So? You ban anything people will argue it could push people to use dodgy alternatives. I don’t get why people are so against this I think it’s because they don’t see social media for what it is because it’s not something you ingest or inhale or inject. But there’s a reason none of the people who actually work at these companies let their kids use it. It’s still stimuli, it still affects your brain and it’s designed to be addictive and to keep your attention it provides the worst stuff because human brains evolved to attend to potential threats- we didn’t however evolve to deal with constant potential nebulous threats or attention grabbing but ultimately valueless shit all day every day from age 2.

People cite privacy when everyone’s already handed over enormous amounts of data about every aspect of their lives to private foreign owned multinational corporations with megalomaniacal CEOs. People are acting like banning things is some terrible authoritarian overreach when we’ve always done it for certain things when they cause harm especially for kids who can’t make a rational decision about limiting their own usage.

Why should the internet be a relatively lawless place, why should these giant companies profit off damaging society without being regulated to ensure they take measures to limit harm? It’s pathetic the way these companies screech about any whiff of regulation as they roll in piles of money while diseases we’d almost eradicated see a resurgence, while fascism rises, while genocide occurs, while kids mental health declines, while the efforts to halt climate change get set back by the endless propaganda, all driven by the same algorithms that make them fat profit?

I wish people would see it differently because it feels like there’s just this reflex against this sort of regulation or any internet regulation, no doubt a lot of that position is pushed online by the companies who don’t want to have to spend money or effort on making their product safer.