If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.

The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?

We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.

I grow up with ICQ where you can click a button to talk with a random stranger. Boomers were crying about Internet addiction.

30 years later, I’m fine and the boomers are the ones getting addicted to fake stuff on the internet.

I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.

And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.

Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.

Exactly, it's like talking about the symptoms and missing the point of the diagnostic.

Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming.

"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"

Having lived many years prior to social media, it feels very clear that social media fundamentally warps people in a way they weren’t before.

If you have only lived within it, it makes sense to underestimate the impact.

> heroin, in how a single use guarantees unavoidable long term consequences with little redeeming qualities

This is a pretty inaccurate representation of heroin. This exact question has been studied, and the rate is about 1/4 for dependency after a single dose. Still super scary and it's not something I'll ever try, but it's a far shot from "guarantees unavoidable long term consequences"

Admittedly it's harder to take the rest of your comment about addiction seriously when it begins on such shaky foundations, sorry.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6584277/

Personal anecdote, and not about social media per se but the infinite-wall aspect of today's web, made my brain behave in very scary ways. I had a few times where I didn't order my hand to swipe (because I was expected to do something else right away) but my hand swiped. It was sufficiently against a part of my mind that it felt 'not me' and it happened a few times, sometimes even more complex movements.

To me it's an evidence that the brain is that sensitive to neurological reward to the point of being bent into automatic aimless actions just for the sake of keeping the cycle going.

It's not as deep and harmful as alcoholism but still too large not to ignore.

A single use of heroin does not guarantee unavoidable long term consequences. I've met many occasional drug users who are clearly not addicts.

“ But all the internet enabled is just more people talking to each other about what's on their mind. ”

Isn’t one of the big complaints about social media that only like 1% or .1% of users get promoted?

I think the problem is your last paragraph buries the lede. - the social media companies want to make this about content, because algorithmic feeds are what make meta a trillion dollar company instead of a 50 billion dollar company.

I do think there would be a fair bit of agreement with your thesis if your minor caveat at the end wasn’t the big huge problem.

I think most of these bans are because no one has figured out how to ban the algorithmic feed and SV isn’t self-regulating.

There would still be plenty of moral panics about the content, but I think the bans are picking up speed because of the form.

I don’t care that my kid wants to join a satanic death cult I care that Meta has figured out how to monetize satanic death cult membership in the algorithm.

While I think you're right that this is a real problem, there's also real costs to a partial solution. It encourages people to see it as a solved problem, disincentivising further reform and giving the impression you don't need to keep an eye on your kid's internet use because the state is handling it for you

The profit motive turns social media into an opium machine gun, the maintenance of a global scale consumer social media without a profit motive impossible, and the existence of a consumer global scale social media makes both smaller scale and protocol-based forms obsolete

Well we live in a global informational network. Instagram actually did try to not fully attentionmaxx their reels algos back in 2014 when TikTok came up, and this led to them losing 60% of the market to this.

You can't regulate the whole world, if you won't make something addictive, someone in China will and you will lose the market to them.

Next best thing is ban because regulations in software are stale the day they get released due to legal processes being slower than technological ones.

What you're saying is we need less social media, and more social networks.

I can agree with this. And I’m not sure how these bans are scoped but maybe they should be scoped specifically around algorithmic feeds.

The biggest problem to me isn’t the content or posting on a friends timeline. It’s that choices are pushed to the user rather than pulled. Change that one dynamic and I may not care as much that YouTube has content I consider toxic. Add a little friction my teen has to go actively discover content he’s curious about, not pushed an algorithmic feed.

I think the problem is though - the tech companies are incentivized to make this about _content_ “ I can’t ban Andrew Tate because it’s not my job to tell people what they can and can’t watch, first amendment, blah blah blah.

And Zuckerberg isn’t wrong here exactly, but per above the real argument I think is less about content and more about form.

But the reality is these companies don’t actually make their money from the content they make it from the form.

So Zuckerberg can’t concede “oh you’re right, making the newsfeed less adddictive doesn’t violate first amendment rights, at least we’re not banning Trump, because he doesn’t care about banning Trump except for the heat he gets from republicans, he cares about you messing with the money printer.

The thing we may all be able to agree they should do is the thing they’ll push back much harder against doing.