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There has been 15 more years of highly motivated psychologists tuning their social media systems to create addiction, time for those who've grown up through this to become adults, foreign interference with democracy etc.

Though I think banning it for children is the wrong approach. Ban the addictive and dangerous features for everyone, adults included — no more infinite scroll, and no more feeds showing content from outside social connections.



> no more feeds showing content from outside social connections

So, kill all news agencies and reporters I guess? or would there be a carve out for incumbents so they can cement their market share? who controls the approval list?


News agencies don’t do personalized curation. Every reader, at least from the same city, gets exactly the same content.


> Every reader, at least from the same city, gets exactly the same content

That alone is a value add people don't realize even as they're losing it: it created a shared reality you and locals inhabited, that you could have a conversation about.


It also helped quite a bit with narrative enforcement.


Maybe. But then at least there was a narrative, which is valuable in itself.


If a social media feed is purely social, news agencies have no more right to be there than to force themselves onto your table in a pub or a board games group.

Even if you want expand from social and allow commercial activity on them, it should still only be whoever you actually chose. It's not like Fox News can interrupt a BBC News broadcast on TV, or The New York Times can substitute itself for your normal copy of The Cambridge News: you chose what source you get, not an algorithm. (And there is a specific named editor to blame if some false story gets in that wasn't checked first for actually being true).


They get no special treatment. They would only show up in my feed if one of my contacts shares a link.


Ban infinite scroll? Sounds like a slippery slope and also hard to enforce. I don't even know how you would craft such a law.


The same way you do age assurance laws, I guess.


On the fly with legislation that actively harms privacy whilst also not protecting anyone at all?

Australia did this, now everything is worse with no tangible improvement to "child safety" or protection from brainrot.


> tuning their social media systems to create addiction

Except this has nothing to do with social media nor with children nor with addiction.


The first sentence of the article "under-16 social media ban".


What are you afraid of?


This is far more to do with different people having different definitions for what constitutes a genocide with one very well funded minority group having a large stake in their version being the accepted one.




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