use GNU/Linux for my own use but on the rare occasion I setup Windows for someone else or need to use it, I just disconnect it / don’t connect it to the internet before setup.

It’s interesting you mention the Baby Shark thing. In Oklahoma there were some prison guards who forced multiple people at various times to stand handcuffed in a stress position for hours listening to Baby Shark for the purpose of torturing them. There was also other forms of physical abuse that happened.

The guards were arrested but were given 2 years of probation. But you as an average citizen get caught up in some war on drugs bullshit where you didn’t even victimize anyone and your unlikely to get the same treatment in many cases, especially in some harsher states.

Former Oklahoma jail officers sued over ‘Baby Shark’ torture tactic are placed on probation

Christian Charles Miles and Gregory Cornell Butler Jr. pleaded no contest to misdemeanor cruelty to a prisoner

A federal civil rights lawsuit four inmates filed in 2021 accused Miles and Butler of using excessive force and discipline tactics described as “torture events.”

Joseph Mitchell, said he was pulled from his cell in November 2019 and placed in a room where he was forced into a “standing stress position” for three to four hours while he was handcuffed behind his back, according to the lawsuit. Officers then played “Baby Shark” on repeat so loud “that it was reverberating down the hallways,” it said.

Ja’Lee Foreman Jr., another inmate, said in the suit that he was not forced to listen to the song but was placed in a stress position and then kneed in the back and slammed into a wall by Miles. Foreman alleged that Miles spat on him as Butler laughed.

In addition to probation, Miles and Butler must complete 40 hours of community service, and they were fined $200 and ordered to pay $300 in victims’ compensation. They are also no longer allowed to work in law enforcement, the court records state.

Butler’s attorney, Lance Phillips, said his client is “happy this matter is behind him.” If Butler remains out of trouble while on probation, he will not have a misdemeanor conviction on his record, Phillips said Wednesday.

I have been saving up for a router and wanted to support a company that sells devices that are compatible with as much open source software as possible.

This really sucks. If I had known this was going to happen randomly I would have prioritised saving up faster and just not spent it on other things. I had no idea I needed to prioritise this.

But like I say frequently about the US. It is a very prohibitionist country. You never know when the next thing you do or use will be criminalized or prohibited. Then you will be at risk of being arrested and in some cases even sent to a literal for profit private prison ran by a place like CoreCivic. It is fucked up.

Even if I were to get a router from a foreign manufacturer now, it likely won’t be legal for me to actually use it. The FCC could at the very least fine somebody depending on how this order will be enforced.

There is also possibly going to be a risk of it being seized at the border.

Who knows how this will even be enforced since the vast vast majority of consumer routers are not even made in the US. I don’t even know of one truly made in the US. But a router from a foreign open source focused company will likely be considered even more of a “foreign manufacturer”.

It only takes a single determined kid really as long as they can explain to their friends how to do it and their friends are capable of or able to install some software or boot into a live USB OS for example.

A lot of the various censorship circumvention software is designed to be fairly easy to use. I first learned about Tails when I was like 14 or so because I was being abused for being suspected of being LGBT by my parents and also for various other things such as being autistic and having other disabilities and they were abusing me for things I could not help. So I needed a way to ensure that I would stay protected from their potential digital snooping so I could get support online, talk to my online friends because I had nearly no irl friends and the very few I did kinda have just took advantage of me and bullied me most of the time.

I also needed to be able to rapidly destroy everything I was doing by pulling out the flash drive wiping the RAM and shutting down the PC. One of the somewhat common use cases for Tails is people under domestic abuse situations they are unable to escape from.

There is a reason why the Trevor Project, a mental health support site for LGBT people has an emergency mechanism for quickly leaving the site while your in the middle of a conversation with a counselor or just browsing the resources too.

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/mental-health-among-autistic-lgbtq-youth-apr-2022/

But regardless after I learned about stuff like that I also helped an online friend from another school access content using bridges as well. I helped another friend at some point too though in that case basic web proxies were enough. Though the latter person I guess was not really a great friend since he only really wanted to talk to me when he needed help with things like that.

Psiphon, another censorship circumvention tool is also fairly easy to use and works on mobile and desktop style OSs.

On my phone I used the Shelter app to create a work profile with a separate password from my devices regular password.

I used various apps like Tor Browser, Orbot, and other free and open source apps such as Bitmask that come with 2 free VPN providers.

In some cases Tor may not even be blocked or if it is you can try obfs4, Snowflake proxies, Meek, and Webtunnel bridges to access it for example.

Also a friend could run a private bridge for you from their home if they are tech savvy and want to help you. For obfs4 for example, out of a lot of services someone could self host, that is relatively easy without as much knowlege required as self hosting something more complex.

Wireguard is relatively easy to self host once you become accustomed to how to configure it. SSH is even easier than Wireguard IMO though Wireguard tries to be as easy as SSH there are a few issues that can happen with Wireguard that need more troubleshooting sometimes compared to SSH. SSH can be used for tunneling traffic and you can set your web browser to use it’s SOCKS port.

So if you can find a friend with an ISP that isn’t doing the filtering who can self host something or can access Tor, Psiphon or a VPN particularly one with a variety of anti censorship options this type of network censorship isn’t going to be trivial.

There is also DNS tunneling and a variety of other methods.