I'm not advocating for or against social media age restrictions or whatever, but you cannot seriously believe that BBSs in the 90s had the same potential social

I'm not advocating for or against social media age restrictions or whatever, but you cannot seriously believe that BBSs in the 90s had the same potential social impact as the big social media platforms of today. The amount of reach that a post on X or TikTok is so many orders of magnitude higher than any post on any BBS ever was or could be. That very fact means that someone with an agenda--good or bad--will be tempted to use X, TikTok, etc to manipulate ("influence") people. Those same actors would never waste their time posting on a BBS to accomplish said goal.